Football Media

In late 2006, the Premier League went after YouTube in an attempt to remove the plethora of clips uploading by fans, and the knock-on effect had thousands of user accounts suspended for ‘repeat violations’ and the subsequent springing up of alternative sources of footy videos (no point in publicising them here).

Then in May 2007 the Premier League joined a class action lawsuit filed against YouTube. To quote the Reuters coverage:

The lawsuit charges that YouTube deliberately encourages massive copyright infringement on its Web site to generate public attention and boost traffic. This has resulted in the loss of valuable content, the complaint said.

“Defendants, which own and operate the Web site YouTube.com, have knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property for their own gain without payment or license to the owners of the intellectual property,” the lawsuit said.

In a nutshell, the Premier League wants to protect its copyright, especially considering the billions they are earning as a result of their TV deals (Sidenote – Uefa have also been working to remove videos from YouTube in the last few months or so). While we’ve grumbled and some people are genuinely worried over fallout, there seems to be a simple, straight-forward solution to this that benefits both users and the Premier League:

Offer official match highlights, and charge money for access and premium features.

Here’s the thing – as long as football exists, people will find a way to circumvent copyright and acquire football video clips. The more you ban something, the more ingenious its users and supporters get. In fact, this approach does more to alienate users than it does to protect copyright.

The problem is not about catching the free-riders – no matter what the English Premier League does, people will find a way to watch the weekend’s goals for free. No matter what the RIAA does, people will listen to pirated / downloaded music for free and won’t be caught.

The challenge is to monetize their intellectual property in such a way that it benefits both sides – the producers (in this case, the FAPL) and the consumers (us, the football fans).

Presumably the Premier League doesn’t like some people getting for free what other people are paying a lot of money for. The solution to that then is quite simple – provide an official outlet for users to acquire match highlights for all games.

Suppose that the Premier League would, for the 08/09 season, allow unlimited view-only access to high-quality video footage of all Premier League goals. At a 2-level pricing model (watch your own club’s matches or all league matches), the Premier League can tap into a very lucrative market and easily dominate it if they make it user-friendly and provide features that attract fans (match highlights provide a focal point for fostering discussion).

Some people say that they won’t pay for this sort of access – but the reality is that as long as this offers more value to users than the free version (be it community, higher quality, access to archives, selecting any 1-minute segment of the game for review, extended replays for key incidents, etc), then this will take hold, money or no money.

I think that monetizing video footage from Premiership games is the right way to go forward, and the Premier League has to take initiative here. Eventually, maybe they can work on providing an automated video clipping service that gives us video clips based on the time delimiters we provide (so, for example, if I wanted to see the footage from 34:12 to 35:41, it would automatically edit the base match footage in the backend and give me a clip to download.

Of course, video editing on the fly such as this would be part of a premium membership.

The good news is that this is already being done for the upcoming season. The bad news is that this being done for Major League Baseball as opposed to the Premier League. Phil from SoccerShout has more on this, and it outlines much of the same features (plus a few extra, like sending match highlights to your phone) as I discussed above and in previous articles from last year.

The Premier League isn’t only leaving money on the table, they’re short-changing their fans by not capitalising on the opportunity to provide better service. Say what you want about US sports, they have a keen sense of business savvy and customer service – something that the Premier League must learn if they want to succeed in the long run.

Not to mention that this would be more valuable and easier to get agreed upon than Game 39.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business