The NFL is not very online friendly

Monday, September 3, 2007, 12:29 PM
Other Stuff by John (Article #161)

From Advertising Age:

Unlike on cable TV, where the NFL Network continues to clash with carriers over broadcast fees, the NFL has secured a dominant position online, having successfully forbidden all other sites to carry its highlights, as well as limiting the amount of press conference footage that can be aired.

Yup. The NFL really gets this internets thingie-ma-jigger. I'd be intrigued to see if this policy extends to takedown notices being sent to YouTube. Generally, if I want to find a clip of anything old from the NFL that is where I go looking.

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NFL.com isn't the worst website you'll ever see. It is nice that it updates scores in close to realtime. That is a nice feature when I need to type and therefore I do not want to have any games actually running.

Of course, I'm a nightmare fan. I admit it. I get games off of TVUPlayer (mostly games from out west, because that seems to be where TVU's base is). I have an OTA antenna for HDTV that allows me to get games from the Pittsburgh, Johnstown and Youngstown markets all the time and sometimes I can sneak Cleveland and Buffalo markets when the weather is right, too. I probably get half of the Sunday Ticket package for free when you get right down to it.

I wonder if the NFL is just being a tad too closed minded about their content. The NFL makes a boatload of cash. By its own choice it prefers to avoid a subscription model because they want the most people watching.

It just doesn't strike me that within the NFL's business model that there is a lot of reason to worry about controlling clips and highlights. But, the NFL isn't the first big entity to not quite understand the series of tubes.

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