Following the 2015 Men’s World Championship in Qatar and the TV blackout at the 2015 Women’s World Championship in Denmark, the IHF tried on several occasions to mediate between TV rights holder beIN Sports and the German TV stations interested in broadcasting the upcoming World Championships.
After they first met in Leipzig, Germany on 11 March 2016, another meeting between the agency of ARD/ZDF, beIN Sports, the German Handball Federation (DHB) and the IHF took place on 20 June 2016 in Paris. There, several arguments were exchanged and the position of beIN Sports was explained in detail again, as the IHF partner’s interest is to protect their rights, since especially in Southern Europe and North Africa exclusive TV rights are violated on many occasions as some channels copy the signal from unencrypted satellites and use it for their own purposes without any permission of the rights holder.
Therefore the rights holder requested a technical solution to avoid this, as it is done on other occasions as well. Unfortunately, none of the public German TV stations was willing to fulfil this requirement.
Since no financial agreement with a pay-TV channel was found, IHF was informed by beIN Sports that a live streaming solution free of charge will be provided for the German market.
The IHF is keen to broadcast the world championships in Germany, one of the countries with the biggest handball tradition, and after several communications with beIN Sports, DHB partner Deutsche Kreditbank AG (DKB), which is also the title sponsor of the German Bundesliga, acquired the broadcasting rights on 5 January 2017 to show all matches of the German national team at the 2017 Men’s World Championship online. The matches will be streamed on handball.dkb.de for free; exclusively for sports fans in Germany.
