BroadcastBridge
There are growing calls for the rights to stream live video of EPL and Football League games to the mobile devices of fans attending match-day at UK football grounds to be renegotiated. Clubs would like to boost their ability to monetise investments in in-stadia mobile broadband and Wi-Fi by streaming video of the match in progress or replays and highlights to smartphones just as they are permitted to do to giant stadium screens and screens in concourses.
Mobile rights are tied into the multi-year TV rights package owned predominantly by Sky and BT Sport whose lawyers interpret this to include rights to stream within the stadium environment.UK soccer contracts pre-date and fail to account for many of the latest developments in in-stadia connectivity.
In the US the situation is markedly different. Video replays and highlights of the venue game, as well as highlights of concurrent games, are available to users of league-wide apps such as NFL Mobile and MLB At The Ballpark.
In Sweden, the Tele 2 Arena, Stockholm (home to soccer clubs Djurgårdens IF and Hammarby IF) is able to offer fans an exclusive at the game experience including live video streams, with up to four unique camera angles and 30-second replays on-demand. The mobile app and infrastructure was Cisco's first Europe install of its StadiumVision Mobile products.
“In the UK the rights piece has got to catch-up,” said David Jones, VP of IT, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) which operates and owns the Tele 2 Arena. “It is up to teams, building owners or leagues to carve out these rights. The easy bit it is the technical side. The commercial relationship between building, league and team and rights holders makes it tricky to deliver.”
According to preliminary studies by broadcast technology developers EVS, on-demand video of instant multi-angle replays are consumed the most. “This is what is missed at a live game versus watching a TV broadcast at home,” EVS stated. “With the amount of PVR’s now installed in homes, you can essentially watch a given replay as many times as you like. Having the ability to do this from your smart phone or tablet while at a game is the perfect example of being able to consume the broadcast experience in a live-game environment.”
Rights holders may be concerned to have a guarantee that the video stream is securely confined to the arena. Football clubs have the right to stream the game to subscribers of their club channels online and to mobile usually 24 hours - and sometimes with a seven day embargo - after the game has occurred.
Microsoft'sStrategic Director - Sports Business Development,Stewart Mison thinks EPL clubs need to look again at the broadcast model. Mison is a former SVP of sports rights marketer Octagon CSI.
“You don't want to cannibalise the live TV rights income stream, but there has got to be something more clubs can carve out in the negotiations to access rights to more video purely for in-stadia streaming,” he said.
Several EPL and Sky Bet Championship clubs have Wi-Fi fresh for the start of the 2014-15 season. Among them: Brighton & Hove Albion, West Bromwich Albion,Birmingham City, Watford,Manchester City,Middlesbrough, Bolton Wanderers and QPR. Of those, only Manchester City has succeeded in carving its own match-day video rights.
Its second screen matchday app CityTV Live offers a video channel for all its supporters containing live behind-the-scenes video pre-match player interviews as they step off the team bus. Exclusive for fans at the Etihad Stadium users can stream two additional live video channels to their mobiles: A ‘highlights’ channel of multi-angle replays of important incidents, including those of controversial decisions; and a Tactical Cam which offers an aerial view of formations and passing lines. Just as at the Tele 2 Arena, a ‘rewind 30 seconds’ function gives fans the ability to rewind at the touch of a button.
Matters may be on the verge of a change. The technology company behind the app which powers content at all those UK football clubs mentioned above - bar Manchester City - is lining up a demo, with Sky's blessing, of video to mobile at a soccer ground.
“We believe we can deliver video stadium-wide using our technology and we hope to show it in some form in the near future,” said Ian Wakeman, Managing Director, TribeHive. “It won't be realtime highlights but along the lines of pre-match team talk discussion with a coach about why they've set up team in a certain way.”
TribeHive boosts Wi-Fi connectivity
TribeHive is the most successful provider of apps to UK soccer clubs because of its unique technology which amplifies the power of Wi-Fi.
Its patent-pending process is claimed to boost connectivity over Wi-Fi by three times at peak congestion periods such as half-time and full-time. “You are three times more likely to get the data you want,” said Wakeman.
It's an extremely simple software solution that makes you wonder why it took a start-up from Sussex University to bring it to market rather than a IT giant like Cisco.
Essentially, TribeHive's tech called HiveCore, uses peer to peer networking to build a connection directly between all phones using the app in a certain place and to share updates to the app. Wi-Fi in crowded and high traffic environments like stadia can be problematic and cause buffering at best or even be unusable during peak periods. With HiveCore, if one cell phone can't connect to the local Wi-Fi base station then demand is moved peer to peer until a connection is made and that data is then shared with all users. Data of course does not mean personal data – this is encrypted – but the app content including team sheets, score update and travel information.
Wakeman explained: "It is not an approach that will work well for ad-hoc gatherings, but makes great sense at regularly scheduled events like sports matches, or even annual events like music festivals, etc, where the time and resource investment required will be worthwhile and there is plenty of opportunity to encourage users to download the app ahead of time."
Last year, Football League Interactive (Fli), which manages and develops the internet and mobile rights of The Football League, signed TribeHive to supply the tech into branded apps for its members.
A “significant proportion” of revenues go back to each club, according to Wakeman, and some is returned to the Fli.
“The club gets a marketing tool to integrate with stadium Beacons to generate a map for fans to navigate their way around the stadium or to promote club merchandise and other offers,” he says. “We are integrating ticketing systems into the app and our Customer Relationship Management system so that when we push out a message to the app you can target particular groups of fans.”
It is being monitored by the Football League for potential wider distribution among clubs within the FLi's umbrella. This includes some EPL clubs like Southampton and Hull.
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