When the Motorvision Group took over the insolvent series broadcaster eoTV in February 2020, it was announced that it would not limit itself to series and films in the future. For a long time, however, the plans of the new owner remained unclear – not least because of Corona and the surprising death of eoTV founder Jürgen Hörner. But now there is clarity: The eoTV brand will be crushed, instead it will be turned into a sports channel with the title More Than Sports TV.
© Sports Entertainment Holding
Zeljko Karajica
-To this end, the Motorvision Group, headed by Managing Director Raimund Koehler, has brought an experienced sports man on board: Zeljko Karajica, with his SEH Sports & Entertainment Holding, takes over the majority of the company behind eoTV, the MV Broadcasting Operating Company. SEH will hold 51 percent of this in the future, while the remaining 49 percent will remain with Motorvision. Both Koehler and Karajica will act as managing directors at More Than Sports TV in the future, as they confirm in an interview with DWDL.de.
Karajica worked for ProSiebenSat.1 until the beginning of 2020, from 2016 as head of the sports business unit 7Sports. Before that, he was, among other things, managing director of Sport1. Incidentally, the former P7S1 boss Thomas Ebeling is also involved in SEH Sports & Entertainment Holding (DWDL.de reported). Together with Koehler, Karajica now wants to set up a new channel that will focus on the areas of motorsport, football, eSports and martial arts. The broadcast will start on June 19th – and from then on the first sports broadcasts will be in the program.
Football, MMA, eSports and motorsport
The station starts in parallel with the brand new European League of Football – the opening game between Panthers Wroczlaw and Cologne Centurions will be broadcast live here. ProSieben Maxx and ran.de had already secured a number of matches in the new league – all other games will in future be shown on More Than Sports TV. In addition, you want to show the games that run on ProSieben Maxx or ran.de in repetition. Other formats related to the football league are also planned.
In addition, More Than Sports TV will broadcast a fight night of the German MMA Championship (GMC) once a month. You can see the fights of the kickboxing world champion Michael Smolik or the reigning GMC champion Kerim Engizek. Talks, documentaries, mixed martial arts classics and the new reality show “Fighthouse” are also planned. In the area of eSports, the Unicorns of Love team will provide “deep insights” into the scene. Basically they will try to offer a lot of live programming, Karajica told DWDL.de.
The question of how a station that has not even started can get so much content is quickly answered: All of the leagues and organizations mentioned are owned by Zeljko Karajica’s SEH Sports & Entertainment Holding. You are the main shareholder of the Unicorns of Love, you implement the new football league yourself, and Karajica is also in charge of the GMC. Now he also has a platform for his sports competitions, some of which are still very fresh.
He brushes aside doubts about the independence of reporting. “Let us first start and produce something, then we will analyze whether we can achieve the necessary independence,” the manager told DWDL.de. Karajica points out in the Football League that some games will also be shown on ProSieben Maxx. “In any case, there is enough journalistic independence. I’m not worried about that.” But it gets a little stranger: In the European League of Football there is at least one team with the Hamburg Sea Devils that is also part of the SEH empire of Karajica. In addition, SEH is also involved in the clubs FC Viktoria Berlin and Austria Klagenfurt. And the “Life After Football” platform is also part of the group. Karajica is omnipresent and mixes in everywhere.
The hodgepodge dissolves
© Motorvision TV
Raimund Koehler
-The range of topics at More Than Sports TV is to be rounded off in future by motorsport, i.e. the field in which Raimund Koehler and his Motorvision Group are especially experts. Koehler says that you can also imagine non-sporting content as long as it appeals to men. Here you have reports and documentaries in view, there are already some of them on eoTV. Since the takeover, the series broadcaster has been a strange hodgepodge of fictional content, cooking programs, reports, sports programs and magazines. Sometimes you show cooking videos from Youtubers. “The fictional programming ends on June 19th,” Raimund Koehler confirmed to DWDL.de. There will also be no more cooking programs – but there will be a teleshopping window. This is part of the refinancing plan, especially in the start-up phase of More Than Sports TV, says Koehler.
In an interview with DWDL.de, Koehler also talks about the fact that eoTV actually had other plans. At this point there should have been more fictional content. After the takeover, however, there was only Corona and with it collapsing advertising income – and then the sudden death of Jürgen Hörner threw the plans upside down. For the future, however, the Motorvision boss is optimistic: “I am convinced that we are much better positioned with the program that we have now planned than we were nine months ago.”
“Let us first start and produce something, then we will analyze whether we can achieve the necessary independence.”
Zeljko Karajica
More Than Sports TV will be available on Magenta TV, waipu.tv, Amazon Fire TV, Zattoo and Swisscom and will thus reach more than 15 million households at the start. In the next step, distribution via the cable network is planned. “Although we do not have the technical reach like other broadcasters at the start, we are hopefully in a position to achieve six-figure net reach, for example with a football broadcast,” says Zeljko Karajica, referring to the fact that the new Liga already have around 60,000 followers on Instagram – so far not a single game. The target group of the station is young and digital, the users are looking for the content. You can also find it on an app. For the time being, the eoTV app will remain, a new offer under the new brand is already in development and should start soon.
Other people behind the new station, besides Karajica and Köhler, are Franziska Kaltenegger as Program Director, Heiko Gebendorfer (program planning) and Andreas Schaefer as Director Sales & Marketing. All of you are already working in one form or another for Motorvision.TV or eoTV. In the future you will work closely with Hamburg’s More Than Sports GmbH. SEH already has a marketing unit under this title. If companies already advertise as part of one of the SEH activities, “the extension towards the transmitter will hopefully be much easier in the future,” says Zeljko Karajica.
Content from other providers is also planned
In the medium term, however, the new station does not only want to concentrate on broadcasts that SEH has a hand in or that are already going well with Motorvision.TV. “We will also see what other rights there are on the market,” Karajica told DWDL.de and promised to expand the portfolio with content from other providers. “For the start, however, we are very well positioned to achieve reasonable coverage.” At the start on June 19, playoff games from the past DEL-2 season will also be shown again. It is not yet clear whether the ice hockey league will also be shown on the station from next season.
The question of the name still remains. Where exactly is the “More” on More Than Sports TV? “For us, sport is more than just what many previously had in mind. Sport is more than ice hockey, football or basketball,” says Zeljko Karajica, referring to the fact that even the then DFB President Reinhard Grindel declared a few years ago , eSports is not a real sport for him. One wants to counter this thinking – now it just has to be supported by a sufficiently large audience – and if possible also involve. And the DFB? There they are now also involved in eSports and have founded a corresponding football platform, among other things.
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