anyone who has followed my blogging here, knows that i am writing about english football from a north american perspective and, consequently, i write a lot about how the game is broadcast here, as well as the relationship of english football to cable TV, and new media technologies. my biggest issue being the rights to radio and, consequently, live online streaming of audio commentary for english football matches and how the "broadcasters'" rights to these audio media are exercised. the other thing i write about here is FREE and OPEN-SOURCE software, and how the general philosophy behind these ideas extends into other areas, mostly concerning information and the control exerted over it by copyright holders and the large commercial broadcasting corporations.
when fighting corporate control in the digital information age, you can't find a more formidable target than professional sports. the whole industry has distinct advantages in terms of information control due, in large part, to the constitutional structure of the medium. for example, once an audio cd is copied to someone's hard drive, it becomes potentially accessible to anyone - or on any network - that you choose to make it available to. the same thing goes for dvds, as long as one has the software to do it with. the same is now true for television and radio through streaming sites like JUSTIN.TV where people have figured out how to stream TV and radio online to a non-restricted audience. my favorite example of this is how a blackpool f.c. supporter has created a channel that streams the BBC local audio commentary of his team's matches to an international audience. this is significant because the match as streamed from the BBC website is unavailable to listeners outside the UK. that is, it's online transmission is blocked at the server level, and cannot be accessed outside the UK; unless it is streamed through an alternative site with enough bandwidth.
MIGHTY_POOL
of course this happens with just about every game that Setanta and Skysports broadcast, someone streams the manchester united or chelsea match online at JUSTIN.TV and it becomes free for people to access, within the sites bandwidth limitations. for example, there is a limit as to how many people can join the chat room that enables them to access the stream. as long as you can get in on it at the time, this would benefit those wishing to avoid added expenses to their monthly cable/satellite bill, as everything here emanates from a TV broadcast - which i can pay for and watch on TV anyway; and that provides it at much better quality. so, i am here and now, much more interested in the radio broadcasts and live streaming online of audio commentary than i am with video streams or TV broadcasts for the moment.
Sports Rights for BBC Local Radio
as it is now, individual clubs retain the rights to audio broadcasts inside the UK. typically, they will license the BBC to do a live radio broadcast - which is available through the BBC online to any UK users. the club's reserve the right (and through a mutual agreement with the FA) to use these broadcasts to stream online through their website as DRM (digital restrictions management) streaming content that is part of the services offered to paying members of the website. the only trouble is that the websites don't exactly seem to belong to the club, but to the FA - and with whom the club has entered into an agreement.
Richard Stallman on DRM (repost)
for those of you who are wondering, richard stallman is the founder of FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION and, thus, is the originator of the idea of free software. he is also the author of the GPL (general public license). as well, he contributed a lot of code early on to the original set of programs (the GNU project) that served as the basis for the deployment of the LINUX family of operating systems. for those of you who are still unaware that you do not need microsoft - there are, in fact, loads of alternatives. my personal recommendation is UBUNTU since it is easy enough to install and use that anyone who knows how to install and run windows would be able to do so with a minimum of preparatory reading.
this is a statement of requirements for accessing live or archived media as it appears on all of the premiership and football league (championship/leagues 1 & 2) websites, developed by a professional digital content management company, and under the auspices of something originally called PREMIUMTV.CO.UK:
Platforms Supported - In order to access our World subscription products you will need Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or above on the following PC operating systems, Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. Other browsers on these PC operating systems (eg Netscape, Opera, Galleon etc) will not work and are not supported
Under the terms of our rights agreements that enable us to bring you this service we have to take every effort to protect the content from piracy. We therefore use Windows Media DRM which means this service will not work on Macintosh PC's at this time
You will also need Windows Media Player 9, 10 or 11 in order to be able to access our World subscription products. If you do not already have the latest Windows Media Player you will be able to download one here
replace the word "piracy" with "file-sharing" and see how it reads to you...
the above conditions are completely unacceptable and incompatible with the interests of the computer user's freedom; and it is totally unethical as it attempts to coerce the user to run microsoft software... and let's face it: even most people who use microsoft hate it, with all the information lost to trojans carrying viruses and the slow boot-up and execution times caused by constantly running anti-virus software, as well as all kinds of needless background programs that the user is unaware and has no control of - and accept it only out of the perceived inevitability of what it takes to run a PC computer. there is no issue here except the blatant attempts to control; which i do not see as being in the interest of anyone including the broadcast companies, and the football clubs themselves. which brings me around to the point:
after years and years of resistance to the medium of TV on the part of the FA and its member clubs, imagining that it would damage attendance and thus, gate revenues - the more powerful and successful teams (the old 1st division) eventually broke away from the governing body (the football league) so it could form "the premier league" and take control of those revenue opportunities that it finally saw were there to be made from both domestic and international cable television broadcasts - and that the age of digital information.... rather digital information itself should now supply a similar change with a very much different effect; that will, for quite different reasons - meet again with much more tenacious and hysterical resistance.
Stephen Fry on Free-Software
copyrights, patents and other conventions and systems of the analog information era - that themselves were responses to the needs of a culture that depended first - and for a very long time, uniquely - on the medium of printed information; then, in the 20th century and with the rapid growth of electric technologies - sound recording, radio, film, and television. the constitutional nature of digital information, is that it changes all of these conventions as to be unenforceable or more simply (and more honestly speaking) obsolete in regards to their original functions. while patents and copyright are very different things covering very different areas of information, both were originally designed as systems of collecting and retaining information for the benefit of advancing science and the useful arts. as well as, giving some reasonable length of time to the originator to retain certain rights, in order to provide the opportunity to collect monetary recompense for his industry and invention. copyright was never intended as a way for any corporation or individual to hold a monopoly on that deemed "intellectual property" in perpetuity, simply to advance what are assumed to be the natural rights of capitalism. in an information age - like we have experienced since the invention of the electric circuit in 1847, news, education, entertainment, sport, drama... all have become big business. it's only a matter of time, however, that - and as with anything, we encounter or we will encounter, a reversal of form.
one of the biggest problems, with this particular reversal of form, is that those who would benefit from a more free use of digital information media haven't figured it out yet. for example, with manchester united being one of the most well known and popular teams in the world whose league, cup and european matches are all broadcast on international TV - would have little reason to worry too much about the audio commentary accessed by paid subscription to their website. it probably doesn't amount, relatively speaking, to very much in terms of revenues when compared to its many other sources of income. only the most isolated of fans, with no television access, might choose audio commentary accessed through a paid subscription as a preferred method of following manchester united. i mean, even if you don't have a TV (let alone the expensive digital-cable subscriptions that are required to watch the full complement of english football each week); one can go to the manchester united supporters club which locates itself at a local bar, and a widescreen live broadcast of the manchester united match is offered. in the case of cup games that do not have a regular cable broadcast, the club pays for closed-circuit TV coverage, and in turn charges an extra-fee in the guise of a "cover-charge" to its attending members. there are similar clubs for arsenal, liverpool, and chelsea; but looking for other such activity, all i could find was a spurs club and an everton club - both of which appeared to be more or less inactive - with the toffees fans congregations listed as being at the pub that i know to have been taken over by the liverpool supporters; and the spurs information had not been updated in several years. as for the baggies, i managed to find a contact in victoria, british columbia - but all there was in terms of information, was a private email address - and it appeared to be a project that never got off the ground. besides, being located on the other side of the country puts me in closer geographical proximity to the hawthorns than i am to the canadian WBA supporter(s) club, as it may or may not exist.
as interest in football - especially the premier and champions league - continues to develop here at an ever-increasing rate, there are also more than a few traditional sports bars that have begun to cater to the interests of the saturday morning english football fans. in fact, there is a small sports-bar on bathurst street, here in toronto, aimed exclusively at meeting the needs of the growing football market by adopting soccer as its full-time theme.
so given the situation and realities concerning the continuing development of english football as an international entity, we are going to have to get beyond the premier league in order for a fuller, more complete and satisfying understanding of the game. while the so-called "big-four" - and its relationship to the champions league - may serve as a foundation for a sustained and ever increasing interest in english football in north america - the only real way to go for expansion of that interest is down. just as TV served as the eventual and deciding catalyst for the founding of the premier league, and the eventual and subsequent development of a significant and all important international following for the sport; the internet, and digital information - if allowed to do its work - will provide development to the game by opening up access to the lower leagues. it took almost 30 years for the football bureaucracies to fully embrace the medium of television - and there's every chance that the changes i am expecting could take quite some time to achieve, as i fully expect corporate resistance to the internet to be much less accepting of it than it was of television. it did, after all, start compromising with television fairly early on as reflected through the venerable and seemingly eternal Match of the Day.
digital information inverts the old broadcast structures by giving users a medium in which they possess the control over content creation, and the general effect is a broad "localizing' and "democritization" of the process of information dissemination. by "localizing", i mean to describe the advent - through the internet and digital technology - of international and non-geographically based communities that form around specific or esoteric subjects, values and ideas. in other words, where we were previously faced with the sharp distinction between "mainstream" and "underground" in our cultural options - much is redefined in the face of digital technology. the making of a "home movie" with a digital video camera and using your favorite song as soundtrack, becomes a subversive act as soon as it is posted to a site like YOUTUBE; as, if it comes to the attention of the copyright holder of the music, then it is quite likely that you will have the audio portion of your video removed by YOUTUBE at the copyright holder's request. likewise, the use of a site like JUSTIN.TV as a way to make TV available free to other users, is to be using the mainstream media as a radical statement against itself. whether by default or design - that is the effect.
as i've written in earlier blogs; blue square premier matches - that have a similar relationship to the league matches in terms of broadcast rights - both in TV (Setanta Sports... of course!), the radio rights (differing only in that the club retains the international rights, as well domestic) and the crucial part that the BBC plays in all this. this means that i can listen to every cambridge united or histon (just to use BBC local radio cambridgeshire as our example) match live on the BBC, i cannot listen to the audio stream of peterborough united which is transmitted through the same local radio. the truth of this is quite insidious, as it serves no purpose - and as i have pointed out before - requires the added effort of blocking the server transmission for the specific time period of the match.
HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN
so just as the richer and more powerful teams broke away from the traditional governance of the football league and formed the premiership to take advantage of what they had identified as an opportunity to promote english football to whole world through the advent of cable TV, ultimately making it the richest and most followed domestic sports league in the world; leagues 1 and 2 should similarly breakaway from the football league, in order to take control of their radio broadcast rights. as this is the essential licensing that they would require to be able to stream their matches live to an international audience, in the same manner as the blue square conference is able to do now.
this type of scenario (or some variation thereof - for example, the championship could decide to go with them) would have two profound effects on english football, one cultural, and one a simple democratic expansion of capitalism.
culturally, it completes, to no small extent, the ability for an increasingly engaged, international audience to follow the game in depth and have a full complement of teams they can effectively follow, and continue their support for over many years, and from season to season. for example, someone who followed leeds united during their hey-day of the 1970s, replete with FA Cup wins, League championships and European Cup competitions, would, at this point, have effectively long lost their ability to follow the team except through reading score-lines and news reports. how many potential team, t-shirt, scarf and hat sales were never realized due to this situation?!? how many video tapes (and now DVDS) might have been bought? nobody really knows and the crazy thing is, nobody has seemed to take much notice... but with the digital media age upon us, it can't be long before somebody makes this observation; especially given the present potentials!
the reason that there are no streaming audio commentaries from any of the premiership or football league clubs has to do with outdated thinking about broadcast licensing. the FA, realizing that full TV coverage is still too expensive for the average cable TV subscriber - retains the international rights to audio broadcasts in order that they can license "big four" matches to local sports radio in the big north american markets. where they have miscalculated is that online streaming of the audio commentary of championship, league 1 or 2 would not interfere or take audience away from the larger broadcast - as football, even in the realm of the "big four" is about team loyalties and rivalries... there is absolutely no way that the development of an audience that would be familiar with and want to follow teams like leyton orient, preston north end, leicester city, hartlepool united, brighton hove albion, ipswich town, millwall, brentford f.c., cardiff city, wycombe wanderers or accrington stanley would ever be competition to a similar transmission of manchester united or chelsea.
in my promised "modest proposal", i suggest that the lower leagues work to get control of their audio broadcasting rights and stream their broadcasts free online to an unlimited, unrestricted international audience. it would simply be more football all around, and develop the interest in a wider and more complete scope of the english game. after all, it's been well over a hundred years since promotion/relegation divisional play has been a part of north american sport, as it was with baseball in the old federal league of the 19th century - and nobody has thought through the logic yet - still employing outdated and outmoded models of capitalist broadcast protocols as related to TV and radio in the 20th century.
let's hope that soon, doncaster rovers, sheffield wednesday, macclesfield town, and coventry city realize how many more shirts they could sell with free, live, international streaming of their home games.
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