Robert Exley
As you’ll all be aware by now, the Premiership’s £5.1 billion domestic TV rights deal means that an extra £2 billion will be flowing through the collective coffers of EPL sides over the next three years. Also, many speculate that the overseas TV rights deal, which currently reaps around £2 billion, may sooner or later even exceed the figure generated by domestic TV rights. English Football’s continued appeal to the TV companies and the companies which advertise on their platform should come as no real surprise. For all its faults, modern Football is largely a sport with pan-social appeal and, in an increasingly fragmented multi-media landscape, Football (as well as most major sporting events) is often usually the only guarantee of a comparatively large simultaneous audience.
As an example, soap operas such as Coronation Street - which once counted on TV audiences around the fifteen million mark - now only attain around half that figure. In comparison, even Portugal v Czech Republic in Euro 2012 managed to reap around eight million viewers in the middle of summer (traditionally the worst performing period for TV viewing figures). For every action however there is an equal and opposite reaction, as BSkyB’s share price had fallen by 2.2% on the back of this deal with many speculating that it would claw back at least £100m through incremental price rises in subscription fees.
The price rises in satellite subscription over the last twenty odd years aren’t the only instance where BSkyB have tried to recoup the increasing amounts laid out to secure broadcasting rights. Football coverage used to be a nice earner for pubs, who in 1992 were charged a flat rate of £6 per month to show games broadcasted on a network which less than 1% of the population bothered subscribing to. However, according to a High Pay Centre report titled ‘Football Mad’, the rise in the years since has topped as much as an unsustainable 10,000%. A price rise which is more often than not passed on to the customer in the form of higher drinks prices, despite this being an era where many local pubs are disappearing at a rate on knots due to being priced out by the availability cheaper beer in supermarkets and off licences.
The very same report commented that: ‘the common trend across all fronts is that wherever people watch Football, there is a concerted effort to raise prices well above inflation, be that in the stadium, at home on TV or in pubs’. Football’s rise in popularity over the last quarter of a century has led to many a lazy hack (myself included) to comment that the game has risen in the public’s consciousness to the status of becoming ‘the new rock ‘n’ roll’. However, it’s worth pondering on what actually did become of the old rock ‘n’ roll.
Up until around fifteen years ago, the music recording industry was practically a licence to print money. The birth of the Compact Disc era in the early to mid-1980s led to a long protracted boom in the recording industry which continued until around the time of the millennium. The CD was promoted by the recording industry as being a technological advancement in sound from what vinyl could achieve and as such record companies doubled the price of the product. Many music lovers also re-bought much of what they’d originally bought on Vinyl. Ultimately though, the CD was cheaper to manufacture than vinyl, as well as cheaper to ship as it was a more durable product that was far lighter in weight.
The record labels earned enormous profits off the back of the expensively priced CD, to the extent that an early advocate of the CD format (who in the early 80s convinced sceptical music industry bigwigs that the CD was the way forward), Warner’s Jac Holzman, even conceded that ‘it's fine to keep that up for two or three years. But the labels kept it up far too long. And I think it was a fraud on the public'. The boom came to a huge crash with the birth of the twenty first century digital age, as most people’s home PCs came with an in-built CD burner, leading many to question why CDs were so expensive in the first place.
The major game changer however came in 1998 on an internet chatroom called ‘w00w00’, as a seventeen year old whizz-kid called Shawn Fanning, under the moniker of ‘Napster’ revealed that he had created software which would allow internet users to dip into each other’s hard drives to share digital audio MP3 music files – what came to be known as ‘Peer to Peer’ (P2P) media. Within a decade or so, once mighty chain stores such as Our Price, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores and Woolworths went to the wall and technology meant that a general public who once paid around £15 to buy an entire album of songs (of which they often only wanted to acquire one or two) could now acquire the individual songs they wanted off the internet for as little as 99p each (if they actually bothered to purchase it at all as file sharing sites such as Limewire continued long after Napster was curtailed by the US courts in July 2001).
In the years that followed, a shrewd businessman like Steve Jobs had the record companies over a barrel, with Apple and it’s iPod and iTunes products seeing its stock rising from $8 Billion to $80 Billion as a result, with the stock of major recording companies often going in the opposite direction, but with little in the way of public sympathy for their plight, as much of the general public could recall the extent to which they were fleeced a little over a decade earlier. Ironically, a threat to Football and the Satellite TV industry’s long protracted boom may very well develop as a result of the very same P2P file sharing technology, albeit with Live TV pictures as opposed to music files.
The rapid global rise of broadband internet connection over the last decade, as well as technological improvements in P2P streaming has meant that a viable alternative to paying over the odds to watch Football has in recent years developed through the online streaming of games available to the Football public, free of charge. If this When Saturday Comes article is anything to go by, this practice has existed over the internet for most of the last decade. Most people who have used it for the majority of this time however would testify to just how temperamental these streams have historically been and, up until the last few years, you certainly wouldn’t have chanced watching on it anything other than a meaningless game involving two neutral sides.
The regular breaking down of internet streams meant that, up until recently, you certainly wouldn’t have considered choosing it for watching an Arsenal game over Sky Sports in the local or traipsing up to a backstreet Finsbury Park boozer to watch Arab satellite coverage of a live game unavailable in the UK. Over the last year or so, however, internet streaming has proved more reliable than it previously was and very often having a second stream of a game as back-up if the one you’re watching crashes is usually enough to ensure that none of the action is missed.
For me personally, I’d never give money to Rupert Murdoch on principle. I’m also generally not over keen on rushing home from work early enough on a weekday evening to squeeze dinner in before the pub. Neither am I that keen on consuming alcohol on a work-day evening, or dragging out a couple of soft drinks long enough to satisfy a publican that I’m consuming enough of his produce to justify occupying space in his bar. It’s with this in mind therefore, that I have found myself turning more to the internet stream to catch midweek games that are shown on Satellite.
Admittedly, the vision on such streams can often be cloudy, but the quality of picture is generally sufficient enough to view. There may very well be those who will question whether people will seriously abandon HD-quality satellite subscription for the potential of a lower quality stream. Fifteen years ago, however, there were also those who seriously questioned whether people would swap CD-quality sound for lower quality MP3 downloads, which ultimately enough people did to seriously dent the recording industry’s turnover. There too also currently exists USB equipment to allow people to hook their PCs up to their widescreen TVs. In the years ahead it’s also more than likely that the popularity of the Smart TV – with its inbuilt internet connection – will continue to rise. This YouTube video shows exactly how Smart TV can be exploited to view Premiership matches without a subscription (as well as live matches not broadcast on TV at all within the UK).
When you bear in mind that the Premiership years had effectively priced out a generation of younger fans at the turnstile (in 1992 a quarter of matchday attendees were aged between sixteen and twenty years of age; by 2007 only 9% were under twenty four and the average age of attendees was forty three), as well as the widely-held truism that the young are more adept at newer technology (as was the case with the downloading of music files in the late 90s/early 00s), Football risks raising a generation of fans accustomed to paying absolutely nothing to view its product in much the same way as today’s pop music industry has to live within a world where fans for the most part pay nothing to own a song.
The Premier League has considered internet streaming enough of a threat to have pushed for the closure of 30,000 illegal streams back in 2012 through internet enforcement company NetResult. However, a spokesman for the company had stated: ‘It is a case of 'whack-a-mole'. One disappears and another one comes back online’, as in the social media era with sites such as Facebook and Twitter, re-emerging sites quickly go viral to a receptive global audience.
Many have raised the question of the extent to which social media can genuinely challenge the hegemony of the traditional media empires. Quite possibly, Premiership TV coverage could be the next theatre of conflict between the two. Premiership football clubs would do well to realise at this point that quite possibly there may well be limits to the extent to which Football fans can be milked for revenue, in order to forego any football clubs eventually going the same way as the once mighty Our Price or Woolworths.
Robert Exley is the author of Modern Life Is Rubbish: How Feral Capitalism Ruined British Culture
