5 Reasons Why…The Prem Must Accept Internet Streaming
By: Rob | November 26th, 2008
So the Premier League has announced, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that its going to clamping down on Justin.tv the website which basically gives anyone with an internet connection a slightly dodgy and unrealiable but free acesss to any Prem match of their choosing. Again we’re faced with a big money making industry who is getting the internet all wrong. Here is a list of 5 reasons why the Premier League and the FA and all the football authorities around the world ought to get into bed with the internet.
1) You’ve made enough money out of it already
Since the early 1990s TV money has been a massive massive influence, particuarly in the UK due to Sky Sports who gave everyone coverage of inumerable Premier League games, assuming that they were prepared to sign up to Sky’s sattilite service, and then pay an extra subscription for Sky Sports. No doubting the influence it has had turning the Prem into the biggest league in the world (at the cost perhaps of its soul), but the games up chaps. You’ve already made a fortune on it, Sky is now the biggest Digital TV provider in the UK by a mile, mainly due to its sport monopoly. Time to hold your hands up and go, alright, we’ve done our bit.
2) You won’t get them anyway
So, if the Prem shuts down Justin.Tv, or any other website, for every one is closes down, 10 more will open up on the internet. All closing one down does is cause a mild inconvienience to the people who want to stream it. They’ll find other ways. Plus all the ones that are in China? Well they fall out of western copyright laws and you can’t close them down. So the Premier League actually can’t get them all anyway.
3) People who want quality will still pay for it
At the end of the day, if you stream something for free on the internet, you get what you pay for, very often. Every couple of minutes the stream freezes, the picture isn’t very good, the commentary is either the hideous ESPN kind (this is why soccerball isn’t big over there by the way) or in a language that I don’t speak, its on a really tiny screen, and the comments bar on the side is moronic (after Joe Cole got a head wound against Croatia, Justin.tv was full of people announcing he’d died. Oh the hilarity.) At the end of the day, I wouldn’t stream it if I had any choice. (Of course the ‘choice’ is not watching it, but my point is, if I had the money I would happily subscribe).
4) US watchers will stop watching the Prem
Right now, the Prem’s reputation is better than anybody’s in the world. America is slowly (as The Offside often proves) coming round to this sport. Its a very lucrative market. At the moment, the choice of football in America is horrendous. If you take away the chance for them to form a bond with the Prem, they’ll go somewhere else, to France, Italy or Spain. Thinking about the long term plan, letting them bootleg now is sensible.
5) If you offered a good quality Internet service, most of us would pay for it
Lets be honest, if the Prem offered a reliable, internet broadcast, even with a small cost, we’d take it. I know I would. The internet streams are of such variable quality, I’d take a stream everytime. Which is why I do like the Champions League, because ITV.com offer thier games broadcast on the net for free, in decent quality (along with their England games) and it doesn’t go down every five minutes. The Prem needs to do the same, without worrying about what SKY will say. With Broadband getting better, they’ll have to.
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Category: 5 Reasons Why
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Comments
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Hear, hear! This is one (and probably the only) area where MLS is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world. They already have an MLS channel on YouTube where they make highlights available for both viewing and embedding, and they sell broadband access for most games not shown nationally for about $20 a season.
I don’t live in LA, and I think there were only about three games this season that I couldn’t watch because they weren’t on either broadband or a channel I had.
(Not sure if the broadband is available internationally or not — perhaps that’s the next step.)
Posted from
United States
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I understand and respect how fans wish to see matches but why is a persons right to receive services for free? I warrant some on this site watch through pirated streams but I doubt anyone thinks of the economic cost of copyright / trademark theft. I have an it isn’t a “pretty situation.” and not easy to deal with. Hopefully in-time your fifth point will be come to volition as all matches will be available for subscription services.
Posted from
Bulgaria -
The real commercial issue with the expansion of streaming isn’t so much with Sky as it is with the non-UK broadcasters to whom the Premier League has sold rights. The weight of overseas rights in the league’s overall television revenues has increased exponentially in recent years, and their current business plan depends on further growth.
They can’t both promote streaming and soak overseas broadcasters for rights fees. The overseas broadcasters aren’t that stupid, and may well have certain contractual protections in their favour.
It may well be, however, that that particular commercial balance will not always hold, and that the league may seen streaming as a better long term revenue stream. Major League Baseball has made just that determination with respect to its MLB.tv service outside of North America, but it wasn’t giving up large rights fees when it did so.
Posted from
Italy -
Is point 4 a promise or threat?
Posted from
Bulgaria -
Gerard – I’m not from America, so its not a threat! But I think it would be generally true. Although if they offered it online, then people would be able to plug in.
ursus – I think I get what your getting at, and I kinda think that if the Prem was selling the rights to each individual customer they’d make more money than selling to a country’s TV for them to use badly. A good example would be that its a nightmare watching Serie A on English Tv, ever since Channel 4 stopped showing it – I have to stream. If Italian Football authorities stamped down on it, I’d loose interest in Italian football because I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it
Of course the other point that I forgot in my post is that the next step is the EPL sueing us, the streamers, and that would be madness – whatever the rights and wrongs sueing someone you could easily make a customer with a little bit of thought it absolute stupidity. As Laurie said, we don’t all live near the team we support for whatever reason, and it’d be nice to be able to watch your team online even if you have to pay for it (I can do this with Bristol Rovers, my team, why can’t the Prem?)
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United States -
Great post Rob. I think it’s true for streaming in general. There is something they can work out, I’m sure. SerieA.tv was enormously popular among fellow ex-pat Serie A fans like myself, because it was good quality, and reliable. Sadly something with the rights must have come up, because it’s gone this year.
If you wanted to watch Monday Night Football (US show) that ESPN/ABC/NFL have the rights to, you could watch it on cable. Or you could choose to watch it for free on NFL.com. I don’t think they’ve started blocking foreign IPs, but considering they are staging international games to grow its’ popularity you’d think it would be against their greater interests. You can watch 6 goddamn cameras of the game!
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United States -
I doubt anyone thinks of the economic cost of copyright / trademark theft. I have an it isn’t a “pretty situation.
Theft=/=copyright infringement. And it’s a very small impact. As Rob said, people will pay for good quality material. Most of the people who watch via streams will not watch if streams are not available. Considering the shirts and such they probably will buy, it’s probably ultimately a positive effect.
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United States -
Rob – thank you. If you think people will pay, why don’t you ask how many on this site will buy ppv at €15-20 or buy a annual package for upwards of €500-1,000 for their club? I can assure you that if their is demand, it will occur. It is already available in limited availability for those in the gaming sector but not a “free service.”
It would be very interesting to see the response, particularly if it came from the general readership and not bloggers.
Posted from
Bulgaria -
SerieA.tv fell afoul of the perennial rights negotiation chaos that is one of the banes of Italian football and a significant contributor to its weakened status globally.
Gerard, I agree with you that it is an interesting question, but I think that your proposed fees are much too high. The standard for North American-based packages (MLB.tv, CentreIce, etc.) seems to be in the USD 150-200 range for significantly more content (in terms of sheer programming hours). I would think that the initial fee per league would more likely be set at something similar, perhaps as low as 99.99 for the first year.
One of the relatively few things I dread about one day returning home to the US is having to give up the access to vast amounts of televised football that I’ve come to take for granted here. We are likely better off than the average target for these services, but I could easily see myself paying a fee of that magnitude for each of Serie A, La Liga and the Champions League.
Posted from
Italy -
NBA league pass online is 90 dollars for all 900 games. If the EPL put a price like that out i’d pay.
Posted from
United States -
Ursus; Do you really feel you need to price it that low to be of interest to American clients?
I do not think €60 / $US90 would provide any investment interest in developing this vehicle. However it might be possible that your idea is what has already been understood and why this is not available yet.
Very interesting opinions in this topic of discussion.
Posted from
Bulgaria -
Gerard, I think that in order to have significant takeup (beyond serious bettors/bloggers/journalists, etc and the idle rich) the price needs to be competitive in the internet sport content marketplace, and that the going rate in that marketplace appears to be in the range of USD 100-200.
Given that you probably think in euro, remember that the rate is now between 1.25 and 1.30, not 1.50, so that an introductory price of USD 99.99 would be close to Euro 79.99.
Posted from
Italy -
Ursus; very interesting point and that makes a lot of sense although is your opinion only for the American market? I have no knowledge of the products you mentioned (MLB.tv, CentreIce, etc.), which in my opinion are much smaller that Football.
Posted from
Germany -
Ah. A couple of points in response.
I think that the North American market is likely to be the most significant in shaping the thinking of anyone seriously considering such a venture for a couple of reasons. For one thing (as the demographics of this site illustrate) it has already demonstrated measurable demand for internet-streamed football, and clearly has both the degree of disposable income and broadband penetration that I would consider necessary preconditions to success. The fact that a significant (and growing) proportion of North Americans now obtain their cable television and broadband internet service from the same provider is an added plus.
Perhaps more importantly, though, other potential markets don’t strike me as being equally attractive. Europe is by far the most obvious market, but Western European football fans are already very well served by the likes of Sky, Premiere, Canal+, Sky Italia, etc, who provide functionally similar services at significantly lower cost through a much more “traditional” delivery mechanism.
I haven’t done the math recently, but when I last did, I was essentially paying Sky Italia about 25 euro a month for every Serie A match, every Champions League match, two Serie B matches a week, four to six games a week from each of the the Premier League and La Liga and two to three from each of the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Russian Premier League and Scottish Premier League. Some of that is in High Definition and all of it is recordable (given time differences, I would want any internet based system to archive matches for at least a week, if not an entire season). It is literally too much football, and I’m an obsessive.
Asian and Latin American markets may not be as well served (though some of the Asian packages are quite extensive), but they also don’t have the infrastructure and disposable income of North Americans in equal numbers, and the situation in Africa is significantly worse in all those respects. Central and Eastern Europe may well be the best potential markets outside of North America in the short term, but I don’t know enough about the potential alternatives available there.
Add to that the fact that region-specific pricing for this kind of service is unlikely to be viable in the long run. The potential audience is by definition internet-savvy, and any system that tries to charge Europeans twice as much as North Americans will soon find much of its European audience using proxy servers and the like.
To explain some of my terms: MLB.tv is the streaming service of Major League Baseball, while Centre Ice is that of the National (Ice) Hockey League; Uvwie’s also mentioned the National Basketball Association’s package and the National (American) Football League has something similar. None of these sports come close to approaching football in terms of European interest, but they all do have their devotees on this side of the Atlantic (not even taking into account ex-patriates like myself), and have had some success in developing a subscriber base in Europe.
Posted from
Italy -
Very interesting points that I agree with you generally speaking although I question if a American audience would be inclined to pay a reasonable fee and given the present climate is likely to extend through the next 3-5 years, would they be able to. I wonder if anyone has mined the data of this web-site or others for such a proposal. Have you heard of analysis as such. I would be interested in knowing how many readers would pay with the fee you suggested.
Posted from
Germany -
I’m virtually certain that the Premier League is studying this question very closely right now, but they are notoriously protective of the confidentiality of their efforts in such respects.
What I can tell you is that they have definitely spoken to North American sports executives familar with the services we’ve mentioned above.
Posted from
Italy -
I can assure you that as well but “angels” are finding it hard to see if people will pay or just talk about it (subtle of me – lol). The biggest challenge I see is the base price is too low and you would need a significant portal for subscriptions.
Posted from
Bulgaria -
I’m resident in Canada and am paying $14.99Can a month for Setanta coverage of Premier League games. They pulled a bit of a fast one, to attract me to their service – their offering of a Rugby World Cup service was actually diabolical! I have not yet discovered a good football (soccer) streaming service on the internet. I would only only pay a nominal fee for it, because it just doen’t compare (at the moment) to TV broadcasts – for quality, reliability and picture size. You cannot discuss fees without considering those factors!
Posted from
United States -
Streams are the only way to see Premier League football for a student living alone and who can’t afford a tv, in a country where maybe ten pubs in all of the land show football.
Posted from
United States -
None of you have mentioned the reason why the Prem *will not and *must not accept streaming – the effect on the gates of lower League teams. The interests of overseas customers are negligible, compared with those of the other 72 clubs in the English league, who derive absolutely no benefit from US, or other overseas interest in our football. If the Premiership allows live streaming of games on a Saturday afternoon, exactly the same thing will happen to our gates as happens on a Tuesday evening when we are unlucky enough to coincide with the brutal and bloated Champions’ League (not a League, not for Champions) – all our casual support will vanish.
Bloggers across the pond need to hear this. We don’t want your money – it will make our already impoverished game even poorer. Support your own teams in your own League, where there is some semblance of connection even if you have no history. Stop lecturing us on what we must and must not accept. We (some of us) will fight to preserve our clubs, our traditions and our pyramid and the notion that we should roll over for the benefit of armchair plastic customers, wherever they may be, is insulting and loathsome. Go and support Chicago Fire and stop whinging about not being able to see games three thousand miles away.
Posted from
United Kingdom -
Jim- I support lowly Bristol Rovers and I already pay to stream their games from their site, as I live in Manchester.
Posted from
United States -
A crappy Premium TV subscription with highlights and live audio commentary isn’t quite the same thing, is it. Incidentally, I suspect the FL’s PTV deal – 25 years for not so much money from 2001 – is one of the problems: given that clubs who come up to the Prem are still presumably tied into PTV, negotiating streaming rights outside them might be a tad difficult.
I repeat: the Football League needs this like a hole in the head. Proper football fans need this like a hole in the head. Overseas interest and money benefits us not one iota. It’s not about “marketing the brand”: it’s about sustaining and growing a core element of community – something internet and TV watchers will never understand.
Posted from
United Kingdom -
Allright, Jim. You muppet, do you think English football has grown globally due to “Bloggers across the pond need to hear this. We don’t want your money – it will make our already impoverished game even poorer. Support your own teams in your own League, where there is some semblance of connection even if you have no history.”
The GLOBAL image of the Premier league, is ONLY due to its fan base outside UK. Sky sports never made money with the UK subscriptions. It made it by selling telecast rights to countries like India, Pakistan, S.America, USA, for inflated rates. You say that they do not need money generated by us? Look at the clubs. Millions of pounds are generated by Replica shirt sales (Other merchandise too). You think all of that was bought by the UK? You are clearly deluded. And as for questioning the loyalty of the fans, I have to laugh. Yes, we may not understand the history or the passion or the atmosphere. But we understand the football! Isnt that the sport?
Talk about delusion and stupidity.
Posted from
United States
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