About LAOLA1

LAOLA1

LAOLA1 is an Austrian sports news portal based in Vienna, described in Bundesliga and OTS releases as Austria's largest sports portal. Founded on 13 July 2001 in Vienna as Sport1.at by Sport1 Multimedia GmbH, it has published under the unified LAOLA1 brand since 2022 and is operated by Sportradar Media Services GmbH of Vienna. The portal produces original sports reporting and live streams, with a focus on Austrian football, ice hockey and international sport, and it forms the consumer-facing media face of the Sportradar group's audiovisual business in Austria.

Founding as Sport1.at in 2001

LAOLA1's history begins on 13 July 2001, when the portal was founded in Vienna as Sport1.at by Sport1 Multimedia GmbH. That founding date places it among the early generation of Austrian online-only media: a sports website launched years before most Austrian newspapers operated serious digital sports desks, at a time when live scores and online sports news were still becoming mass habits.

The Sport1.at name expressed its single-subject mission. Rather than a general news portal with a sports section, it was built as a dedicated sports medium, and it grew within the sports rights and media business that later became the sportsman media group — the structure through which it would eventually pass into Sportradar ownership. The portal survived the renaming and consolidation of that business and emerged under the LAOLA1 name, under which its streaming service had already operated as Laola1.tv.

From sportsman media to Sportradar in 2016

The decisive ownership change came in 2016, when Sportradar acquired the core business of sportsman media holding. Contemporary deal reporting describes what Sportradar took over: the sports rights and marketing agency, the streaming platform Laola1.tv, unas media productions as the live streaming and video production arm, and LAOLA1 Multimedia — explicitly described as the operator of Austria's largest sports website and as a new media service partner for clubs and organisations. The agreement was reached with sportsman's chief executives and founders Thomas Krohne and Karl Wieseneder, and was expected to close by June 2016 subject to antitrust approval.

SportBusiness reported that the two companies had together delivered more than 27,000 live broadcasts to the betting and gaming industry in the preceding year, and that the combined portfolio created one of the largest audiovisual sports offerings from a single provider, including premium content such as Germany's Bundesliga and DFB Pokal, Spain's Copa del Rey, CEV volleyball, ITF tennis and the KHL ice hockey league. LAOLA1 thus became part of a global sports data and audiovisual group while continuing as an Austrian consumer portal.

Operator today: Sportradar Media Services

The operator named for LAOLA1 is Sportradar Media Services GmbH in Vienna. Sportradar Media Services is the audiovisual production arm of Sportradar, providing contribution, production and distribution services for both online and linear broadcast television, and it operates the Laola1.tv international sports channel and OTT platform. Production reporting on its Austrian football coverage describes feeds transmitted to Sportradar's Master Control Room, where commentary is added and content is encoded for live streaming and handed over to playout for linear TV.

Since 2022 the portal has published under the unified LAOLA1 brand, bringing the news website and the streaming identity under one name. The brand itself is a football reference — la ola, the Mexican wave — and it had been established with Austrian audiences through Laola1.tv long before the unified branding, which made it the natural single name for the combined offer.

Editorial focus: Austrian football, ice hockey and international sport

LAOLA1 produces original sports reporting with a focus on Austrian football, ice hockey and international sport. Austrian football coverage centres on the Bundesliga and the national team's fortunes, the natural core audience for an Austrian sports portal, while ice hockey reflects the strong position of the sport in Austria, where the multinational ICE Hockey League commands a large following. International sport — the German Bundesliga, European competitions, Formula 1, tennis and major global events — completes the mix.

As a specialist portal, LAOLA1 competes not with general news sites but with the sports desks of the newspaper portals, the sports offer of ORF, and international sports apps. Its differentiation is depth in Austrian sport and the combination of news with live moving pictures, a combination general portals cannot easily match because it rests on the rights and production business of its parent group.

Live streaming and the Austrian Football Second League

Streaming is the second pillar of LAOLA1 alongside news. From the summer of 2018, Sportradar Media Services held the exclusive rights to the Austrian Football Second League for linear and non-linear distribution worldwide, and LAOLA1 carried that coverage: all matches were available live online on Laola1.tv, at least 30 matches per season were shown exclusively on Laola1 TV across OTT and linear television, and another 30 were broadcast on Austrian TV.

The production scale behind that offer was documented in industry reporting: every match of the 240-game Second League season was produced using cellular bonding units transmitting up to eight simultaneous feeds to Sportradar's Master Control Room, with live commentary added centrally. For a second-division competition, that was an unusually complete live production, and it demonstrated the group's model of using its own production arm to turn rights into a consumer streaming product under the LAOLA1 name.

Services for clubs and federations

Beyond its public portal, LAOLA1's operating business has served as a new media service partner for clubs and organisations, as deal reporting noted at the time of the Sportradar acquisition. That business-to-business role — providing digital media services to sports bodies — sits alongside the consumer website and reflects the portal's origins inside a sports marketing group rather than a traditional publishing house.

This dual character distinguishes LAOLA1 from purely journalistic sports media: it is simultaneously a newsroom publishing to Austrian fans, a streaming platform holding live rights, and a service unit of a sports technology group whose other customers are federations, leagues and bookmakers. Readers see the first of those faces; the other two explain the resources behind it.

Sportradar group context

Sportradar, LAOLA1's ultimate parent, is a Swiss-founded sports data and technology group that listed on the Nasdaq in September 2021 at a valuation of about 8 billion US dollars. Its partnerships span global sport — including multi-year agreements with the NBA and the NHL — and its services range from data distribution and betting products to integrity monitoring against match-fixing. The 2016 sportsman acquisition, which brought LAOLA1 into the group, was the step that significantly upgraded Sportradar's audiovisual content offering.

For the Austrian portal, group membership means access to data, rights and production capacity on a scale no independent Austrian sports site could finance. It also means LAOLA1's strategy is set within a global audiovisual business rather than by the Austrian advertising market alone.

Brand development to the unified LAOLA1

The path from Sport1.at in 2001 to the unified LAOLA1 brand in 2022 summarises the portal's development: founded as a web news brand, carried for years alongside the Laola1.tv streaming name, and finally consolidated under the stronger video-era brand. Reference sources record the founding name and date, the Sport1 Multimedia GmbH origin, the move through the sportsman structure, and the 2022 unification.

One caution belongs in the record: the detailed early history of the portal between 2001 and the 2016 acquisition is documented mainly in summary form in the sources available to this profile. The verified waypoints — the 2001 founding as Sport1.at, Austria's-largest-sports-website status by the time of the 2016 deal, the Second League rights from 2018 and the unified brand from 2022 — are firm; finer claims about intermediate ownership steps or historical traffic records are not made here.

Position in the Austrian sports media market

Bundesliga communications and OTS releases describe LAOLA1 as Austria's largest sports portal, a description also used at the time of its acquisition, when LAOLA1 Multimedia was identified as the operator of Austria's largest sports website. In a small market, that position makes LAOLA1 the default specialist destination for Austrian sports fans who want more than the sports pages of the general portals.

Its competitive set includes ORF Sport's online offer, the sports channels of krone.at, oe24 and the quality newspapers, and global platforms. LAOLA1's verified advantages are its Austrian rights holdings, its own production operation in Vienna, and two decades of continuous publication under its successive brands — a record few Austrian digital-only media of any kind can match.

Outlook

LAOLA1's future is tied to the economics of live sports rights and streaming, where its parent group is a global participant. The portal's editorial core — original reporting on Austrian football and ice hockey plus international sport — gives the streaming business a daily audience, and the streaming business gives the newsroom pictures and access that text-only competitors lack. On the verified record, LAOLA1 stands as Austria's largest sports portal and one of the country's longest-lived digital-native media brands, operating from Vienna within Sportradar Media Services since the group's 2016 acquisition of its former owner.