Out With A Bang

As Murdoch Jnr’s speech appears to be flavour of the month web-wise this weekend, I thought I might just add a little side-bar to yesterday’s post…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=317

… about the so-called ‘link economy’ on whose foundations we all, somehow, hope to rest.

As mentioned before, I don’t do video. I am strictly a house of the written word. Podcasts, I like. Don’t mind being Radio MyFootballWriter; quite good fun. But I’m never going to be MFW TV.

That’s not what I do best… in my ‘umble little way, I’ve always thought I’d try to link to the rest; even offer someone my words in part-payment for their video. Always struck me as a decent ‘deal’ given, I suspect, we’ll get to the barter economy long before we get to the link one.

My peers in the provincial Press industry have played with video; and good luck to them… That’s their choice; I had no choice – never really had that cash to splash.

But I can see what the EDP/Archant are trying to achieve with this…

http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/sport/football/norwich-city/Lakey/default.aspx

Chris Lakey TV. Fine.

Of course, the EDP are not the only ones who put out a football ’show’. The BBC now have a ‘Football League Show.’ It’s on after Match Of The Day on a Saturday night. Somewhere around the midnight hour.

For whatever reason, whilst Match Of The Day is repeated early on a Sunday morning, The Football League Show isn’t.

But, heh, this is the Internet… And this is the BBC’s iPlayer. I can catch up with the goals from Hartlepool vs Norwich whenever I want; or whenever I want over the course of the next six days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfmt9

Of course, the iPlayer is now available to be embedded in external websites…

Mmm… OK, I don’t do video, but I know someone who does… I’ve got, say, 30,000-odd Norwich City fans passing through www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity on a good month…

… all of whom would probably have a look at The Football League Show; given that most of them might not be up at 1am when the League One goals are shown…

… so, if I embed an iPlayer in MyFootballWriter, I’m putting all that content – which I, as a good TV licence fee payer, have paid for – in front of just the kind of audience that the BBC would be looking for… driving their content to the right eyeballs… It’s all ‘branded up’. BBC.

Everyone knows it’s their footage; their content…

OK, it makes people come back to my site; it’s an added ‘attraction’ to a site that tries to make a journalistic living via locally-sourced digital advertising… but I think it’s a decent platform on which the BBC can offer up its video wares.

Just as the EDP’s Norwich City pages would be; or those of TrinityMirror… or of AND…

All of whom could bring 000s of relevant eyeballs to that licence fee payer paid-for content…

All of whom could then, of course, offer their expert football words back to the BBC by way of return.

And I would fancy that somewhere within the editing suites of Bush House, TV Centre or the MailBox, there is the ability to ’splice and dice’ those highlights packages into dedicated Norwich City video bundles that you then distribute out via MFW/NorwichCity or EDP/NorwichCity – just as you could do with Baggies coverage out of the BirminghamMail, etc, etc…

ie, you’re making sure that nothing’s left on the cutting room floor; that in your desire to make sure that the licence fee payer gets full value for their rights deal, that coverage is seen by the widest possible audience.

You would, of course, think that would equally suit The Football League.. that their brand is distributed as widely and as deeply across the web as possible.

That strikes me as a sensible way forward; that somewhere within that mix lies a new, state-supported eco-system for the survival of independent football coverage. Our words; for their video.

Actually when I say ‘their’; I mean ‘our’ . We did, after all, all pay for it.

Ask the question of the BBC and I think we all might be disappointed.

In that, I strongly suspect, such content is going nowhere; it’ll sit on the BBC site and go no further; that was part of the ‘deal’. No third party hosting for that iPlayer/FootballLeague combo…

Now, that may well be down to the rights holders – The Football League – being unwilling to see video content popping up all over the place and undermining the subscription TV servce run in conjunction with each of their member clubs…

Why would anyone pay £9.99 a month to subscribe to CanaryTV if its there, for free, on Chris Lakey TV?

Which is one large and vested interest that queers many a pitch. And, maybe, knocks all such fag packet thinking on the head. That as soon as the football clubs opened their own websites and became digital publishers like the rest of us, we were all f*cked.

We might now control the means of production and the means of distribution, but the control of the access to content remains at the behest of those that produce it… the football clubs.

That all said, it is an interesting arena; you can’t help but figure that it might serve the BBC’s own purposes rather nicely that such prime video content can go nowhere else but their own site; that the one thing that might be of genuine value [sports video content] to us all in terms of traffic and site ’stickability’ ain’t going anywhere other than Auntie’s lap.

One final thought. If OfCom needed something to do, the next time such a deal comes up for grabs why can’t they insist that goals packages are free to air – just as they might argue the case for the FA Cup Final, The Grand National or The Boat Race always being free to air on terrestial TV?

If The Football League want something for their clubs to ‘own’, they get to keep the interviews…

Like I said, just a thought.