When Gary Dickinson, a West Ham season-ticket holder, couldn’t afford another expensive trip up north to watch his side play Bolton in the FA Cup, he turned to the only place he could guarantee would be showing the match — the internet.
Yet, Gary didn’t watch the drab goalless draw from the glossy surroundings of West Ham’s official website, nor did he turn to the BBC or Sky Sports. The only way to watch the match live was through an illicit streaming website, in this case www.fltv.cc, which charged him only £2 to watch the full 90 minutes, rather than the £50-plus it would have cost him for a match ticket and travel.
A sum that “isn’t going to break the bank”, he noted. (His and other fan names have been changed.) He is far from alone. NetResult, a firm hired by the FA Premier League to stamp out the rogue webcasters, estimates that 200,000 fans (roughly Old Trafford filled three times over) watch live games every Saturday from streams broadcast illegally over the internet. The website operators tap into satellite feeds of the games intended for live broadcast in foreign countries, convert them into internet streaming formats, then distribute the video either from their websites or through sophisticated peer-to-peer (P2P) software. Football is following in the precarious footsteps of the music and movie industries, and gearing up for a pitch battle with the illicit internet services that are wooing fans.
That’s not to say fans are over the moon with the underhand webcasters. Like sitting behind the moron with the banner in a football stadium, the view of the action on the internet is often obscured. Gary says the stream of the Bolton v West Ham game was shown “in a window half the size of the computer screen. The picture can be quite grainy, and I had to restart the stream twice” — because it crashed. It’s not exactly Match of the Day quality, but even this patchy service was “better than anything I’ve used before”, Gary says.
Advances in technology mean the streaming services can only improve. The man in charge of the company that has been hired to put the illicit broad- casters out of business is Christopher Stokes, chief executive of NetResult. Even he admits: “A year ago, the streams were awful, but with today’s better video-compression software and bigger bandwidth, some are fantastic.”
If streaming websites have their problems, that’s nothing compared with the rigmarole of finding a match to watch free with peer-to-peer software, such as the Chinese PPLive (www.pplive.com/en), favoured by many English fans. Tottenham supporter Adrian Breslow heard about PPLive on a Spurs message board, but says it was “frustrating” trying to find his team’s game. “All the matches are listed in Chinese, so you have to (download the add-on to) swap it all into English. Even then, there are tons and tons of channels to choose from. It’s a process of trial and error,” says the 32-year-old civil servant from Sutton.
That hundreds of thousands of football fans are prepared to go to such tedious lengths shows how huge is the demand for football live on the internet. Fans don’t shin up a nearby rooftop to catch a free glimpse of the action from outside the stadium any more — they do their legwork on the web. Does the fact that these services are illegal bother the action-hungry supporter? “Not at all,” Gary says.
Like the music and movie moguls before them, the football authorities realise they have a growing problem on their hands. As well as employing NetResult to shut down the shysters, the FA Premier League is planning to offer broadcasters the rights to show live and “near live” matches over the net from the start of the 2007-08 season. “Someone like NTL or Sky could come along and offer live matches across different platforms,” says Dan Johnson, head of press at the Premier League, by which he means digital television and broadband internet.
In the meantime, the football clubs themselves are trying to sate the appetite of fans desperate to keep up to date with their teams. Every single Premiership and Football League club in the country offers video highlights and audio match commentaries to fans prepared to pay an annual subscription, usually about £35 per season (cheaper than a match-day ticket at some clubs). Premium TV, which hosts the official websites for 10 Premiership clubs and all but two of the 72 Football League teams, claims to have about 100,000 subscribers.
The highlights packages are theoretically ideal for fans such as Kent-based Sheffield Wednesday supporters Katie Jepson and David Turnbull, who cannot always get to matches and whose team is rarely afforded in-depth coverage on television. However, while they value the chance to see struggling Wednesday “concede goals in video”, Katie claims that the picture quality, even on broadband, is poor. Fans also have to wait until Monday for highlights of Saturday games (for midweek matches, the following day), which is hardly the instant fix most fans crave. “I knew the Spurs website did highlights, but why would I watch them after they’ve been on Match of the Day on Saturday?” asks Spurs supporter Adrian Breslow.
Katie and David, both 30, much prefer the audio match commentaries that are broadcast live on match days. Indeed, Premium TV confirms that these are far more popular than the video highlights. The commentary is either provided by local radio stations or employees of the clubs, then relayed with a few seconds’ delay over the net. The commentaries are complemented by on-screen live stats provided by the Press Association, so supporters can, for example, see at a glance how many shots their team has managed.
“I listen to at least half the matches in any one season on the internet,” says Katie, a risk analyst at a bank. “We even brought the laptop outside when we were building the garden wall so that we could listen to it.” Heaven knows what the neighbours thought.
The ad-hoc nature of the commentaries — which sometimes switch from club commentators to local radio midway through a match — can also lead to some amusing bloopers. “The funniest thing is when they accidentally fail to switch to the main radio at the beginning of half-time, and you hear what the commentator really thinks, as well as which half-time hot drink they want,” says Katie.
