The MOL League has just closed its doors on a historical season, not only did the league expan with the addition of Debrecen, raise the quality of hockey to new heights that included and exciting playoff season and finals but also the leagues new website, molliga.eu which was the fans could access probably the bigest change this season and that was MOL Liga TV, a plat form on which all MOL League games could be viewed.
Since the field of teams is spread over three countries with the most northwestern team being Nové Zámky which is 781 km and 810 km from the most southeastern teams, Csíkszereda and Brasov respectively. These distances are torture for any fan who wants to see their team on the road, this problem was solved with MOL Liga TV, which can be accessed from any point in the world, while you are on vacation you can still watch your favorite team hit the ice.
The price for this service is relatively inexpensive as a one day “ticket” costs 750 forints and a season pass is 8,500, this can be paid in euros as well (playoff games were 850 and just the playoffs 3000), this can all be done via a quick online money transfer and registration. For the price that you pay for the season, you normally would get about a season worth of home games at the actual rink, however now you have access to about 200 games both at home or on the road for every team in the league. You can jump from one game to the next to watch multiple games at once, or if you want to watch that thrilling overtime victory from last week you can find all the games in the archive as well.
Naturally with this great idea there were some kinks in the system that had to be ironed out, because of this a trial period was set from the start of the season until the October 15th, if anyone who registered was not happy with the product they would get their money back.
Soon after the lounch of the service there was an interetsing post on internationalhockey.net where a person with the user name Garethw87 from Great Britian had the following post: “I have to share this with everyone, I checked out the website molligae.eu and I decided to register for a one day pass to see what it was all about, after all it was only 1.60 euro. I filled out everything and wanted to register when an error message popped up, thats when I realized that it was a free trial day and the games would be free for that day.. Thats when I got a phone call “Hello I’m Laszló from MOL Liga TV and I see that you tried to register and that you got an error message”-came the message from the other end. They explained that it was the first day of the service and the games would be free and the amount was not charged, they thanked me for my interest in the service, it was a nice experience. Thats what I call great customer service."
The dress rehearsal was on September 17th and everyone could watch the Újpest-Nové Zámky game for free. Two days later after two crazy months of hard work on September 19th games were being aired from four different locations with on location play by play commentary. The enthusiasm wasn't just on the part of MOL Liga TV but the fans as well, because of the abundance of people registering the internal online payment system had issues as well. After are the glitches were solved by November MOL Liga TV was also airing games for the Hungarian mens senior team for 750 HUF. There were some issues with bandwidth at time in Romania and in Slovakia or there were problems with local internet service provider. When there were issues with TV times for the MOL League finals the MOL Liga TV stepped up and aired all the games with no problems and everyone was glued to their computer screens as Jesse Dudas scored his overtime winner.
It looks like on the European continent MOL Liga TV is one of a kind of course the NHL has their GameCenter service but there is a long way for them to reach that level.