Digital technology’s impact on sport moves forward this weekend, when the Ukraine v England football match will become the first England international ever to be broadcast exclusively live on the internet in the UK, on a pay-to-view basis. The game can be viewed at www.UkrainevEngland.com.
This breakthrough has been hailed by some as the future of sport, and a massive stride towards total media convergence, yet by others it’s viewed as an absolute disgrace. Leaving many England fans wondering why they can’t watch their national team on free to view terrestrial TV, like the Germans and Italians.
Fans questions and concerns seem to fall into two categories:
1) Background: How did we get to the situation where TV rights for an England game are exclusively available on the internet?
2) The Quality Issue: Are fans going to be able to enjoyably watch Ukraine v England? Or are technological limitations going to stand in the way.
So, in answer to those questions:
How did we get to the situation where TV rights for an England game are exclusively available on the internet?
The best “in a nutshell answer” that I’ve come across was written by Charles Sale in his Daily Mail column.
"The Beeb had originally offered the Ukraine Football Federation £4.5million for the rights after the World Cup draw was made in 2008.
But instead Ukraine sold all their World Cup games to the Kentaro agency, who in turn agreed a £5.5m deal with Setanta for the England match.
Yet when Setanta went bust and the rights returned to Kentaro, the BBC dropped their offer to £1.5m and gave the agency 48 hours to make up their minds.
Kentaro, mindful that no England World Cup qualifier had been bought for less than £3m in the last five years, preferred to test the potential of the internet market, which Kentaro CEO Philipp Grothe called 'the future of premium sports rights content'.”
“Digital sport specialists Perform, who are streaming the England match online via national newspaper websites, including the Daily Mail, are limiting pay-per-view subscribers to 1 million. Actually, they will do well to attract 300,000 even with the offer of free viewing if you have a Bet365 account.”
Perform Group’s outline case can also be found on the Ukraine v England website.
It’s worth pointing out that BBC aren't obliged to show the Ukraine v England as World Cup Qualifiers fall outside the governments pre-identified “crown jewels". And in a free market surely the BBC are being prudent by not overpaying for such sporting events.
My view is that the BBC has placed a couple of fair and reasonable bids here, after all why should the BBC match Setantas exaggerated £5.5m price? Would that be the best use of the BBC license fee? After all Setanta going bust was partially down to overpaying and overinflating the football rights market, and it’s fair to say that if the BBC were able to secure the rights for the match at a fair and reasonable price then we wouldn’t be in this position.
We mustn’t forget that public demand shapes what we get on our TV screens. Matthew Syed sums this up rather well, when he states that the reason that we have this game on the internet “is because we prefer to watch former sportsmen rumbling their way through the rumba in glitter, sequins and a fake tan than real sportsmen playing the national sport in what passes for the greatest competition on the planet.”
So if it’s not the BBC’s fault then it must be the FA's fault then? Well actually no, the FA doesn’t own the relevant rights - the Ukrainian FA do, and they can sell the rights to whoever they like. The rationale being that this system allows individual (minority) FA's to benefit from the visit of larger nations.
So its FIFA's fault? - FIFA should control the TV rights for all the World Cup qualifiers....
....err ok then....let’s move onto question 2.
Are fans going to be able to enjoyably watch Ukraine v England? Or are technological limitations going to stand in the way?
If you've got plans to watch the game in your local pub on a giant screen with a beer in your hand, then realistically you’re not going to have the best experience. And that’s assuming that your landlord does have the technical knowledge to hook his laptop to a giant screen in the first instance.
Preventing landlords from showing the game is probably the biggest downside of this experiment; it doesn’t do the on trade any favours. After the smoking ban and a recession England football games were a banker for a day’s brisk trade. However, I’m sure that if fans look hard enough, then they’ll find some rough boozer hooked up to Swedish satellite or something. Odeon are showing the game on giant screens in 12 cinemas, which is great if you’re aged 13 and under and fancy an alternative to the Saturday Matinee.
However, if you live in rural Britain and your broadband is fed through BT’s archaic copper piping, then you’re probably going to have some buffering issues and you may well have a 7.47 kick off. Then there’s the speed issue, the average broadband download speed in the UK is 4.1mbps.
But if you live on an empty street in a major city, and you have a fast connection then you could do quite well. Don't forget that you can hook up your laptop to the TV.
It will be interesting to see whether the infrastructure will handle a maximum 1 million subscribers streaming a live feed at 5.45pm on Saturday. Perform have limited the stream to 1m in order to guarantee a high quality streaming service, and they’ve also installed a “test” before purchase to ensure a users system can handle video.
I think that this is a great experiment and what better time to do it than now? It’s a good way of watching England and we’re going to have to trial watching online TV at some point in time so why not now?
Whether people are prepared to pay for it is another interesting question. Digital natives have been watching live football streams for free on a Saturday for the last few years – it’s debatable whether these digital natives are going to pay for their streams unless the quality is significantly higher.
This experiment will hang on the quality and reliability of the stream.
