Sport Ab August
How Christian Seifert wants to make small sports big on TV with Dyn
As of: 6:44 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Christian Seifert plans the attack on football with Dyn
Source: dpa/Marcus Brandt
Christian Seifert is definitely visionary. With the sports streaming service Dyn, he believes in making sports outside of football big. Seifert, for a long time the most important manager of the Bundesliga, wants to be successful with his Dyn streaming service from August.
For his new sports TV project, Christian Seifert even travels through the villages. The media manager once brought in the billions for the Bundesliga – and now, if necessary, Seifert is explaining to small handball or hockey clubs on site how he wants to make them big. Dyn is the name of the project of the former DFL boss, which is about to start and will show sports beyond football via the Internet from mid-August.
Seifert is an excellent salesman and explainer. Wherever the former head of the German Football League (DFL) appears and presents his ideas, people flock to him. They love to listen when he says something like, “We’re not launching a platform, we’re launching a movement.”
He was able to persuade the media company Axel Springer SE (to which WELT also belongs) to spend money on it. “We are potentially planning investments in the tens of millions,” Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner told the German Press Agency in February last year when the project was launched under the name S Nation Media. According to Döpfner, the media start-up should “develop sports into a new dimension”.
Christian Seifert is currently on a promotional tour through Germany. His product: Dyn
Source: dpa/Roberto Pfeil
Seifert was able to convince several league managers with this idea. Since then, the founder and shareholder has concluded various media contracts, including the national leagues for handball, basketball, volleyball, table tennis and hockey. The payment provider will start in less than a month, the first broadcast on Dyn is on August 23 (7 p.m.) of the Handball Supercup between THW Kiel and Rhein-Neckar Löwen.
2000 games live at Dyn
Can the venture work? “I don’t want to be the next one to burn money with leagues,” says Seifert. This can be understood as a reference to pay providers, from whom Seifert once wrested billions for Bundesliga rights in his capacity as DFL boss.
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And now it should be possible to earn money with fringe sports such as table tennis or hockey on TV? The industry is skeptical and prefers not to comment publicly. But it sounds like great respect for the 54-year-old when several media managers unofficially say: “If someone can do it, then Christian Seifert.”
The gap between the most popular sport, i.e. football, and the number two or three is nowhere “as large as in Germany”, explains Seifert: “It doesn’t have to stay that way, it can be changed.” With a further reference to his previous job at the DFL, he says: “After I made the big one bigger”, dealing with the supposedly small ones was “particularly attractive”.
One of Seifert’s main approaches is not only to play around 2,000 games live on a pay platform, but also to be present between the game days and free of charge. To do this, his company produces moving images that other media or the clubs themselves are to play out free of charge via various digital channels. There are also agreements with ARD, ZDF and Springer’s television broadcaster BILD for free TV broadcasts.
Dyn wants to inspire young people
Dyn has young people in particular in mind when there is a focus on the distribution of clips on social media. “If they want to have a future, they have to win over the schoolyards,” is one of Seifert’s guiding principles. “We must succeed in bringing sports into the center of society.”
Not everyone was able to convince Seifert. The German ice hockey league, for example, resisted the Dyn boss’s advertising and extended the TV contract with Telekom last year. “There is no question that we would have been happy to have the DEL on the platform as well,” said Marcel Wontorra, the Dyn manager who came from Springer, after the setback in purchasing rights.
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It is likely to become even more difficult to achieve the ambitious goals. According to dpa information, Dyn identified 700,000 potential customers through market research and calculated the break-even point at 500,000. The new sports TV company calculates this with an annual subscription for EUR 12.50 per month and a EUR 14.50 model with a monthly cancellation option.
When it comes to the price, Seifert also has a little dig at the competition – like the streaming service DAZN, which has recently become more and more expensive – when he says: “This is not an introductory offer – and we’ll say in a year: “Eh.”