Live European Ultimate

A lot of ultimate is going to be filmed this season.

Fanseat’s promotional poster. I’m not being paid to put this here or to write this article, all opinions are my own.

I’ve been somewhat uninspired to write about ultimate recently, but it’s probably about time I publish something, given that the mixed season is well and truly underway and the university season is coming to an end this weekend!

A lot has happened elsewhere in the world since my last post; the UUL didn’t meet it’s crowd funding target, a semi-pro mixed league was announced in Australia and Beau Kittredge randomly decided to move to New York... to try and further the gender equity movement, I think? But I really don’t want to write about any of that. So in short: I’m glad the UUL wasn’t funded, I’m excited to see what happens in Australia, I’m beginning to think that Beau’s column is just click-bait.

Fanseat Coverage

Moving on to more pressing matters: today, Fanseat and the European Ultimate Federation formally announced their partnership to bring live coverage of nine featured tournaments, and many more ‘sideline’ events, over the remainder of the season. The nine featured tournaments are:

Tom’s Tourney (Belgium, 4th-6th May)

Talampaya (Switzerland, 19th-21st May)

UKU Open/Women’s Tour 1 (UK, 2nd-3rd June)

UKU Open/Women’s Tour 2 (UK, 16th-17th June)

EUCR-N (Estonia, 18th-19th August)

UKU Nationals (UK, 25th-27th August)

EUCR-S (Italy, 1st-2nd September)

EUCF (Poland, 5th-7th October)

European Beach Ultimate Club Championships (Spain, 26th-28th October)

Here in the UK the planned sideline events are Mixed Tours 2 and 3, University Nationals (this weekend!) and Open/Women’s Tour 3 (which is during WUCC). Other sideline streams are planned throughout Europe but the schedule is quite fluid. A full list of planned streams will, eventually, be posted here.

The nine featured tournaments will be covered with the same production quality that we saw at the UK Tour events and Nationals last year. The sideline events will be covered with a single camera and no replays, but it’s a lot better than no coverage at all!

In terms of the tournaments themselves, everything before WUCC (Tom’s, Talampaya and Tours 1 and 2), will be very interesting given that they are the tournaments that the WUCC teams will be using to warm up. The remainder of the grass season — the euro’s events — will be a good opportunity for teams who didn’t go to WUCC to have a go at taking EUCF spots away from the top teams and we could well see some big upsets.

At the end of the season we will also get to see the first ever EBUCC. Top level beach ultimate is always exciting to watch so I am very much looking forward to seeing how that event turns out. Overall, it looks to be a great season of coverage.

Implications For European Ultimate

There is very little money in ultimate, so having a media company that is willing to put up the money to produce live streams of tournaments is a big deal. It isn’t cheap to produce a live stream of even just a single field, and given that there is no sponsorship money floating around, the money has to either come from viewers or players. It’s unlikely that players would agree to increased player fees to support a live stream that they will most likely not play on (unless they are playing for a top team). So, that means the cost of production has to go on to the viewer — this is Fanseat’s model.

Fortunately for us Fanseat have shown that they are committed to the ultimate community, not only by partnering with EUF but also by taking feedback that was given last season and acting upon it to improve their service (for example, the on-demand experience is now much better). Their service is far from perfect but hopefully we can encourage them to improve it further.

Supporting Fanseat is directly helping to promote and grow the sport. A large amount of free content can be generated from the live streams — mostly in the form of highlights videos shared to Facebook and Twitter — which can be used to market the sport to new players and generate interest in a similar way to how the AUDL’s content has generated interest in the US.

On top of all that, the increased exposure of European ultimate will help create a more cohesive ultimate community in Europe. For years, it’s been very hard to stay up to date on who the top and upcoming teams are. Streaming of EUCF (as well as Tom’s and Windmill to a some extent) helped to illuminate the very top of the scene. The Eurozone podcast has done a great job of trying to stay on top of all the storylines around Europe but they themselves proved how difficult it was to even get in touch with certain parts of the community. The additional coverage that Fanseat are providing this year goes a long way to making it possible to follow European ultimate without having to physically travel to each of the major tournaments.