7 ms·

Netflix should buy the NFL Sunday Ticket rights, not Google

29 points by maxhaot 13y ago

aroch 13y ago
I would certainly pay either company to get Live streams of NFL games (with no blackouts, I hate those with a passion). I can't justify the cost of buying Cable/DTV + the $30-50 a month for the sports package but would happily pay that ~30/month during the season. NFL doesn't offer live streaming inside of the US for some daft reasons (OK, its because they get a ton from cable/DTV regardless of whether someone actually watched or not...)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I would certainly pay either company to get Live streams of NFL games (with no blackouts, I hate those with a passion). 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.
  - aroch 13y ago
    There's no pro team with several hundred miles of me. I know why blackouts exist, and they make sense to a degree in larger cities/areas near a team. However, if we're going to be honest, they have no problems selling tickets to games people actually want to go to. Assuming I had a more flexible work schedule, I would try to go to a few Steelers games (Which would, basically, force me to fly there...I wouldn't relish the drive). 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.
    - consultant23522 13y ago
      I've never understood this mentality. If a company (in this case the NFL) doesn't want me to be their customer then I simply won't be. For example, I like watching the Sabres (hockey for the uninitiated), but only a couple games a season are available to me. Therefore, I have stopped watching the games and they don't receive any of my money in the form of merchandising or ad revenue because one fewer set of eyes are watching their ads.
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        The basic logic is simple: the league makes vastly more revenue per viewer from people in the stadium (ticket sales, concessions, etc.) then from people watching remotely (TV, streaming, etc.), so it can afford to lose lots of TV, streaming, etc. viewers if doing so avoids losing a small number (or a small share of the revenues from) in-stadium audience. > 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.
    - djjose 13y ago
      That's what NBA League Pass offered last year. You pick a couple of teams and you get their games. I happily paid for it and will do so again this season. 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!
    - nmcveity 13y ago
      NFL offers a fantastic service, similar to the one you want, called gamepass. There is a catch (of course!), you just need to be in an international market. 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!
  - kodablah 13y ago
    > Blackouts exist to limit the extent that remote viewing substitutes for live attendance 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.
    - freehunter 13y ago
      I subscribed to MLB.tv for one month so I could watch my Detroit Tigers last year. Every game was blacked out, since I live in Michigan. I could only watch, for example, the Kansas City feed, with Kansas City announcers and Kansas City-focused commentary. I don't get antenna reception in my apartment for whatever reason, so I have no alternative. My alternative was to visit a local bar for games I needed to see, and just not watch anything else.
      - lionsdan 13y ago
        Lucky you don't live in Iowa. The Cubs, White Sox, Brewers, Twins, Cardinals, and Royals are all blacked out. That can be up to 40% of the entire schedule on many nights.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Y'all are confusing your words. 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.
- burntsushi 13y ago
  You can do it this year for $100 for the whole season. Just buy the Madden 25th Anniversary Edition on Amazon. [1] 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-Playstation-3/dp/B00CF7KVGE http://www.amazon.com/Madden-Anniversary-Edition-Sunday-Play... [2] - http://kotaku.com/madden-special-edition-includes-sunday-ticket-even-wi-508524868 http://kotaku.com/madden-special-edition-includes-sunday-tic...
  - bhousel 13y ago
    Looks like that doesn't include postseason..
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      No it doesn't. Just the regular season.
    - tjtrapp 13y ago
      Postseason typically shows all games on TV. This setup will allow us to watch any game regardless of where you live (and what your cable provider allows you to watch).
  - tjtrapp 13y ago
    Holy cow! This sounds amazing for me b/c I'm a TWC subscriber and (b/c of my aptarments location) cannot get a DTV receiver installed.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisgd 13y ago
    I had not heard of this, thank you. I imagine there will be a number of used one's on ebay after people pull the passcode out of the box, which is what I am thinking about doing.
dkrich 13y ago
I think this is a false dichotomy. Individuals pay hundreds of dollars to get the season or half-season package up-front. Given a four-month season (playoff games are broadcast over regular networks), $20/month isn't even close to what DirectTV charges. On a monthly basis, the figure would be closer to $60-$70 so I'm not sure where the author gets his proposed figures from. 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.
- siegecraft 13y ago
  I think very few people pay full price for Sunday Ticket, either via deals like this year's Madden, getting it for free as a new customer, or calling and complaining that you don't get it for free/threatening to leave until they substantially discount it for you.
tmuir 13y ago
I think live sports is the last bit of programming that prevents a lot people from getting rid of cable completely. 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.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > On the other hand, sports, football in particular, are one of the biggest selling points of HDTV and the high resolution picture it provides. 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.
- ajross 13y ago
  I'm curious about your last paragraph. Certainly on-demand video is subject to buffering, but the rest of that doesn't seem to be my experience at all. We watch both Netflix and Youtube content at home on multiple clients (e.g. browesr, phones, the now-ancient Netflix app on the TiVo HD...) and while obviously we've seen the occasional network failure I don't think any of them seem to be service-specific. Basically, watching "premium" 720p+ content on Youtube provides virtually indistinguishable quality and reliability. Is that really not your experience?
  - dbarlett 13y ago
    What ISP do you have? Degraded streaming is widespread these days: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-buffers-the-secret-deals-that-make-and-break-online-video/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-yo...
    - 13y ago
pdubs 13y ago
Has Netflix done live video on anything approaching this scale? I don't doubt that they have the capabilities to put a live streaming infrastructure together for something like this, but DTV's out starting next year and there's a lot of work to get done in that time. That would be a lot of risk.
- consultant23522 13y ago
  I don't know about Netflix but even Youtube has trouble with high profile live events.
- minikites 13y ago
  NBC put the Super Bowl online and it seemed to work okay as I recall. I imagine weekly Sunday games get less traffic. Does Sunday Ticket include RedZone? That would be the real selling point.
  - the_watcher 13y ago
    RedZone is key to anyone buying Sunday ticket. You could sell RZC without Sunday Ticket though (I'd buy it).
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  At its peak, Netflix accounts for something like a full third of internet traffic in the US (almost double Youtube's haul).
  - Sargos 13y ago
    None of that is live streaming. Netflix can only do that via cached videos at ISPs and other tricks. 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.
VikingCoder 13y ago
The math here is all wrong. It's vastly more expensive than this, if you want to provide it a la carte. All cable subscribers are currently subsidizing live sports, whether they want to or not. It's a dinosaur that should die. Sports salaries should be 1/10th of what they currently are.
- heyheyhey 13y ago
  > Sports salaries should be 1/10th of what they currently are. So where should that 9/10 go?
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    If the major expense of your business is the salaries of your employees, and your number of employees need to remain relatively unchanged, and your revenue drops in 1/10th, then roughly you will need to higher employees who will accept 1/10th of the wages. Some of your current employees may accept, but you can expect massive turn-over. And arguably lower-quality employees. In short, I'm being forced to pay for live sports, if I want cable, and I predict that very soon that will change.
    - harryh 13y ago
      I'll bet you any amount that you care to wager that the salaries for NBA/NFL/MLB players don't drop by anything close to 90% at any point in the next 10 years.
      - VikingCoder 13y ago
        No try, major league sports athlete who is trying to mitigate his losses! ;-) 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?
        13y ago
bcrescimanno 13y ago
Disclaimer: I worked at Netflix until the end of July 2013 but I have no inside knowledge relating to anything to do with NFL Sunday Ticket. 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.
raldi 13y ago
If by "should" the author is referring to what would be in the best interests of consumers, then the NFL should forget about exclusive licenses and just sign deals with everyone. 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?

29 points by maxhaot 13y ago

aroch 13y ago

I would certainly pay either company to get Live streams of NFL games (with no blackouts, I hate those with a passion). I can't justify the cost of buying Cable/DTV + the $30-50 a month for the sports package but would happily pay that ~30/month during the season. NFL doesn't offer live streaming inside of the US for some daft reasons (OK, its because they get a ton from cable/DTV regardless of whether someone actually watched or not...)

dragonwriter 13y ago
> I would certainly pay either company to get Live streams of NFL games (with no blackouts, I hate those with a passion). 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.
- aroch 13y ago
  There's no pro team with several hundred miles of me. I know why blackouts exist, and they make sense to a degree in larger cities/areas near a team. However, if we're going to be honest, they have no problems selling tickets to games people actually want to go to. Assuming I had a more flexible work schedule, I would try to go to a few Steelers games (Which would, basically, force me to fly there...I wouldn't relish the drive). 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.
  - consultant23522 13y ago
    I've never understood this mentality. If a company (in this case the NFL) doesn't want me to be their customer then I simply won't be. For example, I like watching the Sabres (hockey for the uninitiated), but only a couple games a season are available to me. Therefore, I have stopped watching the games and they don't receive any of my money in the form of merchandising or ad revenue because one fewer set of eyes are watching their ads.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      The basic logic is simple: the league makes vastly more revenue per viewer from people in the stadium (ticket sales, concessions, etc.) then from people watching remotely (TV, streaming, etc.), so it can afford to lose lots of TV, streaming, etc. viewers if doing so avoids losing a small number (or a small share of the revenues from) in-stadium audience. > 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.
  - djjose 13y ago
    That's what NBA League Pass offered last year. You pick a couple of teams and you get their games. I happily paid for it and will do so again this season. 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!
  - nmcveity 13y ago
    NFL offers a fantastic service, similar to the one you want, called gamepass. There is a catch (of course!), you just need to be in an international market. 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!
- kodablah 13y ago
  > Blackouts exist to limit the extent that remote viewing substitutes for live attendance 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.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    I subscribed to MLB.tv for one month so I could watch my Detroit Tigers last year. Every game was blacked out, since I live in Michigan. I could only watch, for example, the Kansas City feed, with Kansas City announcers and Kansas City-focused commentary. I don't get antenna reception in my apartment for whatever reason, so I have no alternative. My alternative was to visit a local bar for games I needed to see, and just not watch anything else.
    - lionsdan 13y ago
      Lucky you don't live in Iowa. The Cubs, White Sox, Brewers, Twins, Cardinals, and Royals are all blacked out. That can be up to 40% of the entire schedule on many nights.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Y'all are confusing your words. 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.
burntsushi 13y ago
You can do it this year for $100 for the whole season. Just buy the Madden 25th Anniversary Edition on Amazon. [1] 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-Playstation-3/dp/B00CF7KVGE http://www.amazon.com/Madden-Anniversary-Edition-Sunday-Play... [2] - http://kotaku.com/madden-special-edition-includes-sunday-ticket-even-wi-508524868 http://kotaku.com/madden-special-edition-includes-sunday-tic...
- bhousel 13y ago
  Looks like that doesn't include postseason..
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    No it doesn't. Just the regular season.
  - tjtrapp 13y ago
    Postseason typically shows all games on TV. This setup will allow us to watch any game regardless of where you live (and what your cable provider allows you to watch).
- tjtrapp 13y ago
  Holy cow! This sounds amazing for me b/c I'm a TWC subscriber and (b/c of my aptarments location) cannot get a DTV receiver installed.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisgd 13y ago
  I had not heard of this, thank you. I imagine there will be a number of used one's on ebay after people pull the passcode out of the box, which is what I am thinking about doing.

dkrich 13y ago

I think this is a false dichotomy. Individuals pay hundreds of dollars to get the season or half-season package up-front. Given a four-month season (playoff games are broadcast over regular networks), $20/month isn't even close to what DirectTV charges. On a monthly basis, the figure would be closer to $60-$70 so I'm not sure where the author gets his proposed figures from. 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.

siegecraft 13y ago
I think very few people pay full price for Sunday Ticket, either via deals like this year's Madden, getting it for free as a new customer, or calling and complaining that you don't get it for free/threatening to leave until they substantially discount it for you.

tmuir 13y ago

I think live sports is the last bit of programming that prevents a lot people from getting rid of cable completely. 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.

jlgreco 13y ago
> On the other hand, sports, football in particular, are one of the biggest selling points of HDTV and the high resolution picture it provides. 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.
ajross 13y ago
I'm curious about your last paragraph. Certainly on-demand video is subject to buffering, but the rest of that doesn't seem to be my experience at all. We watch both Netflix and Youtube content at home on multiple clients (e.g. browesr, phones, the now-ancient Netflix app on the TiVo HD...) and while obviously we've seen the occasional network failure I don't think any of them seem to be service-specific. Basically, watching "premium" 720p+ content on Youtube provides virtually indistinguishable quality and reliability. Is that really not your experience?
- dbarlett 13y ago
  What ISP do you have? Degraded streaming is widespread these days: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-buffers-the-secret-deals-that-make-and-break-online-video/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-yo...
  - 13y ago

pdubs 13y ago

Has Netflix done live video on anything approaching this scale? I don't doubt that they have the capabilities to put a live streaming infrastructure together for something like this, but DTV's out starting next year and there's a lot of work to get done in that time. That would be a lot of risk.

consultant23522 13y ago
I don't know about Netflix but even Youtube has trouble with high profile live events.
minikites 13y ago
NBC put the Super Bowl online and it seemed to work okay as I recall. I imagine weekly Sunday games get less traffic. Does Sunday Ticket include RedZone? That would be the real selling point.
- the_watcher 13y ago
  RedZone is key to anyone buying Sunday ticket. You could sell RZC without Sunday Ticket though (I'd buy it).
mmanfrin 13y ago
At its peak, Netflix accounts for something like a full third of internet traffic in the US (almost double Youtube's haul).
- Sargos 13y ago
  None of that is live streaming. Netflix can only do that via cached videos at ISPs and other tricks. 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.

VikingCoder 13y ago

The math here is all wrong. It's vastly more expensive than this, if you want to provide it a la carte. All cable subscribers are currently subsidizing live sports, whether they want to or not. It's a dinosaur that should die. Sports salaries should be 1/10th of what they currently are.

heyheyhey 13y ago
> Sports salaries should be 1/10th of what they currently are. So where should that 9/10 go?
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  If the major expense of your business is the salaries of your employees, and your number of employees need to remain relatively unchanged, and your revenue drops in 1/10th, then roughly you will need to higher employees who will accept 1/10th of the wages. Some of your current employees may accept, but you can expect massive turn-over. And arguably lower-quality employees. In short, I'm being forced to pay for live sports, if I want cable, and I predict that very soon that will change.
  - harryh 13y ago
    I'll bet you any amount that you care to wager that the salaries for NBA/NFL/MLB players don't drop by anything close to 90% at any point in the next 10 years.
    - VikingCoder 13y ago
      No try, major league sports athlete who is trying to mitigate his losses! ;-) 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?
      - 13y ago

bcrescimanno 13y ago

Disclaimer: I worked at Netflix until the end of July 2013 but I have no inside knowledge relating to anything to do with NFL Sunday Ticket. 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.

raldi 13y ago

If by "should" the author is referring to what would be in the best interests of consumers, then the NFL should forget about exclusive licenses and just sign deals with everyone. 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?