DigiTV on the Monument Centenary Festival:
“we plan to handle this as a full production like a Wildeklawer”
DigiTV will roll out their A-game setup. This will vastly improve the chances that viewers who login to watch the tournament starting on Friday 23 April 2021, are not let down by the quality or other streaming related interrupts.
It’s a huge bonus because streaming services are expected to see a major spike in viewership while strict Covid lockdown measures remain in place. The most significant of these being the restriction of spectator access to attend school sports matches in person.
DigiTV provides schools with an educational tool above all else. It has proven very useful in many respects as students learn a range of audio-visual skills while those connected to the schools are granted access to a good deal of informative video content including various sports covering most sports teams .
However in its school TV format, its 1st XV platform has been much maligned by frustrated rugby supporters who log on to watch higher profile matches, thereby creating higher than usual user volumes, which the system usually seems to struggles to cope with. The end result is a very negative opinion of the product’s capabilities.
In a world where there is a fine line that divides rights from privileges, supporters are now set to get free access to decent quality live-streaming of high profile matches at Monument High School without major setbacks thanks to the DigiTV full production designation.
An interesting broadcast behind the scenes roller-coaster ride unfolded as part of the drama of a phantom main sponsor that surrounded the finalising the Monnas 100th birthday rugby celebration.
With a reasonably airtight agreement in place, DigiTV holds the right to film school events at Monnas. However for the time that a third party trust was running the Centenary Festival, it side-lined the agreement, allowing the third party organiser to bring in the SuperSport backed School Sport Live’s proven reliable YouTube based service to broadcast matches. After things went South and it came to light that the third party did not have a main sponsor, Monnas stepped in take back control and save their festival, effectively making it a school event once again and paving the way for the return of DigiTV.
More information from DigiTV in response to questions about the how the Monnas Centenary Festival will be different to the normal offering, what has changed since the Kingswood 125th Festival and how the Bulls Rugby Day is different:
DigiTV will indeed be doing the live-streaming the Monnas Rugby Festival for the centenary celebrations. We are looking forward to bringing this unique event to our viewers from around the world. We will forward you the link/links to the various matches to share with your followers.
As this is a special event – we will be looking to provide the viewers at home a similar viewing experience as with Wildeklawer a few years ago. The Monnas Rugby Festival as an event celebrating Monument 100th anniversary as well as the calibre of schools that will clash over the weekend lifted status of the festival and we will also take our production for it from our normal schools’ team to a beefed-up production team which will also include our schools’ team at Monnas.
Our overall service without a doubt got better since the Kingswood 125th Festival. It was just a schools’ production team that ran that specific production (their first). We also started some training with our production teams a couple of weeks ago to get them ready for the upcoming winter sport season, as most of them haven’t streamed or filmed a rugby match in over a year.
We therefore believe we are fully prepared to bring the followers of schoolboy rugby most of the top matches during this season. With no spectators allowed during games, we understand that our service to the parents, grandparents, old boys etc. is of even more importance than ever before.
The Bulls Rugby Day of 2021 was a paid event (like most of SSL’s streams are) and we provided them with commentators, bigger production team, more cameras etc. for the stream of the day. The productions team included all our school teams from the Gauteng area during that day.
To give you an indication during the 2019 winter sport season we did more live-streams per month (culture, academics, sport included) than SuperSport did for the year of 2019. We are proud of what we achieved since we started back in 2016 – and believe we have grown a lot as a company since those early days.
As stated in communication earlier – we are more than just a sport and even further a first or A-team streaming platform. We will be looking to also bring parents and schoolrugby supporters action from the B-field (Jan de Klerk) from Monnas over the weekend that included the second stringers as well as junior teams.
whwere are the links-how do we pay