With little fanfare the European Handball Federation (EHF) has quietly instituted a subscription fee for it’s web streaming service, ehfTV. Depending on where you live this is either really big news or a footnote of passing interest. If you live in a country that already shows competitions like the EHF Champions League on TV you probably didn’t use ehfTV much. But, if you live in a country like the U.S. this is really big news. The free gravy train of watching every match of every European competition free, live and on-demand is sadly over. You can still watch… but now it’s going to cost you. For club competitions it will be 7.99 Euros for a monthly subscription and 45.99 Euros for a yearly subscription. And, if you want to watch the 2024 Women’s Euros it will be 8.99 Euros for the whole competition.

Short Sighted or a Reasonable Business Decision?

So, is this a short sighted or reasonable business decision? Short sighted, in that it limits handball exposure in new and emerging markets. Or, reasonable, in that ehfTV is a pretty good product and it’s certainly not free to produce and deliver that content world-wide. A solid case can be made for either argument.

Short Sighted Case: Handball is a virtually unknown in many parts of the world. Charging people to watch is essentially deciding to give up on newcomers because virtually no one is going to pay to watch something they aren’t familiar with. Building new markets and acquiring new fans is way more important than the 46 Euros you are now going to get from the handful of committed fans in countries like the U.S. One wonders how many of those fans even exist. Well, we’ll soon find out…

Reasonable Business Decision: Producing and delivering quality handball content is not a free proposition. Even if it results in marginal revenue streams it’s still better than nothing. Further, consumers are getting more and more accustomed to paying for streaming content. What once was a novelty is now commonplace. Finally, we can’t discount the impact of VPN and piracy. There are very likely some free loaders watching ehfTV from non geo-blocked locations. Eliminating all pirated streams is an impossibility, but simply removing the free streams will likely encourage some free loaders to pay a reasonable subscription fee.

My Take: Reasonable, but New Market Development Efforts Should Shift to Finding Great Streaming Partners

I generally come down on the side of free… Who doesn’t? But, I’ve been following this for quite awhile and the streaming world has evolved quite a bit. Here’s my first mention of ehfTV way back in 2008 and a commentary that I wrote four years ago. I was afraid we were going to lose ehfTV in 2020 and we actually got another four years. The EHF gave away a great product for 16 years. That seems like a pretty reasonable effort to grow new markets to me. I’m actually surprised it lasted this long.

That said, the battle to develop new handball markets shouldn’t be forgotten. Instead, it should move on to new battlefields. In particular, the EHF, IHF, HBL and other content owners should redouble their efforts to find streaming platform partners in countries like the U.S. Because while ehfTV was free there was very limited discovery opportunity. i.e., If you weren’t already familiar with ehfTV you were very unlikely to find it. Whereas with a good partner with decent customer reach, the platform can promote handball to potential new fans.

Case in point, EHF content can be watched on DAZN in Canada and is even available for free on Pluto TV in Germany. Pluto TV could be an option for the U.S. So could ESPN+, Roku TV and Peacock. I’m currently on the Peacock bandwagon, but due diligence would be to engage each potential partner with an eye on market growth. Because it doesn’t matter where committed fans like me watch handball. It matters where handball is best exposed to potential new fans.