Every Women’s Championship match will be streamed live on the league’s YouTube channel from next season onwards, the Guardian can reveal.
The move will see roughly a six-fold increase in the number of live second-tier fixtures being shown live from next term, up from the usual one match per gameweek at present, to 100% of games being available live.
According to sources, the coverage of Championship matches will also be produced with a minimum of two cameras to provide alternative angles, rather than the current single-camera coverage which has typically been provided for Championship matches this season.
Sky Sports will still have the right to select Championship fixtures for live broadcast if it wishes to do so, as reported when the broadcaster’s five-year shared domestic television deal with BBC Sport for the Women’s Super League was announced on 30 October. But any games that Sky selects will also be streamed on YouTube, guaranteeing that all 132 matches across the campaign will be available to watch live, free-to-air.
The Guardian understands that the tender for production of the live games to be streamed on YouTube is expected to go out over the course of the next week.
So far this season, after 10 gameweeks of the current Championship campaign, 11 second-tier fixtures have been streamed live on YouTube, the most-watched of which was the local derby between Sunderland and Newcastle with a total of 81,313 total live views during the 90 minutes, not including any additional replays of the stream since.
This season, in the top tier, any WSL matches not selected by Sky nor the BBC have also been streamed on YouTube, in a change from previous seasons where they were broadcast live on the Football Association’s free platform the FA Player. That switch came in conjunction with the running of the top two women’s leagues being transferred from the FA to a new entity, temporarily known as Women’s Professional Leagues Limited.
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The Guardian revealed in October that viewing figures for WSL games being streamed online had tripled since that switch. So far this term, the largest live audience the WSL has seen for a YouTube game was the 271,502 who tuned in to Manchester United’s away victory at Leicester City on 17 November, whereas the highest figure for a game on FA Player last season was understood to be Arsenal v Bristol City which attracted 78,050 live viewers.
Source: theguardian.com
