Five Teams with Livestation to Offer Live Streaming Soccer on Apple iPhone

UK commercial terrestrial broadcaster, Five, said Wednesday that it has teamed with broadband video specialist, Livestation, to offer live streaming of Europa League soccer on the Apple iPhone. It claims to be the first UK broadcaster to offer live streaming soccer via an iPhone app.

The new app, which is priced at £3.99 and which Five says was beta tested earlier this month, is billed as allowing live viewing of every one of the broadcaster's Thursday-night Europa League telecasts throughout the 2009-10 season, as well as highlights of each week's competition. It works on both WiFi and 3G, Five says, and will go live in time for today's (October 1st) match-up between Celtic and Rapid Vienna. "We're offering a genuine service to football fans," Jonathan Lewis, Five's head of digital media, said in a prepared statement. "The app, which delivers the highest video quality seen on mobile so far, is attractively priced and means never having to miss a minute of the live action when you're on the move. It also exemplifies Five's strategy to extend the reach of our long-form, ad-supported video content to as many platforms as possible, with the aim of generating additional incremental advertising revenues."

Five claims to have "the most ambitious content distribution strategy of any UK commercial broadcaster." Among other things, it offers an online catch-up TV service, called Demand Five; it is constructing content-driven portals, such as Holy Soap (see the article published on itvt.com, June 26th) and FiveFWD (see the article published on itvt.com, June 16th), that are aimed at specific demographics; it has joined Project Canvas, the joint OTT initiative whose other backers are the BBC, ITV and BT (see the article published on itvt.com, July 30th); and it has also announced plans to participate in a similar service from Sony Bravia (see the article published on itvt.com, September 2nd).