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 rojadirecta.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.ukrainevengland.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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!