Singing from the virtual terraces
There were no proud boasts of a ‘coup’ when it was announced that the Ukraine vs England football game was going to be broadcast solely online. Setanta had the rights, went bust, England qualified for the World Cup turning this into a rather tame match and no one bought the rights for it. So the internet broadcast was the only option.
But what it did do was give the chance to show a full high profile live football game online. An exciting opportunity to assess how the web could cope and how the watching public would embrace this new channel. Would the stream work? Would it fall over or grind to a halt? Would people be happy to sacrifice their 42 inch HD TVs in preference for their 14 inch laptops and 17 inch monitors?
From the little that has been revealed so far, the stream largely worked well with only a few experiencing lags in the feed. Problems appear to have arisen from individuals’ ISP problems rather than the source of the feed. So far, so good. The technology stood up to the job.
The main issue was the under-subscription to the event - the human element. It appears the event was poorly subscribed to so the numbers requesting the feed were a lot lower than expected (and as a result the feed capacity was over egged for the demand) which undoubtedly helped the smoothness of service.
The reason why this experiment failed (and made it interesting to try) was the broadcasters took something that was traditionally watched in the pub or front room with mates and beers a plenty and shoehorned it into the home office or onto a laptop - somewhere where the surroundings were not entirely conducive to impassioned football revelry. As a result, the experience was less ‘total football’ and more ‘pitter-patter of geek footfall’.
What this suggests is that the technology and infrastructure is in place to push these serious volumes of data around. Now service providers need to actively push their internet offerings alongside their traditional broadcasting channels to their customers. This means explaining the expansion of services to public in such a way that they wish to pay extra to embrace in the internet in their front room, not just BBC One, ITV, Dave and News24. (Tough going in the current recession as there’s bound to be a financial element to this).
However, by bringing internet into the front room, live streaming sports events will become the norm and will change our consumption of internet content and the manner by which we digest content for good. Until then, such events will be the domain of the obsessive and rather sad football fanatic only.
Tags: bringing the internet into the front room, broadcasting matches online, online broadcasts
