A landmark anniversary for Sportcast, the broadcast subsidiary of the Bundesliga (formerly known as the Deutsche Fußball Liga – DFL), is a chance to reflect on past achievements and look ahead to the live production of the future. Managing director Alexander Günther talks to SVG Europe about the company’s 20-year journey from host broadcaster to the technical backbone of Bundesliga media production – and where it goes next.

SVG Europe: Congratulations on the 20th anniversary. Looking back, what stands out from the early days about the Sportcast approach, and what still holds true today?

Alexander Günther: In 2006, the media landscape was completely different. We started with a simple idea: to be one of the first football leagues in the world to produce its own signal, the world feed, on behalf of the former DFL. We were founded in early May 2006 and had to build the company, coordinating technical and editorial staff and camera crews in just three or four months: the decision came in March, and by August the first matches were on screen. It was tough, working around the clock, but it worked out.

From the beginning, our DNA was for the highest quality, integrating innovation where it optimises the product, and sustainable, methodical approaches to production. “Sustainable” then didn’t mean green production; it meant the ability to operate successfully in the long term without compromising the environmental, social, and economic foundations of our company.

Over the years, we’ve gone from a typical host broadcaster to the technical backbone of the Bundesliga’s media production. That’s the story of 20 years.

SVG Europe: How has what Sportcast provides grown? For example, you now have the Media Hub, described as the world’s largest football archive?

Alexander Günther: In 2006 we started with host broadcasting – unilateral services for our domestic partners, and for the international market a feed with English and Spanish commentary and graphics, delivered by satellite.

In 2007, the Bundesliga and the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB) asked us to build the archive. We collected all the material from the national broadcasters from 1963 onwards – 40,000 hours of historical content in 15 different digital and analogue formats – and digitised it all. The idea wasn’t only to collect it, but to store it with the best metadata, with perfect logging, which had to be done manually back in those days. So, 2006 was our live content; 2007 the non-live; then from 2009 the data feeds. In 2016, together with Deltatre, we established a data company – Sportec Solutions – which from the 2017/18 season was the operating system collecting all the data. So we built the live, the non-live and the data – all the ingredients for the best media production.

SVG Europe: At the heart of what you provide is of course the live signal. But as the volume of content has grown, how do you keep every fixture consistent and to the same quality?

Alexander Günther: It comes down to production and resource management; you need the best, most experienced people you can hire. On the technical side we build real standards – SD, HD, UHD, HDR – in close connection with our media partners and service providers and manufacturers. Because of having the serial production in our own hands, we have been able to easily test, integrate and standardise processes and parameters at any time.

DACH Forum 2026 Alexander Günther will speak at the upcoming Sky Sport and SVG Europe DACH Forum – for more information and to register visit svgeurope.org/dach-forum-2026

Then we integrated a quality assurance system, with a live evaluation of every feed – for example, making sure the pitch is green, and at the same level and colour over all Bundesliga matches. Most important is an iterative process: every failure or issue during a live production is marked in a web-based system, then evaluated again after the match, so a mistake happens only once and is fixed until the next week – on technical issues and even human errors.

SVG Europe: Sportcast is also known for innovation and pioneering; SVG Europe regularly attends SportsInnovation. How important is innovation, particularly when it comes to differentiating for a crowded international market?

Alexander Günther: In 2015, we had the idea of an innovation match – in Wolfsburg – where we tested new things, taking an idea through to serial production. In 2018 we established SportsInnovation – today one of the most important innovation fairs in Europe for media and sports. Innovation is part of our daily work and it has always been part of Sportcast DNA: whatever we do, we try to improve the product and enhance it for our customers, for the fans.

With SportsInnovation, the Bundesliga built a platform where friends of innovation come together and test in real-life environments, in continuous exchange with media partners, other leagues, suppliers and manufacturers – not only live production with cameras, but data integration and AI. How important is innovation? It’s essential; to differentiate our feeds from all the other leagues, and to enhance the world’s football production.

SVG Europe: At the most recent SportsInnovation event (a biennial conference and exhibition with live demonstrations that is led by the Bundesliga and hosted at the Merkur Spiel-Arena) there was a demonstration of a fully integrated end-to-end setup for an automated Bundesliga 2 production with five broadcast cameras on robotic heads. What’s the real driver when it comes to AI? Is it mainly about efficiency and cost?

Alexander Günther: It’s a wheel of parameters: efficiency, time, quality, economics, cost. We go through the whole wheel to find out what kind of innovation it is. Is it a process innovation, an efficiency gain, or something that brings a completely new experience to the fans?

AI is a change in our landscape anyway, but it’s not just about automation or efficiency; it’s that you can provide the ingredients to optimise your production. Data is so important – audio and video at source – then the new elements, whether IP or cloud-based, and on that basis you integrate human beings and artificial intelligence. Then you select which innovation brings the most benefit for fans, economics, processes, operations. That’s our total innovation management.

SVG Europe: Of the various technologies you’ve mentioned, such as IP, cloud and AI, is there one that most excites you, or that will have the biggest impact for the Bundesliga?

Alexander Günther: One example of the move from host broadcasting to digital production is remote production – moving from the traditional OB truck, where you provide everything at the venue, to a more centralised model. The infrastructure can be on-prem, hybrid or cloud. So cloud production will be one shift; the move to all-IP and IT-based production another; and AI will become an integral part of each production step. Within a few years we’ll work out whether some camera positions can be substituted with AI-driven cameras.

But we need to change the perspective to the demands of the fans. No innovation is as important as the benefit a fan gets from it, so we have to be closer not only to our media partners but to the fans. At the same time, whatever we change, the security, resilience and reliability of the Bundesliga Live Product remain non-negotiable. Everything we’ve built over 20 years was the foundation to provide single feeds when they want them – and from our side, there’s no technical limit any more.

SVG Europe: You’re also serving your broadcast partners. What are they asking for?

Alexander Günther: The shift from broadcasting to single-casting has been happening for years. The new demand is for more localised feed, such as more languages, localised graphics, more on-demand – or for us to provide the ingredients so partners can enhance the product themselves.

Regional differences are real: internationally, viewers expect much more data and graphics on screen than Germans do, and consumption differs across North America, Asia and Africa. We talk about four columns of product: live, non-live, digital and – increasingly – documentary content. With those you can serve almost every demand. But providing is the biggest challenge for the future, localised feed distribution, from satellite to fibre to streaming, which is most of it today. Media partners increasingly require additional services to allow them to differentiate their own coverage.

SVG Europe: What are the biggest challenges in delivering all this – for you and your peers across Europe also involved in host production?

Alexander Günther: On the production side it has to be standardised, flexible and scalable, all at once. The second challenge is the lack of competencies and availability of staff. We need more of an academy approach, and we have to manage the shift in competencies: a traditional camera operator may stay one, but an engineer who built the traditional broadcast now needs to work in the IP world. The third is cost; with rising costs and more demand, you have to deliver more value at the same cost level.

SVG Europe: Everyone we speak to returns to that issue around staff and competencies – the multi-skilled operator in lower tiers, handling graphics, directing and data at once, for example. How are you approaching it?

Alexander Günther: This is exactly the academy project, and it’s not only education for graphics. Take the idea of SportsInnovation and transfer it to the broadcasting industry – to people educated across tiers one to four. It’s about understanding production and resource management, and enhancing the post production ingredients. In the end you need a holistic view and people with a broader range of abilities.

There are still specialists, but to be cost-effective, especially in tiers three and four, you need broader capabilities in each person. Between now and 2030 our world will keep changing anyway, from traditional production, to a Bundesliga production that is based on an integrated technical backbone supplying automation, AI-features and more content for more global usage. That’s the next big thing.

SVG Europe: I won’t ask you to try and predict the next 20 years, but looking to the 25th anniversary in five years, what would you hope to be celebrating?

Alexander Günther: That Sportcast is the full technological backbone of the Bundesliga’s media production chain, with a fully integrated production environment and the best B2B distribution in the world. But the biggest thing is that we’ve successfully transferred our industry to a new, knowledge-based world – so people are not in fear, but have learned and taken that transformation on as a kind of DNA for the next level of media production. In five or ten years we’ll have shifted from broadcast to narrow and single-cast, able to provide every piece of content a Bundesliga fan wants, whether they’re in the stadium or wherever they are.

There will be different gaps to fill too – HR and competencies is one we have mentioned, so we’re focusing on that – and making sure the entire media-production workflow is orchestrated by Sportcast, because it’s such a complex world. In the end, I hope this exchange in our industry – of ideas, of people, of inspiring moments – lasts. There will be some robotics anyway, but the human factor will always be there.