Netflix should buy the NFL Sunday Ticket rights, not Google
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On the other hand, sports, football in particular, are one of the biggest selling points of HDTV and the high resolution picture it provides.
If the future of watching football consists of the same buffering, crappy framerates and resolution, and all around frustration of using Youtube as it exists today, this experiment will end halfway through Sunday of Week 1.
Many consumers are not particularly aware of video quality beyond what advertising tells them. So long as the screen is big and they think it is HD (either because the settop box that they plugged in wrong says "HD" on it, or because marketing has told them that 720p is the bees knees, or whatever), then they are pretty happy.
Buffering is something that everyone notices immediately though. That would make or break this.
Basically, watching "premium" 720p+ content on Youtube provides virtually indistinguishable quality and reliability. Is that really not your experience?
Netflix is surprisingly smooth and fast and extremely good quality, while Youtube stutters awfully.
It is, of course, anecdote (and not relevant to the U.S.)
Based on my understanding of how most video compression works, I bet it effects the bandwidth requirements.
Which is a long way of saying, I don't think streaming video content via a cable modem is all that different from watching content via a cable box.
You can't go to the bar (at least around here) for the sole purpose of watching the latest episode of 'Breaking Bad'.
As many have said here, Netflix has absolutely no experience in live-streaming, which, despite the apparent similarity, is entirely different than streaming cached content. To my knowledge, the idea of doing anything live hasn't been on the company's radar. As recently as early February when we launched House of Cards, the company wasn't even set up to allow for a real-time, coordinated launch of a title on the service.
Unless something like this was being run as a top-secret, skunkworks-style effort (which I seriously doubt) the service architecture isn't at all prepare to handle live-content and there's little reason to believe that Netflix has any interest in dipping its toe into the live sports world.
Does Sunday Ticket include RedZone? That would be the real selling point.
Live steaming is a whole new ballgame and something Netflix has never tried. YouTube has live streamed many events such as Google IO and Presidential debates.
It would be interesting to see if Netflix's architecture is even capable of supporting NFL Sunday Ticket.
Blackouts exist to limit the extent that remote viewing substitutes for live attendance, as a means to support the live ticket prices. The alternative to blackouts is to accept that remote viewing is a substitute for live attendance, and to make the prices for remote viewing higher and those for live attendance lower.
I don't even care about not getting all the games for every team, let me pick a set of teams (say 3-6) and get all their games live. Hell, I'll even take a pick of two teams for live streaming. I already subscribe to NFL network's streaming service for game replays, but there are some games -- like for the teams I support -- that I want live.
> If a company (in this case the NFL) doesn't want me to be their customer then I simply won't be.
Sacrificing low-revenue customers to preserve revenue from high-revenue customers isn't exactly a novel business model.
The NFL has driven me crazy with not adopting a similar model. I can't get DTV at my home (condo), I don't care about the local teams, and paying for the whole league wasn't available on my local provider. They had a PS3 streaming option last season but I read it didn't work reliably so I didn't bother. Like you, I'd happily pay to follow a few teams teams + Red Zone. Luckily, as someone above posted, there's a great deal for $99 this season to purchase Madden and get Sunday Ticket included. I jumped all over that!
Its been a few years since I moved to the US so my memory is probably a little spotty but I seem to recall all games, live, HD with the ability to replay on demand (like gamerewind). You could also have the feed use the audio from teams radio network instead of the TV commentary. Man, I really miss that feature!
I know, on top of that when I spent time in Switzerland I found out they get all the NFL games for free, live on TV. I've never understood why.
Y'all are confusing your words. "Blackouts" you describe are local TV broadcast blackouts if they don't sell out the stadium. "Blackouts" the GP describes are the blackouts on Sunday ticket because you are supposed to watch them locally.
Opinions: The former is good, it forces attendance. The latter is not, as it puts prevents regions that otherwise can't watch the games locally from being able to watch them at all (due to poor blackout zoning). MLB.TV is about to enter a lawsuit about this very thing, and though they'll likely win, it is a huge problem.
Couple that with the ESPN's and others having a hatred for cord-cutters and you have an area ripe for disruption, even though the sports leagues themselves can hold it down w/ their anti-trust exemptions and unfair practices. But that won't last forever once the Googles and Netflixes have the capital to force the leagues' hands.
My alternative was to visit a local bar for games I needed to see, and just not watch anything else.
No, I'm not.
> "Blackouts" you describe are local TV broadcast blackouts if they don't sell out the stadium.
That's one set of blackouts to limit the extent that remote viewing substitutes for live attendance, but...
> "Blackouts" the GP describes are the blackouts on Sunday ticket because you are supposed to watch them locally.
...that's also a set of blackouts to limit the extent that remote viewing substitutes for live attendance (in part). (It prevents Sunday Ticket from providing an end-run around the other kind of blackout.)
It also serves another similar purpose, to protect the local TV contract revenue in the same way that local TV blackouts protect stadium revenue.
Before you read the fine print and conclude that it's only available to people who can't get DirecTV, please see this clarification [2] from Anthony Stevenson (Madden's director of marketing).
If the clarification turns out to be false, Amazon will be getting a return from me and a strongly worded complaint. :-)
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Madden-Anniversary-Edition-Sunday-Play...
[2] - http://kotaku.com/madden-special-edition-includes-sunday-tic...
If you are a cord-cutter with no cable, having Google own the rights and stream games over the internet would help you if you didn't already have cable, but those that do already get about five games a week over their local networks. So really Google would have to charge a flat fee up-front to stream all games on Sunday Ticket.
But it's important to remember that a large percentage of Sunday Ticket revenue comes from bars that purchase large packages to broadcast it to their patrons. From what I'm told this cost depends on the capacity of the location and can run into the tens of thousands of dollars for a single season. I'm not sure how this would play into Google or Netflix's strategy.
So where should that 9/10 go?
In short, I'm being forced to pay for live sports, if I want cable, and I predict that very soon that will change.
If taxes stopped supporting sports, and if cable / satellite customers didn't have to subsidize sports, something would have to give.
Are you just saying those things are impossible, or are you saying I'm overstating what the outcome would be?
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/07/209820647/the-history-and-futu...
> Threatened by Internet streaming services and a fragmenting TV audience, Comcast/NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Turner, and CBS have agreed over the last 20 months to spend $72 billion for the TV rights to professional, Olympic, and college sports well into the next decade.
http://articles.philly.com/2012-11-19/news/35187681_1_sports...
> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.
However:
> In some TV markets, Abdoulah said, sports channels account for 60 percent of the overall programming costs in the cable-TV bill because of fees for regional sports networks.
I guarantee that it is not the case that greater than 60 percent of people who sign up for cable do so solely to watch sports. So, in certain markets, it is for sure people like me who subsidize sports programming, not the other way around.
That's basically what I think unless I'm presented with very strong evidence to the contrary.
You can assert all you want about how you think the cable company should spend it's money, but you don't get all that much of a say in the matter.
Time Warner bled 191,000 subscribers in one quarter.
DirectTV lost 84,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/business/media/directv-and...
The NFL will spend about 3.8B on salaries next year. The NBA is around 2B. MLB is around 3.2B. Add that up and you get 9B. Spread that evenly among the 7.2 Million teachers in the US and you get: only 1,250 each.
A 2.8% raise is nothing to scoff at.
Also, I think you're vastly underestimating, based on all of the support staff necessary to make a sporting facility, man it, broadcast it, and comment on it.
Not to mention how much the team owners take out of it.
But it's not the huge windfall I think that OP implied. It's not "if we didn't spend so much money on sports we could fix all these problems we have in our education system" money.
I overall think it would hurt the economy (not "help education,") but you're still massively understating the money spent on sports.
Question for the room: If the government were to mandate FRAND licensing of live sports content, would the benefits to the consumer outweigh the market burden of regulation?