NFL piracy

[unbibium]

BoingBoing disappoints me.

Over the weekend, there was a pivotal NFL game. All I know about it is that the New England Patriots are playing, and the game is only carried on the NFL network, a network that many cable companies don't even carry, and those that do put it on their most expensive tiers. The office was abuzz about it all last week.

Now, based on everything Cory Doctorow has been saying for the last few years, when entertainment companies do something truly clueless, the public responds by filling the gap, and usually this means ordinary law-abiding citizens become heartless pirates. Therefore, I expected there to pirated streams all over the Internet, rebroadcasting the live game without the express written consent of the NFL. And since cutting commercials out of live TV is difficult, maybe a few smartass ones would replace all the beer commercials with scenes from every Lifetime movie where a drunk husband is beating up his wife.

I wonder if that will ever happen.

Comments

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

It was the local game here. "Pivotal" doesn't quite describe it, since both the Pats' and the Jets' places were pretty much set for the post-season, but there was some drama since the Jets brought on that whole "spygate" thing, and a coach rivalry between Jets and Pats (Pats stole Belichick away from the Jets, the current Jets coach was Belichick's defense guy, and probably was snatched a bit early.) So people expected a high scoring grudge match game and maybe the Pats beating some records they're near, but the weather made it an ugly grind.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback has the most detailed coverage of the NFL Network thing I've seen:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/071030
Except his axe to grind is about "NFL Sunday Ticket", a DirecTV only thing to watch any game, but I think he can't get it because the dish angles or something. The summary of that is: NFL Sunday Ticket is kind of a lifeline for DirecTV who is otherwise getting slaughtered by cheaper and more techie cable offerings, so they're making it worth the NFL's while to be the monopoly provider of that. The summary of the NFL cable thing is: NFL wants to have its cake and eat it to, charging a fairly premium price for its channel, but also having it part of "basic cable", so that the cost gets rolled into a typical monthly bill.

To quote TMQ:

The NFL wants to charge $7 to $9 per household per year for the NFL Network on basic, a fee the carriers strongly resist. This price would make the NFL Network, a seasonal product for a specialized audience, one of the most expensive items in the national cable universe. ESPN, which is to cable what cheeseburgers are to McDonald's, charges $30 to $35 per year for multiple channels with very broad appeal. CNN charges about $5 a year to the cable carriers, NBA TV about $4, and most cable channels charge far less or nothing at all. (The ones that charge nothing subsist on advertising.) Cable carriers want the NFL Network exiled to a premium sports tier so they will meet less resistance passing the price along to consumers, but that means a far smaller audience for NFLN, and hence lower ad revenues.

Now, hearing those numbers of NFL vs ESPN, I think the NFL has a pretty strong case. I'd say ESPN doesn't have broad appeal so much as a broad range of very specific appeals, which probably means on average a viewer might have one channel worth of content they want at any given time (sort of like the 80/20 rules for Word, where everyone use the core and then a small subset of the features, but everyone's subset is different) I'd say NFL is at least a quarter as popular as ESPN's range. It gets a little trickier since its primary content generation only happens half the year, but it seems to be that Football has a level of potentially year-round appeal that it's still a good proposition.

Good god, I never expected my response to be quite this long and detailed. I don't even care all that much, though I enjoyed the NFL Network when it was on a hotel or two I was business tripping at.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Wow. That sounds like quite the house of cards to tumble down if live sports piracy ever gets as popular as time-shifted TV piracy.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

I think what's more interesting (in a house of cards kind of way) is how NFL.com bills itself as the only website w/ clips...

Maybe the factor I'm not thinking of is how so much of sports is local. I might be exaggerating the appeal of the NFL as a whole, when people tend to be a lot more concerned about their local team. So the main audience is for the really big events, which have a 50/50 chance of getting national play already, or for folks whose hometeam is elsewhere...

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Was New England able to watch their own team play on their local TV channel? Because I heard they couldn't, or that John Kerry had to bring the NFL network into negotiations.

Also, there are cities with lots of transplants, including Phoenix, where you might find more fans of their original hometown than the actual local team.

I also hear that a lot of problems are due to conventions that have outlived their usefulness. Rules like blacking out a local game if it's not sold out, because if there are seats available, you might as well go to the ballpark and buy a ticket, why not? Well, that convention dates back to before traffic and urban sprawl made the stadium a 90-minute drive from your house, and before ticket prices got into the ridiculous range.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

I watched the Patriots game on a normal local station.

I don't know what machinations went on to make that happen.

But I think I've heard more stuff happening for the final Thursday night game of Patriots vs Giants, which might be the first team to have an unbeaten regular season for a long while