Big sporting events should be on terrestrial television!
England v Ukraine’s 500,000-strong audience will no doubt have pound signs dancing around internet entrepreneurs eyes, but lonely monks in their cells viewing on laptops doesn’t really cut it, according to Raymond Snoddy …
The World Cup qualifier between England and the Ukraine was a very strange one – and not just because Rio Ferdinand had a terrible game, Robert Green became the first England goal keeper to be sent off in an international, or even that the team lost the game and with it a 100% qualifying record.
No this was history in the making – the first time an England international was relayed to the public via the web, and only the web, with the small added boost of a relay to a dozen cinemas. It all probably happened by accident. The UK broadcasters wouldn’t pay the fee demanded by Kentaro, the company that managed the rights for the Ukraine Football Association, given that England has already qualified already for next summer’s finals in South Africa.
So the choice was clear. Take a large loss on the rights or find another way to reach an audience via pay-per-view. Necessity often encourages innovation and, really, streaming technology is already well advanced.
It still amounts to a disruptive use of technology to bypass the broadcasting bottleneck and go direct to individual laptops. It would have been better for those seeking an easy life if the “experiment” had been a complete failure – if nobody had turned up .
That was far from the case and although some complained about the quality of the pictures, the main gripes seemed to be about the things that could be fixed next time, such as the hiring of the monosyllabic Sven-Goran Eriksson as the expert commentator.
Then there was the further oddity that the BBC was unable to announce the fact that it had bought rights to show the highlights until virtually the last minute – in the middle of Strictly Come Dancing.
It is claimed that as many as 300,000 paid sums of up to £11.99 to watch on their laptops and that a total audience approaching 500,000 was assembled. By any standards that was not a bad effort for a first time out, although without absolute clarity of numbers we can’t be entirely sure. As a result though internet entrepreneurs will have pound signs dancing in their eyes.
Just think how much money you could raise if such an event were properly done, properly marketed. A new potent form of exclusive rights has been born – at least in financial terms. Of course there is the small problem that perhaps eight or nine million would have almost certainly watched the game if it had been broadcast live on terrestrial television.
For sports such as football the age-old dilemma between visibility and cash has once again been thrown into sharp relief. And things could be about to get worse. The technology also already exists to take any video on the internet and place it seamlessly live on proper large screen television sets. Relay to laptops alone is merely a temporary passing phase.
If sports administrators have any sense they will chose public visibility over maximising cash every time. The emotional impact of live is at its most potent when it is a shared experience.
You can kill interest in a sport by taking it behind the pay per view curtain. Who knows or cares who the current world boxing champions are because the sport is hardly ever on network television any more. It is very easy to turn a major sport into a minor, if lucrative, one if you treat the fans with contempt.
On major sports like live international football the marketing community has an obvious interest and they should make their voices heard.
In a fragmented television world it is the big sporting events that almost uniquely bring the big audiences together in the old way. They should be on terrestrial television, and for the commercial community that means ITV. Lonely monks in their cells viewing on their laptops don’t really cut it.
It may be that sports administrators need to be protected from their propensity to succumb to short-term greed. Step forward the former FA executive director Donald Davies who was chosen in December by then Culture Secretary Andy Burnham to conduct a review of the “crown jewels” list of protected televised sports events.
Impossible to predict what the, increasingly eccentric, current Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw will make of the task. Burnham was positively urging Davies to extend the list in the public interest.
Davies should now get a move on and, taking the Ukraine events on board, see whether he can do anything to protect all home nation World Cup qualifying games for terrestrial television in the UK. Then Bradshaw could move quickly to do some good work before, if the opinion polls are to be relied upon, he heads off to opposition.
The alternative could be more England-Ukraine games watched by 500,000 even though the rights owners turn a nice profit.
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