MEDIA | Watching the World Cup on TV has been made expensive for many people. Ahmad Humeid surveys the signs of a consumer backlash and the appearance alternative forms of media around the event
Football is not round. The ball that the 22 men kick around on the field might be spherical, but the global industry of football has the shape of a gigantic pyramid. At the base of this pyramid are kids playing with punctured balls on dirt streets and schoolyards. At the top of the pyramid sits a god-like governing body, the FIFA, a non-profit, but very rich organization.
I won’t go into the massive dollar figures associated with the FIFA and the World Cup. It’s enough to say that the numbers related to organization, sponsoring and media are dizzying.
The 2006 World Cup in Germany was the first time people in the Arab world felt the overwhelming power of the FIFA and its absolute control of the flow of TV images of the world’s greatest sporting event. Despite the shouts of protest against the overt commercialization of the broadcast rights, the reality soon hit everyone. The Arab Radio and TV Network (ART) had acquired the right to broadcast the World Cup in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Want to watch the World Cup? Then you’d better pay up something like 300$ to get a satellite dish and receiver from ART. And No, you can’t just buy a month’s access to watch the games. You’ll have a full year access to ART’s ‘bouquet’ of channels whether you want them or not. For someone who usually watches a few hours of TV every month (I am not kidding) paying a few hundred dollars to watch the World Cup seems absurd.
In a country like Jordan, where many people are barely able to make ends meet, charging them to watch their favorite global sporting event has created a lot of bitterness. That’s why King Abdullah ordered the setting up of 30 public viewing screens across the country for people who cannot afford PayTV to watch the games.
Public viewing screens were not the only solution. Many Jordanian have become experts in satellite receiver hacking. Everyone, including the country’s top cartoonist Hajjaj are talking about breaking the codes for certain European satellite channels. Even with the codes changing daily, people are flocking to the internet where they find satellite hacker forums that provide the latest codes.
In Palestine, local TV channels are re-broadcasting the games on terrestrial waves. ART has assured these broadcasters that they will not be sued. Amongst all the negativity directed at ART, the company’s tolerance of the Palestinian TV stations’ “piracy” of their broadcasts was a good PR move.
The aggressive licensing of the World Cup’s TV images is manifesting itself in jarring ways. The two German state-owned broadcasters ARD and ZDF have switched to broadcasting documentaries on their Hotbird satellite feeds. In their news bulletins broadcast on Hotbird, they blank out their picture when showing game highlights!
On the popular Arab news channel Al Arabiyah only freeze frames of the games are being shown during sports news bulletins. No wonder there is widespread criticism of the the licensing practices of FIFA. Some critics are going as far as saying that the monopolistic practices of FIFA, is undermining the very foundations of the pyramid they’re sitting on top.
A people driven backlash?
A live sporting event is the perfect moment for the traditional TV business. While hollywood movies can be pirated on DVD or even downloaded from the net, a football game is something that everyone wants to watch live. That’s where the mainstream TV business can still excel.
One can’t underestimate the technical cost and sophistication of the infrastructure of the massive media machinery deployed to capture and broadcast the games on a global scale. Dozens of high definition cameras capture the action in brilliant colors. TV directors, engineers, broadcast equipment, satellite feeds and all the other cogs in the media machine do have a massive cost. Whether that justifies the aggressive management of broadcast rights or not can be debated.
But other, new media forces are at play too. Normal people using the net to hack satellite feeds is the only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what people can do to circumvent the monopolistic powers of mainstream media. User generated content in the form of pictures and videos shared on the web is starting to become a more visible media byproduct of the tournament.
Traditional media types view devices like mobile phones and laptops as just another ‘channel’ they can distribute their ‘media properties’ to and make more money. Indeed, this World Cup has been characterized by the rise of mobile TV services, pushed by major mobile providers. UMTS technology is being used in Europe to offer a live mobile TV experience. The Beijing 2008 Olympics are expected to be venue where such services really take off.
But such services only look at the ‘down stream’: from content owner to content consumer. What this ignores is the rising ‘upstream’ trend of people shooting their own videos and photos with their mobiles and sharing them via the web or Bluetooth. The video capabilities of still image cameras, as well as mobile phone are getting better all the time and their connectivity to the web, via WiFi or other technologies, is becoming stronger.
Today, you can find tens of thousands of images shot and shared on the web by people celebrating the World Cup. Videos are making their way to the web too. iFilm, an online distributor of short form video content (which is now owned by MTV) has dedicated a special section on its site to publish user generated video content.
Flickr, the popular photo sharing site has a growing number of user groups dedicated to publishing World Cup related photos. The irony is that Flickr is owned by Yahoo, a major World Cup sponsor. The user generated content of Flickr (but also from people’s blogs) is making its way to the Yahoo produced World Cup home page. Yahoo obviously sees value in featuring such content. Do they have to be reminded that they’re getting this content for free from passionate users?
I can easily imagine a situation in the near future where people in the stadium would be shooting the live event with their camera phones and ‘webcasting’ them to friends, family or even a wider audience. Of course such video stream would be no match to the ‘official’ professional, multi-angle, professionally directed video. But in an age where the organizers of major, popular, global events are so aggressive in protecting their broadcasts, this form of citizen media might become a viable alternative.
Such webcasting might be deemed illegal by the organizers, but there is little that they can do (unless they want to force all people to leave their phones and cameras at the door!).
Traditional media companies will not disappear overnight because of the power of people to generate content. But user-generated content is a factor that no one can afford to ignore anymore.
Comments
2 responses to “The World Cup: controlling the flow of images”
Are you saying FIFA requested payTV to be applied? why the Arab Lands? I know that European countries all broadcast games for free, so why ART barged in like that, is what I do not understand! I hope we can do something by 2010 to convince them to either lower the rate, or give better offers, or let go some of the exculsivity to others
it is heart breaking!
i love your site, but you need to put alot more pictures of the world cup on here, that’s what i am looking for and searching the net for and i thought maybe this site would have picture codes of the FIFA world cup to put on my website, but i guess not.