Clubber TV: From streaming the Kerry intermediate championship to taking on the Premier League?

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-August, Jimmy Doyle was shouting at his screen, willing victory for a team to which he had no obvious connection. The club in question is a small outfit, one that has never played a minute of senior championship football. Doyle and his work colleagues are a small team too, even if they are spread over three different continents. And for a few crucial minutes, their sole focus was an intermediate football match in Killarney.
You don’t get much more niche than the Kerry intermediate club championship. But then, not all niches are created equal. For this one had David Clifford’s Fossa team involved and when you’re Jimmy Doyle, founder and CEO of Clubber TV, the fortunes of David Clifford’s Fossa are never too far from your mind. Particularly on Sunday afternoons in mid-August.
“Fossa are a complete anomaly,” Doyle says. “They’ve been the biggest games of all, of everything we’ve done on Clubber since we started. Intermediate football, like. Mad. But they were beaten in that county semi-final against Laune Rangers. We were disgusted. We’re all there shouting: ‘Come on.’ Shouting at Kerry intermediate football.”
As the club championship season starts to gather pace around the country, Clubber is the only outlet matching it stride for stride. The platform will carry 57 games live this weekend – 17 in Tipperary, 11 in Kilkenny, seven in Kerry and on and on. Everything from Dunnamaggin v Mooncoin to Rathmore v East Kerry to Kiltale v Kildalkey.
What do they have? They have deals with 11 counties to show their club championships, as well as Munster and Leinster, when the time comes. Once TG4 have picked the games they’re showing live – this week it’s Kilruane v Loughmore Castleiney in Tipp and James Stephens v Ballyhale in Kilkenny – Clubber take everything else. As long as they think they can get enough people to pay to watch it, they will show every game they can.
“We were sitting one weekend a couple of weeks ago to pick the games,” Doyle says. “Kerry is one of our counties but the club final between Crokes and Dingle was on TV so we weren’t covering it. There were very few other games on – just Junior Premier, which is the third tier in Kerry. The fourth tier is Junior A and we were looking at it, and you’re talking about places like Knocknagoshel and Tarbert involved.
“These are small communities and the football team is the top thing in the community. Everybody lives and breathes it and so you can be damn sure everybody is into it. They’re not all going to go to the game or they’re going to want to watch it back afterwards. It brings a sense of pride into that community to get it on to TV and have people talking about it.
“We just couldn’t justify it in the end. We looked and we went: ‘You know what? That’s not going to get us enough.’ Our number for a game is about 70. We think that if 70 people pay to watch a game we show, that covers the cost. We looked at those Kerry Junior A games and decided we couldn’t make it on those. We couldn’t take the risk.
“But if I’m sitting talking to you in a couple of years, I want to be able to say: ‘Yeah, of course we do Kerry Junior A games – we’ve been able to take the technology costs down in the meantime.’”
Currently, purchasing a single game on Clubber costs €10.99, with a week pass costing €29.99 and an annual pass €149.99.
Doyle describes Clubber as a technology company rather than a streaming service. His background is in Microsoft, where he spent the first two decades of his career before going out on his own four years ago. With a name like his, it doesn’t take much guessing to work out he’s from Tipperary – his big fixture this weekend is the Tipp intermediate relegation semi-final between Newport and his club Moyne-Templetuohy.
[ Ciarán Murphy: Widespread live-streaming ensures a whole new ball game for the GAAOpens in new window ]
“I was working in a corporate environment at Microsoft, living and breathing technology every day, which I really enjoyed and I learned a bunch about,” he says. “But my job was very much entrepreneurial in nature, in that we were a small satellite office from HQ in America. I survived for that length of time in Microsoft through building small little businesses in there and [would] keep attaching myself on to the next thing.
“But it wasn’t scratching an itch with me. The thing about working for a huge place like Microsoft is that you waste so much time on stupid stuff, managing up the chain to bosses so that they can massage a message that allows them to manage up the chain to theirs. I wanted to do something myself. So that was first and foremost.”
Initially, Clubber was going to be an analysis tool. In the broad sweep of time, that might still be what it turns out to be. Doyle was tricking around with different bits and pieces of AI when he was at Microsoft and the first idea he had was to develop a tool that would essentially democratise GAA analysis.
All the stuff you hear about intercounty teams using, with their armies of stats people beavering away, Doyle reckoned he could just create an AI program to do instead. The idea was to sell it to clubs at every level and take it from there.
But then the pandemic came and the streaming revolution happened, more or less overnight. Suddenly, the idea of someone setting up a camera and putting out a live-stream of a game – any game at all – didn’t seem strange. For Doyle’s AI thing to work, clubs were going to have to film these games anyway. So now that they were, why wouldn’t he create a platform to see could he build an audience?
“I’ve had to teach myself everything,” he says. “Everything. And like, the funny thing is that it’s been the best thing. Because if I had a background in TV and broadcasting, I’d have done this a whole different way. And all the guys who probably saw us start now would have been thinking: ‘F**king eejits, what are they at?’ Because we were making up as we went along.
“We were trying stuff and seeing how it might work. We were very much focused on how we use this latest technology that we know can do it over the internet, basically. That’s really a fraction of the price of using satellite. Satellite is the tried and trusted way.
“Like, if you go to an All-Ireland final, there’s a big satellite truck rolled in. Everybody cables all their cameras down to the satellite truck. There’s a person sitting in the truck, doing all the graphics, switching cameras. There’s producers, people all over the field. It’s a hundred-grand production.
“That’s the big cost, doing it through satellite. We’re there with fewer cameras, using simpler machines. We’ve our software which is saying: ‘Do this, do that, take this, take that.’ It all flows for you. It’s very simple. Your scoreboard, everything’s done there. So the same person who’s running the replays is doing that as well. It’s a much leaner set-up. And we’ll do it for 80 per cent less than what a satellite would cost. So that’s why we can do more.”
For all that they’re able to cover, Doyle’s team is tiny. He has an engineer who lives in Cairo, another in Kuwait. They didn’t go to college thinking they’d someday be familiar with the intricacies of the Waterford football championship but life’s winds blow you to some strange places. All in all, he has 10 full-time employees – all the commentators and videographers are subcontracted.
“We think we do something interesting. The thing we’re starting to learn now is that we’re more of a super marketing vehicle for the sport as opposed to being a drag on it. In the early days when we went to county boards – and still now, to some extent – they get very much fixated on gates and attendances.
“They’re very much: ‘This is my revenue. Oh, television streaming? Okay, I might make a bit of money off you – what are you going to pay me? I’m going to lose this much from the gate – are you going to give me this much?’
“And we’re trying to change that conversation totally. We’re like, ‘Lads, stop. Your sport is under attack like every other sport, from Netflix, from the Premier League, from everything else that’s out there. You need to keep your sport in the conscious minds of all of the young people and older people.’
“The county boards are starting to learn that because they’re seeing it in their gates. Tipperary and Kerry are probably the best examples. We’ve been there the longest, we’ve done the most and we’re most known down there. Their gates are fine and we’re getting good viewership. So everything’s working well. We think we’re driving up gates.”
In time, Doyle’s idea is to take it on the road. If Clubber can work for the GAA, then surely there’s fertile ground in other sports in other countries. He just doesn’t know yet what or where that might be. But the company is only four years old. More road ahead than behind.
“When we talk about where can we go, the big thing for us is scale, scale, scale. I want to be doing thousands of GAA games so that it can be proved that this system can be transferred to other sports and other countries in whatever part of the world. That’s what our ultimate goal is.
“That’s the idea, eventually. I don’t know where. We haven’t put a lot of research into it yet. It’s something that we’re probably going to start doing relatively soon. But, like, is the GAA thing an anomaly? I can’t believe it is. Live sport is still something that lives and breathes in every community in the world. So it just has to be possible. We need to figure out how to get ourselves embedded in it and that will be our next big quest.”