‘Revolutions are not about trifles, but they spring from trifles’
Aristotle

Ukraine v England. A nothing match? Yes - we’d already qualified for the World Cup. A sports broadcasting revolution? No - simply another glimpse of a revolution that’s already here.

This is not to downplay the significance of the match as an online pay-per-view event of course. Even with only a reported 250,000-300,000 online pay-per-view subscribers, it’s the most watched “internet-only” football match in history – the concensus being that the previous record was set by Manchester City’s friendly against Barcelona on August 19, which was available free in the UK only on City’s website, where 95,000 fans clicked in.

But make no mistake: live streaming of major sports events is already with us. During last year’s Beijing Olympics, BBC Sport served 40 million UK requests for online video streams and 11.8 million viewers used the red button during the Games; hundreds of thousands of UK consumers regularly stream live global sports every month through various sites; and niche sports, extreme sports and gaming are routinely streamed online due to the lack of mainstream broadcast distribution opportunities.

As webcasting grows in capacity and audience, it’s inevitable that more events will be streamed online. Computers and portable devices are simply alternative screens, and are converging quickly. Once TV sets are broadband-enabled the role of the internet won’t matter. Viewers won’t care how the match is getting to their screens – it’s all ‘TV’. It’s just that the notion and experience of ‘TV’ is going to change.

But only slowly of course. Saturday’s match proved that internet-only ppv is still in a contentious infancy when it comes to marquee events, and that the traditional broadcasters will not be usurped as the main distributors of big-ticket sport anytime soon.  QED: if England had still needed points against Ukraine, the game would have been bought by one of the big TV names for millions.

But we’ve seen a glimpse of the future. Remember when Sky first came along?

‘The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.’
William Gibson

By Tim Crow on October 12th, 2009

Tags: Default, Football, Media