Online Sports site Pundit Arena has bought the exclusive broadcast rights for this Friday’s matches between the Barbarians and Tonga and the first ever Barbarians Women’s game against Munster at Thomond Park.
The Women’s game will include Ireland’s Grand Slam winning captain Fiona Coghlan taking to the field again to make history.
The Men’s match will bring to an end the 2017 World Tour for the Barbarians and is likely to feature All Black winger Julian Savea.
For those not travelling to Limerick, the only place to watch will be through Pundit Arena across their online and social media channels at www.punditarena.com/tv
“The idea of expanding into live televised sports content has been on our agenda and when the opportunity to take the rights for such a prestigious event came up we decided to move quicker than had been originally planned,” said Pundit Arena Co-Founder Ross O’Dwyer speaking to Sport for Business over the weekend.
“We have an online user base in Ireland alone of 650,000 per month and with a similar number and rising in the UK, driven mainly by Rugby coverage, we were an attractive proposition for the Barbarians.”
Pundit Arena was born out of a UCC incubator which put O’Dwyer together with Richard Barrett and the site launched in November 2013 with less than 400 unique users in the first month.
Switching from a model of purely user-generated content towards a more focused and quality journalism based site has paid rich dividends with the numbers and traffic now making it a serious player in sports media.
“The model for TV sport is rapidly evolving and we want to be part of the move towards bringing sport away from the big box in the corner towards devices in hand through live streaming.”
“We signed Nick Heath as our lead Rugby writer this summer and he has really driven our position in the sport through travelling to New Zealand with Lions and bringing us to the attention of a wider and influential audience.”
The coverage from Thomond Park on Friday will be broadcast directly through Pundit Arena as opposed to via Facebook or any other third-party sites.
It will be delivered from a multi-camera and broadcast quality set up in the stadium and there will be no charge to watch the matches online.
“This will be a learning experience for us in an area we will be expanding over the coming months and years,” said O’Dwyer.
“The deal was only signed on Friday afternoon and the lead time is too short to bring on a broadcast sponsor as such.”
“We will be using what we do in Limerick on Friday as a calling card to say we are a player in the broadcast arena.”
It’s a great opportunity to nip in and out with a quieter than usual Friday night sports schedule building into the following day’s Guinness Series International between Ireland and South Africa at the Aviva Stadium and the Republic of Ireland travelling to Denmark on Saturday night.
“Our audience will be with us for both those big occasions in terms of online coverage on Saturday.”
“They will also be with us, and us alone, for a big new step into live broadcasting on Friday night.”
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