Irish online TV firm plays its Wildcard


28 Sep 2007

The first league to be carried in season on internet TV service Joost will be the Canadian Football League (CFL) and is being brought on board by Irish company Wildwave on their ‘indie’ sports channel Wildcard.

“There is a huge pent-up demand for Canadian Sports and the CFL in particular, across the world and with the launch of Wildcard Sports Network on Joost, with the CFL as our featured launch partner, we can now provide this compelling League’s most hard-hitting content to a worldwide audience on today’s most advanced internet TV platform,” said Stephen McCormack, CEO of Wildwave.

Wildcard Sports is one of four channels that the company has on Joost, the others: IamTV, Wildlight Channel and Havoc Television, are focused mostly on independent film and music.

McCormack told siliconrepublic.com: “Wildcard is about making an interesting sports channel that is a bit more left of centre with smaller sports, indie sports, areas like that.”

He said that the drive behind picking the CFL as the main launch partner was because of the sheer amount of Canadians around the world who want to watch football but don’t necessarily have access to a TV deal or a distribution that they can watch it on.

McCormack added that the Wildcard Sports Channel will also be adding other niche sports areas such as beach soccer, hockey, poker and sumo.

By Marie Boran