I know many of you have been impressed by the quality of our live streaming service provided by SATV this season. When we set up live streaming, for speed, we agreed to utilise software that provides the club with a paywall. This paywall software is provided by a Dutch based company called Cleeng. It’s the software that allows you to sign in and pay for your ticket, or input your voucher code to get to the video. For reasons detailed below, the club has decided to change to a different paywall system. This will not affect the actual live stream in any way, just the sign in page.

From a fan perspective, we understand that your perception has likely been that this software has worked well all season – so why change it?

Here’s why: Their cost model was not particularly clear up front. Cleeng take a percentage of the cost of every stream. We understood this on signing up, however the actual percentage taken has turned out to be much higher than we initially expected. The upshot of this is that for some games, they are charging more than 45% of the £10 stream charge. When you add in the additional costs to stream and host live televised matches, we have reached a commercial tipping point. Simply, we can cannot afford to continue with this cost model.

We are certain that having heard the reason behind the change, you, our fans, will understand that this change is commercially essential. Thankfully, a local firm has come to our aid – Stirling IT have now developed our very own paywall software.

We intend to go live with this substitute option after testing, so if you’d like to be part of that testing, and will be watching our game vs Stranraer on Tuesday 13th April from home, then please let us know by dropping us an email at dhg@stirlingalbion.info. We need testers to ensure that the system runs smoothly before rolling it out to all the fans. The planned date for this rollout is the Edinburgh City game on 20th April. If the trial is successful, going live with this change will reduce our cost to stream a match considerably.

However, there are always technical gremlins with new software, so if we do experience issues, we hope you’ll bear with us and let us know via email and we’ll do our best to sort them out.
We’ll be communicating on this after our test on Tuesday, so watch the website and social media pages. Don’t worry, we’ll try to keep the disruption as minimal as possible and all of our loyal season ticket holders will still get their discounts and be able to keep the same codes!!

Mon The Binos
Colin Rowley
SAFC Commercial Director