Gamesaver skates into China

Gamesaver is an app and video streaming service which junior sports teams can use to record and stream their games, offering parents and fans digital content. For athletes, the app includes information regarding nutrition, practice and general wellbeing.

The new agreement aims to develop Gamesaver’s video streaming concept towards coaching and produce, in effect, a totally new service for the Chinese market. The Chinese version will be integrated with Sports Republic’s CoachVision software to offer Chinese coaches professional guidance, training and material.

“The Chinese government aims to inspire 300 million citizens to engage with winter sports,” saidVellu Maurola, founder of Gamesaver. “Ice hockey alone has a target of 10 million kids, so they’re really looking for ideas on how to activate unknown sports among the people.”

Meeting the challenge

Sports Republic is the official partner of the 2022 Chinese Winter Olympics and has considerable reach in the markets. The collaboration could very well provide an answer to the Chinese challenge with the service and has attracted some of Finland’s high-profile professional ice hockey players such as Teemu Selänne, Patrik Laine, Aleksander Barkov and Sebastian Aho.

“Sports Republic has agreed to build 50–250 winter sports training centres for kids and youth in China by 2022,” commented Vanessa Folkesson, co-founder of Sports Republic. “An individual training centre will serve up to a million young athletes annually, who will look for inspiration from Gamesaver’s unique ice hockey content.”

According to Maurola, China is planning to build up to 1 000 new ice hockey rinks in the coming years to support the sport. Ice hockey is not alone in being recognised as a sector for co-operation between Finland and China amidst the huge push for the upcoming Olympic games. Check out our list of takeaways from the collaboration so far.