Football rules punt Oz IPTV into touch
Minister will decide who gets to play with balls and when
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Australia's nacent IPTV industry won't be able to win business with the entertainment industry's time honoured practice of paying outrageous prices for exclusive rights to broadcast live sport, thanks to a new plan outlined yesterday by Minster for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy.
Australia operates an “anti-siphoning” regime that means free-to-air television stations have first right of refusal on a list of major sporting events. Only once those stations decline to bid may pay TV operators bid.
Senator Conroy yesterday introduced a new Bill to update that regime. The new proposal appears to make it nigh-on impossible for IPTV players to win rights to major sporting events ahead of free-to-air TV by putting them in the same class as pay TV operators.
“The Bill provides that a rights holder of a listed event must not confer exclusive rights to that event to a content service provider, such as a new media provider,” Conroy said in Parliament, adding that “ … new media providers are treated the same as subscription broadcasters, and are therefore able to acquire the rights … as long as this acquisition does not prevent free-to-air broadcasters from acquiring the rights ...”
Curiously, the Bill proposes to allow the Minister to decide which events appear on the list of events that must be shown on free-to-air television. Conroy is a fan of Collingwood Football Club, the team that everyone who is not a Collingwood supporter loves to hate. ®
COMMENTS
I thought this was going to be a third tier
This is where IPTV should sit. Yes the younger generation can get IPTV set up but older generations can't and most IPTV is exactly the same as pay TV (it's just using another paid service to deliver it). I think new legislation should also be put to the parliament which excludes ISP from getting exclusive rights and restricting it to only their subscribers. This is the first time I agree with Stephen Conroy (the guy is clueless so I think someone else put him up to this). Now if only we can get someone in to fix the rest of this stuff ups he has put in (the NBN and the filter) We can get this country moving again!
Arbitrary? Yes, but so were the Romans
"Curiously, the Bill proposes to allow the Minister to decide which events appear on the list of events that must be shown on free-to-air television."
Curious, I agree, but that's the way it's been run for the last 20 years & it generally works quite well. Every few years the FTA & PayTV networks fight it out for what goes on the list & what doesn't. Events stay on the list until 3 months before they start, giving PayTV a chance to pick them up if the FTA networks choose not to broadcast them. There's been a few cases between negotiations where the Minister has decided to either put things on the list (ensuring they're available on FTA) or pull them off (allowing PayTV to fight it out with FTA for the broadcast rights) - "in the national interest", of course ;-).
It's basically a very "bread and circuses" - or, rather, "plasma and sport" - practice. Keep the punters happy by letting them watch footy, cricket, and the Duhlympics for free, and they wont vote you out just because soccer ends up on Foxtel...
Non-exclusive broadcast rights?
There would be no problem here if it weren't for the insistence on exclusive rights or nothing. I understand that exclusive rights are significantly more valuable than non-exclusive but the all or nothing attitude of both the broadcasters and the rights holders leaves a load of consumer demand unmet, as evidenced by the widespread illegal streaming of various sports. By offering a diverse range of viewing options I'm sure the rights holders could actually make more money overall due to the increase in the size of the audience.
I'd love to see IPTV take off in Australia but the anti-siphoning laws are an important safeguard and unless IPTV is more readily available than cable TV then it's quite right for it to put in the same class for this purpose. By more readily available I mean either ad supported, reasonably priced pay per view or casual single 'channel' subscriptions as opposed to the massively bundled long term subscriptions offered by Foxtel.
Personally, as a Brit living in Oz, I'd love to be able to watch England play Test cricket and I'm prepared to pay for the privilege. I am not prepared to pay for an enormous bundle of crappy Foxtel channels just to get that though and there are currently no (legal) alternatives. IPTV has the potential flexibility to allow people to buy the content they actually want but only if the rights holders switch to non-exclusive rights contracts.
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