A spokesperson for the company that will provide streams of all Airtricity League games outside of Ireland next season has confirmed that they will only be available to holders of active accounts with betting websites, at least at the start of the project.

The FAI announced the plans to stream over 250 games on Thursday, with CEO John Delaney saying it would "increase global reach" but it has emerged that fans wishing to watch the games will have to be signed up to gambling sites and spending money to access the streams.

Martin Füreder of Trackchamp, a joint venture between tracking technology company ChyronHego and online gaming company Betwin party, told RTÉ 2fm's Game On: "The first distribution will be through betting operators but we are also aiming at, and have already discussed with the league, additional platforms where people can access the streams.

"But at the moment we are focused on getting everything delivered by March, putting our systems into arenas and setting everything up. After that we'll look into the additional stuff that we are very keen to do with the league.

"It's not completely for free at the moment."

"What is industry standard is that you need to have an account registered and have some activity on the account.This maybe differs from website to website but to our knowledge our betting operators use it.

"So it's not completely for free at the moment."

Delaney had also mentioned the potential benefits of the data gathered by Trackchamp's cameras, but it remains to be seen whether that will be provided free of charge to the clubs or deducted from the €150,000 pot that is to be shared between them as a result of the deal.

"It will depend on what it is exactly. Some may involve additional costs, some may be part of us sharing whatever comes in," said Füreder

"We take a partnership approach to getting everything done and a realistic one to budgets available."

Füreder added that the single-camera streams, which will only be shown outside of the Republic of Ireland for contractual reasons, would be standard definition to start with but that they were looking at the possibility of upgrading the quality to HD over time.

"It's standard defintition, not HDTV quality, but it's good production with an automatic camera that intelligently follows all the movements on the pitch," he said. "We also have operators onsite that assist this camera.

"We are also in the process of looking at improving the quality up to HD at some point, over the next year or two hopefully."