This past weekend, we were back at St Peter’s College for the 2026 Sport and Cultural Festival – streamed live across over a hundred fixtures. Almost exactly a year ago, St Peter’s was also where Fan Stream TV ZA launched. Twelve months on, streaming the same festival again felt like the right place to mark what’s actually happened in between.
In that year we’ve gone from a single flagship festival to a full calendar of streamed fixtures across South African grassroots sport – water polo tournaments at Hilton; hockey at Rustenburg; community fundraisers like the CHOC 4HR AMRAP; and our first club and league partnership, streaming the Old Mutual 5quad League finals. Schools have been the backbone of the year, but the platform was always meant for grassroots sport more broadly.
None of that would have been possible without the schools, clubs and organisers who trusted a platform that was in its infancy.
Grassroots media-rights ownership
Media rights ownership is the conversation that actually resonates. We went into this year expecting production quality to be the pitch. It wasn’t – control was. Keeping your own footage, deciding who gets to watch, and building a network of sponsors, parents, alumni and local businesses around it, instead of handing a season’s worth of matches to a third party that owns it afterwards: that’s the conversation we’ve been having since day one. The high level of production quality we were able to bring still mattered – but it’s rights and control that bring organisations on in the first place.
Accessibility
Streaming means different things to different communities, and we had to build for that. Some want everything public – sponsors, alumni, the whole community watching live. Others want a lot more control: a private stream limited to an approved list of parents, members or staff. Building that option properly turned out to matter a lot.
Consistency
Consistency is harder than any single big event. Streaming a 20th Annual Festival with 174 matches over three days is a known, planned-for challenge. Streaming a primary school hockey league, or turning around a last-minute community fundraiser, is a different kind of task – and it’s that reliability that’s built trust with the schools, clubs and organisers we work with.
If there’s a single lesson from the year, it’s that this works as a platform, not a series of one-off events. What we’re building is a community around each school or club – its rights, its sponsors and its audience, held together on a channel that organisation runs entirely on its own terms: who streams, who’s involved commercially, and who gets to watch.
So: thank you to St Peter’s for hosting us twice now, and to every school, club and organiser who backed us before we had a year behind us. Here’s to the next twelve months – and the next festival.
– Steve Tudhope, Head of Operations, Fan Stream TV ZA
If your school, club or league wants to be part of next year’s calendar, our Grassroots Package is the perfect place to start: za.fanstreamtv.com/grassroots-package
