Content Wants To Be Free: Football Edition

03:51 PM Nov 07, 2006

Via Football Outsiders, where discussion has descended into a stultifying miasma of intellectual property minutiae, comes word that the National Football League is the latest entity to strip its highlights from YouTube.

Let's leave aside for the moment the timing: just like the rest of the copyright action on YouTube, it's occurred in the aftermath of the startup's move under the penumbra of Google's capacious treasuries. There's every likelihood that it's a dance of corporate elephants to conclude with a curtsy and a few million bucks changing hands.

But forget that.

Whether it is or is not indicative of any grander strategy on the part of the league, let's consider it as such. Because while the NFL is obviously a different animal in terms of scale from the local web 2.0 API jockey, it's as classic a case of content distribution as any. What best behooves the long-term growth of the sport: wide distribution of free highlight videos that people will forward to one another, slap on their blog, argue about calls, the works? Or, an RIAA-like clampdown demanding marketing royalties for every replay?

The NFL, which has been broadcasting over the public airwaves for decades, is a prototype instance of what passes as the cutting edge Internet business model: promulgating free content to a wide audience in order to sell advertising. And they haven't done half-badly with it. How is the Internet not one more channel for the same? And how does legal strongarming build its appeal to young audiences?

A site like Football Outsiders is actually a great example. They depend on abstracted content generated by the league -- statistics -- which they remix and comment upon. (Statistics appear to be clear of league-enforced proprietary control, although that decision took a lawsuit.) That site is itself attempting to attack the "Hilbert problems," the gross limitations on statistics recovered from games which impede sabermetric-quality advanced analysis simply because there's no reliable data about who's on the field for any given play, formations, coverage assignments, and all the rest. The site has been running a game-charting project in which a network of volunteers literally watch and record from the (sloppy) network feeds.

Cross that observation with Pro Football Talk's recent analysis of the surprising success of Edge NFL Matchup:

The show does what no other broadcast attempts, with only the exception of the NFL Films Game of the Week on NFLN; it breaks down the "all-22" coaching film and helps the viewers understand why certain plays work, and why they don't.

(sorry for the lack of a PFT direct link; their blog doesn't have item-level permalinks ... as it passes into the archives, it'll be in the 11-1-06 to 11-15-06 link)

... and my read is that the NFL should be moving in the exact opposite direction. Football Outsiders game-charters have more than once complained about imprecise numbers and plays impossible to attribute because network cameras don't capture the whole field. It's long past time -- especially in the generation of Madden football, when more casual fans than ever have exposure to the intricacies of different formations -- to make those "all-22" coaching films as widely and freely available as possible.

Naturally, the league makes huge revenue from selling broadcast rights. There'll always be a need to placate multiple stakeholders. But how much richer does understanding of the game become once people are able to get online and see the coaching tape from last Sunday's thriller -- and start to read, and produce, informed commentary about the merits of a team's matchup decisions and play-calling based on that? And if people are spending hours online looking at video, arguing about the cover-2 -- and, uh, working, boss, really! -- how much more embedded are they with the league that mints coin from this product with cable rights and jersey sales?

Hey, the NFL is doing just fine without my advice. And in the scheme of its business, this is, for now, no doubt a trivial slice. But if I had content that valuable with revenue streams that dependable, I'd sure want it seen as widely as possible. If the league persists, it'll be a great way for the next upstart to challenge it.

P.S. -- That Dwight Clark catch that the Mercury-News refers to? It's still -- sort of -- there.

Add a comment