Barry Hand

Pho­to­graph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Sat­ur­day 10th Octo­ber her­alded a turn­ing point in foot­ball broad­cast­ing when an oth­er­wise irrel­e­vant dead rub­ber match for Eng­land (they had already qual­i­fied) was exclu­sively streamed online to 500,000 viewers.

Although pay­ing money to watch sweaty action in East­ern Euro­pean is noth­ing new online, doing so for a foot­ball match is, and this has has been bub­bling along over the last 2 – 3 years is the ever increas­ing num­ber of foot­ball fans scour­ing for free foot­ball streams.

We are now at a tech­no­log­i­cal stage where the ser­vice providers exist to make online stream­ing viable, both in terms of the actual ISP’s with increased band­width as well as broad­cast ser­vice web­sites mak­ing it easy to share live video content.

Watch­ing foot­ball streams for free

Stream­ing foot­ball comes in two dis­tinct flavours, YouTube-esque sites like justin​.tv & ustream ver­sus soft­ware peer-2-peer appli­ca­tions like TVAnts & Sop­Cast. This also leads to the rise of stream index­ing web­sites like rojadi​recta​.com

Online stream­ing appears to be par­tic­u­lar grey area as the rights for these pack­ages are sold dif­fer­ently to each mar­ket, so an Eng­lish pre­mier league pack­age for a broad­caster in Asia would cost con­sid­er­ably less than in Europe, and if some­one hap­pens to stream their Asian broad­cast online, well that would allow just about any­one to watch it…for free.

500,000 view­ers

So back to England’s game against Ukraine, due to Setanta going bust, Swiss agency Ken­taro were left hold­ing the rights with Per­form tasked with stream­ing the game fol­low­ing unsat­is­fac­tory offers from TV broad­cast­ers and made avail­able online only on www​.ukrain​e​veng​land​.com in dif­fer­ing price options rang­ing from £5 to £12 depend­ing on when you pur­chased the ‘pass’.

Around 500,000 are reported to have viewed the game, which was also made avail­able in UK cin­e­mas as well as part­ner sites like Bet365​.com. With that 500,000 fig­ure in mind, it is unclear the num­ber of pay­ing pun­ters, I’d esti­mate that it’s around half that which is con­sid­er­ably lower than say 2 mil­lion if shown on Sky, or 7 mil­lion if shown on ITV.

Accord­ing to Philipp Grothe, CEO of Kentaro:

“This pio­neer­ing broad­cast has been a great suc­cess. Not only have we deliv­ered Britain’s largest ever live pay-to-view inter­net sports audi­ence but com­mer­cially the ven­ture has proved itself as a viable model for future games. Tech­nol­ogy has ignited a rev­o­lu­tion in people’s view­ing habits and there is a new sports broad­cast plat­form devel­op­ing on the broad­band enabled internet.”

Viewer feed­back

So I think it’s fair to say we’ll be see­ing more of online pay per view, another inter­est­ing aspect is the pic­ture qual­ity and accord­ing to Perform’s post match sur­vey an aver­age of 87% view­ers felt the pic­ture qual­ity was sat­is­fac­tory or bet­ter and 93% were sat­is­fied with the cus­tomer sup­port. While 87% said the match offered value for money and 89% would pur­chase another live sports event online.

Not sur­pris­ingly web traf­fic from UK to video web­sites peaked on game day.

Sky enters the market

Undoubt­edly the biggest player in sports broad­cast­ing is BSkyB, and they’re work­ing on some cool stuff them­selves. Sky Player is a video on demand online ser­vice allow­ing you to watch Sky util­is­ing Microsoft’s sil­verlight tech­nol­ogy, and recently announced that Sky Player is com­ing to the Xbox Live plat­form, allow­ing you to inter­act with with other friends watch­ing the same game. This looks amaz­ing and seems like the first ser­vice to com­bat the lack of atmos­phere when watch­ing any­thing online, espe­cially impor­tant if Sky are to get cus­tomers away from the pub/front room and embrace watch­ing online. Of course this won’t be free, and will require a sub­scrip­tion to avail of the pre­mium stations.

RTE & BBC

So where does that live free-to-air broad­cast­ers, well RTE have been stream­ing live tv online for a while now. Notably after some recent foot­ball qual­i­fiers they have kept the con­ver­sa­tion going with some web only con­tent once the sched­uled pro­gram ends TV, so they are to be applauded for increas­ing engage­ment there — a major gripe being mainly from non Irish res­i­dents not being able to use the service.

BBC mean­while are under­stand­ably fur­ther ahead with live audio/video stream­ing which is geolo­ca­tion locked down mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to view from Ire­land. They also increase engage­ment by encour­ag­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in minute by minute reports and their 606 ser­vice.

The future?

So where does this leave things, well — setup very nicely with free-to-air broad­cast­ers already repli­cat­ing their ser­vices to an online audi­ence and pay per view is sure to increase with Sky get­ting on-board with their Sky Player service.

While an audi­ence may not fully embrace online only games but given the com­mer­cial pos­si­bil­i­ties and the low cost require­ment of an inter­net con­nec­tion ver­sus a fixed satel­lite ser­vice, the future is clearly online…if the ser­vice providers can keep up!