GolTV finally gets online streaming for Bundesliga, U.S. Open Cup final

Updated September 4: The security patches I reported that KlowdTV was working on have been rolled out, and I've also been told that GolTV's Spanish feed will be available through the service by the middle of September.

For over a year now, I have been trying to get a hold of people at GolTV to get some answers about their lack of distribution on national cable and satellite platforms.

GolTV has been ravaged since beIN Sport launched, and quite literally took over its turf. In addition to buying up rights to Spanish and Italian soccer, beIN hired a lot of GolTV's talent and built studios across town from GolTV's Miami headquarters.

And it's no secret that beIN Sport pushed many pay-TV providers to drop GolTV when it signed carriage deals. That includes Comcast, which bounced GolTV without much remorse when it picked up beIN Sport in 2012. DirecTV yanked GolTV's English-language feed a few months before Comcast's move, though the satellite provider still carries GolTV's Spanish channel to this day.

Now GolTV is in the final year of its two marquee rights deals: Germany's Bundesliga and the U.S. Open Cup final. Speculation has run rampant in soccer circles about the network's fragile finances, and the company's refusal to talk to anyone in the soccer media hasn't helped.

(We aren't entitled to be talked to, of course, but it would help their cause just a bit if they'd open up.)

But at long last, there's a ray of hope. News broke Wednesday via BundesligaFanatic.com that in its 11th year of operation, GolTV has finally agreed to stream its content online.

The stream will be provided by KlowdTV, which runs a subscription service on a monthly basis. KlowdTV also hosts streaming for well-established horse racing broadcaster HRTV, as well as 11 other sports and entertainment channel.

I talked Wednesday the CEO and co-founder of the Alexandria, Va.-based company, Bill O'Hara. It turns out that the streaming deal is an old-school American soccer story: just like the rest of us, he was fed up with not being able to watch GolTV's games.

"I reached out to their director of affiliate relations and basically pitched them on the notion of over-the-top [i.e. subscription] streaming in HD," O'Hara told me. "It's pretty much the perfect fit for our business model as we start out, which is targeting channels that we think have excellent content and a large viewership that is under-served."

The streaming will just be of GolTV's linear English channel - not its Spanish channel or any other games from the leagues GolTV broadcasts.

(Or its Canadian channel. The service is only for American viewers.)

It will cost $8.48 per month: $4.99 for the base service plus $3.49 for the sports package that includes GolTV. And it's a high definition feed, which not even DirecTV or Verizon FiOS have.

You can't just subscribe to GolTV through KlowdTV as an individual channel - O'Hara told me that such an option "is not within our agreement" with the network. But he added that if an a la carte option was available, the channel might cost as much as it does in the package.

So this setup is better than nothing. And it might be better than Dish Network's $30-a-month German package that includes all of Sky Deutschland's Bundesliga coverage, but only in standard definition.

O'Hara also dangled an intriguing tidbit out there about KlowdTV's future.

"We are pursuing other soccer channels as well, which shall remain nameless," he said.

For now, he's happy with the channel's mix of outdoor and combat sports content, plus GolTV and HRTV.

In addition to the subscription fee, there is one other major red flag with KlowdTV's service: its payment page isn't fully secured. The payment widget, run by established vendor Stripe, is HTTPS-encoded, and both O'Hara and one of his website developers insisted to me that Stripe does all the data-hashing, and KlowdTV does not keep any information at all on its own servers.

Nonetheless, O'Hara told me that he and his staff are working right now on security upgrades to the website to ensure everyone's peace of mind - including their own.

As I wrote above, it's better than nothing. And it's entirely legal, which is a lot more than you can say for pretty much every other online platform for watching the Bundesliga that you can imagine. So you can decide for yourself whether you want to give it a shot. If you do, send me a tweet and let me know what you think.