There’s a lad I know, him and his group of mates share the
log-in details for a streaming service offering flawless HD feeds of all
Premier League matches. One of them pays a PayPal account £4 per month
for the privilege. They’re all under instruction not to share the
password with anyone, the logic being that the more people that access it the
more likely it is to get shut down. They know it will eventually
though. Just as they also know as soon as it is another one will pop right
up to replace it.
That’s the world we’re living in. And all it’ll take
is for a host to base themselves in Sweden or one of the smaller island nations
existing just for the privilege and there’ll end up being no practical way of
shutting it down. If things continue as they have been we’ll see the
Pirate Bay of football streaming before too long. If the history of the
internet has taught us anything it’s that long term it will be pretty much
impossible to stop the majority of people accessing supposedly copyrighted
material. And if football broadcasting has it’s that no matter how much
you show people will watch it.
The astonishing thing about the streaming debate is how
little the powers that be seem to be doing to stop it. Or perhaps more
accurately how little they’re able to do. On occasion you might see a
press release when 30,000 streams get taken down in a year. They might
just be realising that in every stream they shut down there’s untold multitudes
still up and at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection. In
this they’re not only fighting against the future, they’re trying to hold back
the present.
And that’s watching at home.
In pubs if anything it’s more engrained.
Irrespective of the complex verdict in the Portsmouth landlady trial if
you want to watch any match this weekend odds are there’ll be a pub a short
distance away showing it. A couple of
years ago my local used to tell you what games they had on with a nod and a
wink. Now they’ll be openly advertised in
chalk on the sign outside.
This, as with everything about modern football that we don’t
particularly like, is the Premier League and Sky’s fault. Thirty years ago they didn’t announce what
game would have highlights featured on Match of the Day in the fear that no one
would show up. Now there’s at least four
out of ten games shown in full each weekend.
It’s only going one way.
More than anything this is a symptom of a larger
malaise. There’s a generation of fans
being lost to watching football live in this country. The reasons for this are broad and complex
but can mostly be attributed to cost. With
tickets so expensive is it really a surprise that the accepted way to follow
your team at 3 o’clock on a Saturday is now to watch them via a foreign
satellite stream in a pub.
The usual reason given for not allowing 3 o’clock live
broadcasts on a Saturday is to protect lower league football, the idea being if
fans could chose to watch Premier League games on TV then attendance down the
leagues would suffer. If this was true
you would have expected to have seen a large drop in the last few years when
streaming became widespread which simply isn’t happening.
Of course the Germans are much more efficient. Every match from the top two divisions is
broadcast live on TV and at the same time their top division is the best
attended in Europe. What Germany also
has a pricing structure and ethos built around attracting young fans to viewing
matches live in its stadia. If there’s
no chance of stopping people streaming matches, and in a practical sense
there’s not, surely it makes sense to offer the same service but
regulated? It shouldn’t be beyond
copying what the Germans are doing to simultaneously bring more young fans
through the gates while offering armchair fans the option to watch every
Premier League game legally. It
shouldn’t but it probably is.
The unspoken criticism of this will be why with all the
thudding near constant availability of modern football is even more
needed. This is a fair point. But at some point in the last 20 years we
crossed that particular Rubicon and kept on going forwards so we might as well
keep going till the end now. Rightly or
wrongly a generation of fans (myself included) has grown up in a world where
the next big match is a short walk to the pub away. While protecting the atmosphere of the people
lucky enough to be inside the stadium is important this shouldn’t preclude
allowing fans to get more of what they’re used to getting.
The suspicion is that the authorities are happy enough to
bask in the glow of the latest record breaking TV deal and not worry about what
the future holds. For all the signs of a
breaking point being reached they can point to that as evidence of the system
working. In their attempts to deal with
the issue of streaming so far they’ve resembled the music and movie industries
in the early 00s, struggling to understand the scale of the challenge they
faced as their business model eroded beneath them. There is a chance they could embrace
providing a platform to allow fans to watch any game live by 2015 to be
included with the next round of TV bidding.
With so much money still being made through TV rights alone (News
International paid £30 million to show mobile PL highlights for the next three
years compared to a combined £3 billion plus from Sky and BT for TV rights)
it’s unlikely that any change will be considered until those figures change
considerably. As football’s fan base
ages it’s only a matter of time before they’re forced to act. The suspicion is
they’ll have missed an opportunity by the time they do.
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