"Enormous potential": What Alexander Walkenhorst plans to do with the TTBL livestream

Alexander Walkenhorst is at work with a lot of drive and enthusiasm at Spontent, the new media partner of the German Table Tennis League. The young entrepreneur wants and is expected to initiate nothing less than the transition of the TTBL, and with it table tennis sports in Germany, into a new era of reporting.

What TTBL Managing Director Nico Stehle recently described in the trade magazine "tischtennis" as a quantum leap for his Tischtennis Bundesliga (TTBL) is by no means squaring the circle for Alexander Walkenhorst. "In table tennis, as in some other threshold sports, there is enormous potential. Through advanced digitization, there is also an opportunity for sports with smaller budgets to narrow the gap to soccer, which has cleverly exploited structural advantages for itself. We want to push into this niche," says the 33-year-old with great confidence.

Walkenhorst knows what he's talking about. In 2020, the volleyball player initially created an interactive competition series suitable for the Internet out of the necessity of the Corona lockdown and the associated tournament cancellations. Almost in parallel, Walkenhorst developed the Spontent channel, which has since become the largest sports channel on the world's largest livestreaming platform, Twitch. Last season, as a media partner of the Volleyball Bundesliga, the start-up already produced successful broadcasts of the butterfly artists on the net at the first go, measurably multiplying public interest in the sport.

Focus on developing image and production quality

These positive experiences should now also benefit the TTBL, which Walkenhorst believes is "similarly compact to the Volleyball Bundesliga and therefore has just as good a basis for improvements in media presentation. Spontent's plans initially call for a focus on the further development of image and production quality. From the second half of the season, the program around the TTBL is to be expanded with editorial studio formats - use of social media included. "It's about creating identification, about faces and stories that can grow into a true community journey," says Walkenhorst, summarizing the ideas.

However, the Essen native will already be traveling a lot from the second half of July. With his team, the brother of Olympic beach volleyball champion Kira Walkenhorst will deliver the technical equipment to the TTBL clubs.

Alexander Walkenhorst: "It's an absolute privilege".

The associated training sessions will be the start of a long-term collaboration between the clubs and Spontent. This is because Walkenhorst's company will remain the production service provider for TTBL and former DFL CEO Christian Seifert's new project from the 2023/24 season, even after the media rights have been passed on to the new streaming provider S Nation Media.

"It is an absolute privilege to be able to accompany this world-class league in the coming years and to jointly develop the production and editorial level around the TTBL," says Walkenhorst. "In the medium term, we want to work with the league to tell the myriad stories of the athletes and clubs, creating league-wide fans and unprecedented identification."