The combinatison of sports and entertainment have always been his passion and so Gisbert Wundram founded Sportainment in 2003. Initially started as an agency "for media evaluations", the company operated already a few years later as Sportainment Medien GmbH & Co. KG.
The core business at that time: DVDs and BluRays. In the rapidly growing media market, Sportainment quickly made a name for itself as the No. 1 producer of sports and soccer DVDs. Sportainment´s licensing partners and licensors included all the major soccer associations and almost all the clubs in the German Bundesliga: FIFA, UEFA, DFB, DFL as well as FC Bayern München, Borussia Dortmund, FC Schalke 04, Werder Bremen, Hamburger SV, VfB Stuttgart, VfL Wolfsburg, FC St. Pauli, ... The specialty: Sportainment produced the Chronicles of the big clubs with the greatest soccer matches in the club´s history. This resulted in unique compilations with the DNA of all the major Bundesliga clubs. In addition, soccer tournaments such as World and European Championships with the successes of the national teams were immortalized on DVD and BluRay.
As a result, between 2003 and 2018, more than hundreds of different soccer titles were produced with a total print run of well over 1 million copies, which still adorn the shelves of soccer fans today.
With the advent of the streaming age, the market for home entertainment products (DVDs BluRay) flagged sharply, so that since 2019 Sportainment has newly focused on the area of technical and editorial services in the field of sports. With club TV services from the 1st and 2nd Bundesliga as well as the processing of sports and match highlights from the fields of soccer, basketball and ice hockey, Sportainment has fully established itself in the market to this day.
Sportdigital TV Sende- und Produktions GmbH was founded by Gisbert Wundram in 2007 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Sportainment GmbH & Co. KG as a start-up within the framework of a joint venture with Hamburg-based sports rights agency SPORTFIVE. In the early days - from 2007 to 2009 - Sportdigital produced and broadcast more than 400 season live matches of the Handball, Basketball and Volleyball Bundesliga as part of the joint venture with SPORTFIVE, and aired the Handball World Cup 2007. SPORTFIVE was later sold to Lagardère and in 2009 the joint venture with Sportdigital was discontinued.
Together with the managing partner since 2010, Bendix Eisermann, who also wrote the business plan as a "man of the first hour" back in 2005 and played a key role in building up the pay TV station, Sportdigital was strategically repositioned from 2010. From 2011, Sportdigital exclusively broadcasts live matches from international soccer leagues, making it the first entirely thematic soccer broadcaster in Europe.
Following the claim "Football Around The World", Sportdigital FUSSBALL broadcasts live and all around the clock about 800 international top soccer matches per season from many different time zones around the world. The channel has currently secured the rights to around 20 international soccer leagues and competitions, making it probably the broadest live soccer TV offering in the German-speaking world.
The pay TV channel pursues a B2B multi-platform strategy and is currently included in more than 20 pay TV packages of all digital satellite, cable and IPTV providers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. These include Sky, Vodafone, Telekom Magenta, Amazon, DAZN, ... . This way, the channel currently reaches around 3 million subscribers who have booked the channel directly or via a pay package. (for more information, please visit www.sportdigital.de)
In 2019, EDGEsport was added as another 24/7 pay TV sports channel. Through a cooperation with IMG, Sportdigital was able to secure the rights to the 100% action, fun and outdoor channel for the DACH region. Since then, the distribution of the channel has been continuously expanded. Since 2020, the channel is available on Sky and HD+ via Astra satellite 19.2°East.
In 2020, ClipMyHorse.TV followed, another linear pay TV station for equestrian sports, resulting from a cooperation with ClipMyHorse, Europe´s largest equestrian sports portal. This channel is also offered to subscribers via satellite on Sky and HD+ as part of the TrendSport package.
In 2018, Gisbert Wundram and Bendix Eisermann founded another startup, commentaro GmbH. The idea behind it: Anyone can slip into the role of a real sports commentator and, by means of recording their own voice, comment on their own contributions from all over the world of sports and share them with friends. The special thing about it is that new sports news items with original audio are made available for commenting on the commentaro portal on a daily basis. Only through the mixture of the commentary and the ambience does a real sports clip come into being.
commentaro is available as an app or a browser solution. In 2019/20, the two founders, Gisbert Wundram and Bendix Eisermann, presented their portal in the Vox program "Die Höhle der Löwen".
In the meantime, commentaro has become the first and only recruiting portal for young sports commentators, through which various talented young sports commentators have been recruited for the TV channels of Sportdigital TV Sende- und Produktions GmbH. The commentaro technical equipment will also allow the commentators to comment on live matches from the comfort of their own homes in 2022.
The Sportainment Media Group companies are privately owned family businesses and currently offer secure jobs to around 40 permanent and 25 freelance employees in Hamburg.