Saturday sees the launch proper of TownTV, the club’s new service replacing iFollow, and director of media and communications Marcus Nash told TWTD what fans can expect from the new venture.
Soon after his appointment, CEO Mark Ashton announced that the Blues would be leaving the EFL-provided iFollow arrangement as soon as their contract was up, which was at the end of last season.
Planning for TownTV had been ongoing for some while at that point, while the summer has seen a new state-of-the-art studio built at the ground by Manchester-based specialists Audio Schemes.
The service was effectively given a live rehearsal at the Innsbruck Cup in Austria but Saturday’s game against Stoke is the big launch, although broadcast rules mean that supporters in the UK and the Republic of Ireland are unable to watch the game itself live.
However, they will be able to tune in to the pre-match show, while the match will be available to overseas fans.
"Saturday against Stoke is the big launch because those that are paying their £5.99 or paying their international monthly subscription can now watch a pre-match show, which starts at 2pm,” Nash said.
"At 2pm, the pre-match show will open up with Curly [former Soccer AM presenter James Kirtland] as the presenter, while Matt Holland and Darren Ambrose will be on the panel and they’ll go into a show similar to the Innsbruck one, but this time it will be in our big studio. Glenn Wheeler will be joined by regular partner Ian Westlake on commentary.
"The studio’s been built in the old gym, it’s a massive investment from the ownership and Mark Ashton.
"I think supporters will really get to see what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to bring them. Our number one goal is bringing them the best possible for their football club.”
The aim is to make a significant step up in production values, not just with the pre-match show, but also the coverage itself.
"We’re going from a two-camera operation to a four-camera operation at Portman Road,” Nash continued. "The microphones will be all around the pitch, which was an investment that we put in last year, and that goes a long way. We’re really trying to bring fans much closer to the action.
"There’ll be replays, there’ll be analytical data, there’ll be community features, there’ll be VTs, there’ll be behind the scenes, we’ll really be aiming for a kind of Monday Night Football-style Sky Sports production.
"There’ll be fans’ input into that as well over time, we’re lucky to work with some fans in the media department, so we’re constantly evolving.”
Rather than having to plug a laptop into a TV, the new app allows games to be cast from a phone or tablet.
"The difference now with the app is that you can cast it,” he continued. "Before people had to go on their laptop and put in an HDMI cable, now you just cast it. Most devices have got a cast option.”
TownTV will feature a mix of free and subscription content, although fans will have to log in for both.
Quizzed on what will be free, Nash, who joined Town in the summer of 2021 having worked in a similar role at Hamilton Academical, said: "Anything under five minutes, like Town in Five, Kieran McKenna’s pre-match interview, Kieran post-match, the player pre- and post-match, that will all be free and remain free.
"We might do little features every now and then with Mark Ashton and Kieran McKenna like you saw the other day where we want to put that out there and let the fans see the messages coming from the top. That again should be free.
"It’s important that we give fans an element of free content but they do need to be logged in to view it and I think that’s where the confusion is with a lot of supporters. It’s not having to sign up for TownTV, they don’t, they just have to make an Ipswich Town account which gets them access to everything.”
Regarding the single log-in required to access various club online services, he added: "The bottom line with not being able to watch without logging in is because of the single sign-in that the club’s trying to drive.
"A single sign-on can be to go and buy kits at Planet Blue, it can be the same sign-on to go onto TownTV and we’re trying to drive everybody to register on the website and have one account for all. That’s why we’re encouraging people to log in to watch the videos. It’s a simple solution for everybody to be able to do that.
"This is a summer of digital transformation where we’ve just launched a website that ties into the single sign-on, that ties into TownTV. It’s very rare that any business or football club would do it all at one time, but we have.
"It’s been planned for two years, essentially since Gamechanger took over, these things have been getting studied and researched and carefully detailed and we just went for it all in one summer.
"These things are going to have teething issues. We’ve seen some supporters say that they need to log in every now and again on the app because it’s logging them out. That’s flagged up now to the third party that controls it and they’re going to sort that.
"We’ve put two years of work into this, we know what we’re doing, we’re doing it for the fans. We might get little things wrong but we are listening and we will adapt. I want the fans to realise that this is your product, trust us with it, but we will listen.”
Sunday’s live-on-Sky game at Sunderland led to some confusion regarding which matches will be available to watch via TownTV, both domestically and internationally.
"It’s no different to iFollow in terms of the model and how the structure works, we’re all governed by the same geo rules,” Nash explained.
"A Saturday 3pm game is embargoed by Article 48 [of the UEFA Statutes], which means only those outside the UK and the Republic of Ireland can watch it.
"Those international fans are lucky because they can watch quite a lot of our fixtures. But those within the UK and Ireland can only watch anything outside Article 48 and at the moment that’s midweek fixtures.
"When Sky select a game, such as Sunderland and it’s a main feature game, that becomes not just a UK thing but it becomes an international thing. Sky may sell that to ESPN+ in America, for example, and there are so many locations that can’t watch it due to it being broadcast on their territory.
"There were very few countries that could watch the Sunderland game and the majority of them were in Africa. A very select few could watch it on TownTV.
"In the Carabao Cup, there’s a competition rule, so it’s not possible to stream it. I think there are one or two games which are on Sky but that’s it, so that will be audio only.”
Nash says fans will get a feel for the project from the weekend: "It’s going to be a real production. I think fans will start to really see the direction we’re going when they see that pre-match show on Saturday.”