Sports fans and journalists are increasingly using live-streaming and recording apps such as Periscope, Meerkat and Vine at sporting events. Broadcasters and rights holders are trying to clamp down on these apps since they have paid a hefty sum for exclusive rights. But are they fighting a losing battle? Is it feasible to keep a tab on so many people? Is there a way forward?
By: Jaideep Vaidya
In the early hours of May 3, 2015, after Floyd Mayweather beat Manny Pacquiao with a unanimous decision in what was billed as ‘The Fight of the Century’, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted the following:
https://twitter.com/dickc/status/594725651854139392
Costolo was referring to Periscope, a live-streaming service bought by Twitter this year, which during the fight had allowed thousands of people around the world to bypass the $100 HBO pay-per-view deal and watch it free on the app.
One such viewer was Mashable’s senior technology correspondent, Christina Warren, who described the experience in a post: “I tuned in in the third round and was able to see dozens and dozens of fight streams in the global ‘live’ menu [of the app]. Tapping into a few streams, it was quickly apparent that some were just standard Periscopes of friends at a fight-night party, while others were focused intently on television sets or computer screens playing the fight in real time.
“The number of streams was almost overwhelming. Some Periscopers were shooting in portrait mode (as is standard for Periscope), while others were shooting in landscape to capture more of a TV screen. Some streams featured commentary from parties and shots of friends; others focused almost completely on the fight itself. Some streams were in crowded rooms, other in almost empty homes.”
The quality of the video on Periscope is nowhere near the high definition telecast available on pay-per-view. Even the audio from the fight was mostly drowned by the cheering of the fans at the source of the Periscope stream. However, if it was going to save them $100, it was a sacrifice the viewers were willing to make. Costolo’s tweet received hundreds of retweets and replies, mostly thanking him and Periscope for allowing people to watch the fight for free.
However, there were a few who raised some valid questions, like Kevin Doohan, who wrote:
https://twitter.com/kdoohan/status/594728197394071552
Legal issue
In the week before the fight, the official broadcasters of the fight, HBO and Showtime, sued at least a couple of websites that were offering illegal streaming of the event for copyright infringement. However, that did not stop thousands of Periscopers from live-streaming the fight. There were a number of streams that were taken down while the fight was ongoing. However, Warren wrote that “it wasn’t really a problem because like a hydra, we could just go to another Periscope stream somewhere else in the world to watch the fight on someone else’s TV.”
Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour came out defending his app, saying that it wasn’t designed to allow people to stream copyrighted material and that their content policy even prohibits it. “I think we built a tool that allows people to share what they’re seeing with the world and sometimes people will use that for things we have no intention of supporting,” he said, appearing on CBS This Morning. “Piracy is not something that excites us. What excites us is building a teleportation machine.”
This increasingly popular teleportation app, which raked up over a million downloads in just 10 days after its launch, is not only being used by sports fans, but also journalists. In May 2015, Washington Post designer Dan Worthington live-streamed the making of the newspaper’s sports front page on Periscope, attracting thousands of curious viewers.
“The response was unbelievable,” Worthington told the Post. “And people stuck around for multiple hours as their phone batteries died out — many tweeted me saying as much… I didn’t expect the response. I did a few broadcasts last night and the first one had 39 viewers and I was wowed. Later when the games ended and we began to get into the nuts and bolts of the cover, I watched as thousands joined the broadcast.
“The Twitter-verse was very complimentary and loved how we used Periscope to give them an inside look. People asked great questions and gave great suggestions; they learned more about what we do to produce a newspaper; and they even found out columnists don’t write their own headlines. It was a chance to show the readers the process and how we work as a team to produce this thing 365 times a year.”
Wei over the line?
While the Post’s experiment may not have caused any legal hassles, since they were broadcasting from their own newsroom, golf blogger Stephanie Wei raised the ire of the PGA Tour earlier this year when she live-streamed bits of the practice rounds of Jordan Spieth and a couple of other golfers at the WGC-Cadillac Match Play Championship. She even put forward questions from viewers of her stream to the players, who responded.
Embed from Getty ImagesIt all seemed great until the PGA Tour discovered Wei’s stream. They were so incensed that they revoked her credentials for the rest of the season, citing multiple violations of its media regulations which prohibit accredited reporters from sharing video images of players taken at tournament venues.
Writing in her blog Wei Under Par, Wei accepted she was at some fault, but felt the punishment was unprecedented and the rules unclear. “I wasn’t sure if it exactly constituted as ‘video’, since it was live stream and the content disappears after a certain number of hours,” she wrote. “Thus, I figured there was enough wiggle room to post the clips (and I was not intentionally trying to violate the Tour’s regulations).
“The new media landscape is ever-changing with progressive technology, which includes apps such as Periscope. In retrospect, I should have called the Tour to double check and ask if I could use it, but obviously, hindsight is 20/20…Things in new media and technology are changing so quickly that sometimes I find it difficult and confusing to keep up with what constitutes as ‘OK’ and what doesn’t.
“I was unclear with whether it conflicted with broadcasting rights since the practice rounds (to my knowledge) are not televised, nor was the somewhat raw, alternative footage I was showing. It was truly meant to spread fanfare for the Tour, its players and the event.
“Fans — people who don’t have credentials — can Periscope until the cows come home, but the media is prohibited from providing the masses that don’t have the privilege of attending the event with fresh, interesting and different content. If I’m the Tour, I would encourage the media to use their access to Periscope during practice rounds as often as possible…”
The Tour was indeed not even going to telecast the practice rounds that Wei had live-streamed. However, they still categorised it as “stealing”. Speaking to Golf.com, the Tour’s chief marketing officer Ty Votaw said, “Who owns those rights? We do, not you. If you want access to those rights, you have to pay for it. When [Wei] posts unauthorized videos, she’s stealing. “We exist to entertain the fans, that is correct. That is not the issue in play here. The issue is who owns the content from Monday to Monday at tournament sites. If every reporter was allowed to post videos or engage in other prohibited acts we wouldn’t have the ability to enter into exclusive relationships or merchandise content.”
Wei added in her blog that “the standards for enforcing the regulations are also incredibly hazy.” When she asked the Tour’s communications director about how they monitor every journalist and even the fans, he told her that “the Tour doesn’t have someone monitoring everyone and that they don’t enforce the regulations consistently because it’s human nature for people to take pictures and post them these days.”
Embed from Getty ImagesBroadcasters’ nightmare
Services such as Periscope, Meerkat and Vine enable anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection to broadcast live events to the world for free, without paying for any rights. This is slowly, but steadily, becoming a nightmare for rights holders and broadcasters, who pay a hefty sum for exclusive rights — a sum that is constantly rising.
In February this year, the Barclays Premier League sold television rights for its matches from 2016-19 to Sky Sports and BT Sport for a record £5.136 billion. The amount was 71 percent higher than their last deal signed in 2012. In the US, according to a Reuters report, “Disney and Turner Broadcasting agreed to more than double their annual payments for rights to NBA games under a deal reached last year that could be worth upward of $22.5 billion over nine years.”
“Periscope is something that has opened up a can of worms for broadcasters,” says John Gubba, filmmaker and former ITV Sports reporter. “Very recently, I was at Camp Nou, Barcelona, and there was a very high percentage of people just sitting there trying to record something on their phones, just waiting for something to happen and upload on social media.
“All these things are a double-edged sword. People are taking a piece of the pie and potentially, in theory, broadcasters are losing revenue. But in reality I don’t think they are losing revenue because commercial rights for all these sports, particularly football and the Premier League, is going up and up. People showing stuff on social media is having zero commercial impact. You can argue that it is helping because it is creating more interest in the game.”
However, that is not how sporting bodies are looking at it, for now. In the US, where these recording apps are more popular, they have already taken steps to ban them during live matches. In April this year, the NHL banned the use of Periscope and Meerkat up to 30 minutes before face off. The NFL has even asked its teams to not use the apps, leave alone fans. Only the MLB has so far maintained that it won’t stop fans from using the apps.
In the UK, these apps have been slower to catch on, but the signs are there that a multiple sport clampdown similar to the US isn’t far away. Mark Demuth, controller of ITV Sport, says that rights holders in the UK have definite concerns about footage which is released unofficially.
Embed from Getty Images“The Premier League fought hard to combat goals going out on Saturday afternoon via social media,” says Demuth. “They’re trying to clamp down on a number of sites that show the games. The rights holders have a big fear because it impacts on the value of their rights. They don’t want to sell a multibillion pound deal to Sky and then have the best action go out illegally on a Saturday afternoon. As for our programmes, because we have official rights we are allowed to put out clips and so forth on most contracts we acquire.”
The Premier League has earlier worked with Twitter and ISPs to shut down Vine videos, which fans use to post goals and mini highlights on loop. “Last season we successfully blocked 45,000 streams that were illegally showing Premier League footage, and successfully took legal action against certain websites, both in the English and overseas courts,” a Premier League spokesperson told the Guardian.
In April this year, The Sun reported that the Premier League issued a new guidance to stadiums to ban the use of live streaming smartphone apps. According to the report, match stewards were asked to keep an eagle eye on fans using apps such as Periscope to live-stream the action. A Premier League official told The Sun: “It’s like cops and robbers. New technologies come along and you work out how to mitigate their impact. We’ve a close relationship with Twitter to stop it and get streams taken down. We take breaches of intellectual property seriously.”
Journos’ standpoint
Sports journalists in the UK mostly understand where the rights holders are coming from. Sachin Nakrani, sports features editor at The Guardian, says, “They spend a lot of money for exclusivity and I think they are entitled to clamp down. If broadcasters have bought exclusive rights for showing something and if it’s being live-streamed [elsewhere] it is unfair. If that is happening, they should quite rightly say they should pay less because other people are watching it free off the internet.”
“In an ideal world it would be a free-for-all,” says Jacob Steinberg, football and tennis writer at The Guardian. “But you have to be realistic and acknowledge the fact that rights holders are not going to want people to stream for free.” Steinberg reveals that there is a clear guideline for journalists in press boxes that they cannot record anything. He sees the logic: “If you were to be recording crowd trouble or something, then it would be different. But if you’re sitting there recording the match action, I’m not sure whether that should be allowed.”
A fan records action during a charity game between Manchester United Legends and Bayern Munich All Stars in June 2015 – Photo Courtesy: Jaideep Vaidya
Professor Edward Kian, faculty member at Oklahoma State University School of Media and Strategic Communications, whose major research area has been sports media, sees the broadcasters’ rationale behind wanting to protect their rights, but says that it will be very hard for them to keep reporters from using these new mediums over time. “A couple of years ago, Ohio State Athletics told reporters they could not use Twitter from the football press box, because it would compete with the official Ohio State football Twitter feed,” he says. “That ban did not last.”
Does this mean that rights holders are fighting a losing battle when it comes to protecting their exclusive content? Gubba, himself a broadcasting entrepreneur, believes so, saying that even if they do close down something like Periscope, something else will pop up elsewhere. “We are living in an age of so much new technology. People are inventing stuff all the time. Even YouTube is only 10 years old. For someone like myself, it’s a relatively short space time,” he says.
“You’ve got clubs like Manchester United that are stopping people taking iPads in [the stadium during matches]. They say it’s because of security concerns. Whether it is a security concern or not, it is a way that effectively clamps down. But the reality is that it’s not practical to take the smartphones of 70,000 people,” he adds.
Demuth, however, doesn’t see it that way. He believes there will always be an audience out there who will prefer to watch content on a large 42-inch TV screen, as opposed to a five-inch smartphone screen. “I don’t think people would want to watch games on a smartphone,” he says. “You lose the experience. It works well for short incidents like a goal or controversial moments, but I’m not sure there is an increasing desire to watch whole matches on the phone. Twenty million people watched England v Uruguay match at the Fifa World Cup last year. I don’t think these apps are going to reduce the audience considerably.”
Way forward
One way forward for rights holders, as suggested by sports journalists, is to themselves adapt to new technologies, rather than reacting to them negatively. “I think sports organisations have to embrace the technology and look at the positives and not the negatives,” says Gubba. “I’d rather see sports clubs take a proactive approach because at the end of the day it all contributes to the engagement and entertainment for the people that follow the sport.
“I think slowly but surely sports clubs and organisations are moving in that direction. The reality is that individuals are often more creative and quicker in doing these things and organisations have to decide internally what they are going to do about it. Football clubs have particularly been slow at responding in the past, but they are becoming more active now,” he adds.
Embed from Getty ImagesIn the same month that the Premier League issued its guidance to stadiums against the use of recording apps, it also launched its own Periscope initiative in a bid to use the technology to its own benefit. Ahead of an Arsenal v Liverpool match in April, the League announced that fans would be taken inside the dressing rooms of the two teams. Pre-match team talks delivered by both captains would then be live-streamed for the fans, a privilege not even given to the official broadcaster for the match, BT Sport.
“At the end of the day football is a sport, it’s a game,” says Gubba. “It has become such a business that people think in terms of money all the time. But you have to think about the longevity of the sport as well. You have to involve the fans. If you make it so commercial that they can’t enjoy the experience, eventually you will lose the fans.”
The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club also used apps like Periscope and Snapchat during the 2015 Wimbledon Championships, while forbidding spectators from doing so themselves. “I think over the years organisations will come to understand the platforms better and create more provisions for them,” says Kevin Garside, sports writer for the Independent. “If it proves popular, I think the host broadcaster would use it anyway. I think there is a niche role for these technologies that is beyond the means of host broadcaster. If they thought about it less defensively and more positively they would embrace it.”
Phil Wye, BBC5 Live football producer, says, “Live streaming is probably something that is, and should be, monitored more comfortably than recording apps. Can you keep tabs on everyone at a venue who has a smartphone, a tablet or a camera to check the validity of what they might be doing? No. But experienced rights holders do tend to either adapt their own content, or manage and contend with competing technologies in various ways.”
“[If broadcasters begin to use these apps themselves] they could just amplify the products they have themselves,” says Demuth. It’s a means of getting to new audiences and promoting what they’re doing. All broadcasters are very conscious of that. The BBC has an extensive digital team who are aware that if they can amplify the noise around their product, all the better. You’ll see that increasing as time goes by.”
Sports Journalism UK 