Turner Gets Digital Rights To NCAA Championships

[Lehigh Football Nation]

http://news.bostonherald.com/sports/college/general/view/20100921turner_gets_digital_rights_to_ncaa_champio nships/


Turner Sports and the NCAA announced a 14-year digital rights deal Tuesday that includes management of NCAA.com, the primary web site for all 88 NCAA tournaments, and other services including March Madness on Demand.

"We’re doing this for a couple of reasons, and we would never do a stupid economic deal," said Lenny Daniels, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Turner Sports. "The long-term television world is going to change, and we think everything is, eventually, going to be interconnected."

Financial terms were not immediately disclosed.

What are the impacts of this change to the FCS playoffs? Is there still going to be a deal with ESPN for televising the games? Will all - or some - be available through a Turner network?

I have many questions, no answers. xconfusedx

[danefan]

This is the digital rights only. I don't think it has anything to do with the broadcast rights.

If anything, I could see an expansion of online availability of NCAA games not on TV.

[Bogus Megapardus]

http://news.bostonherald.com/sports/college/general/view/20100921turner_gets_digital_rights_to_ncaa_champio nships/



What are the impacts of this change to the FCS playoffs? Is there still going to be a deal with ESPN for televising the games? Will all - or some - be available through a Turner network?

I have many questions, no answers. xconfusedx

Televisions are now web-enabled. It all comes down to whether Turner will use a pay-per-view format (like CBS All-Access) or an ISP enabled format (like ESPN3). This could be a very smart deal for Turner but expect litigation over the distinction between "broadcast" and "webcast" amongst various content providers. We just saw this sort of conflict arise on a little scale last weekend at Lafayette, between All-Access (which is provided through CBS) and ESPN3. At the end both carried the game but this sort of dispute is going to come up with increasing frequency as content providers and facilitators step on one another's toes.

Provided the bandwidth is large enough, your (new web-enabled) television does not care whether it is rendering a broadcast game or a webcast game. Nor does it matter how the signal is initiated from the game; the same video and audio feed serves both. It's just a matter of later decoding whatever compression algorithm is used to package the signal by the provider or facilitator.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Televisions are now web-enabled. It all comes down to whether Turner will use a pay-per-view format (like CBS All-Access) or an ISP enabled format (like ESPN3). This could be a very smart deal for Turner but expect litigation over the distinction between "broadcast" and "webcast" amongst various content providers. We just saw this sort of conflict arise on a little scale last weekend at Lafayette, between All-Access (which is provided through CBS) and ESPN3. At the end both carried the game but this sort of dispute is going to come up with increasing frequency as content providers and facilitators step on one another's toes.

Provided the bandwidth is large enough, your (new web-enabled) television does not care whether it is rendering a broadcast game or a webcast game. Nor does it matter how the signal is initiated from the game; the same video and audio feed serves both. It's just a matter of later decoding whatever compression algorithm is used to package the signal by the provider or facilitator.

Exactly. ESPN owns the TV rights to the FCS playoffs, and also owned the "web rights" to the games via ESPN3. All other games, I think, were either produced locally (SFA/Montana leaps to mind) or also ESPN3. At least one year CBS College Sports covered at least one non-televised first-round game at Villanova, with the NCAA logo splashed on the webcast.

If Turner - a TV company - is broadcasting the digital rights, are they going to just use a webcam and a radio feed? Or will it be a produced production, with announcers, multiple cameras, and the like? If they're making it broadcast-quality, what's stopping them from broadcasting in on their network?

[Bogus Megapardus]

If Turner - a TV company - is broadcasting the digital rights, are they going to just use a webcam and a radio feed? Or will it be a produced production, with announcers, multiple cameras, and the like? If they're making it broadcast-quality, what's stopping them from broadcasting in on their network?

I'll go back to the Lafayette example. Lafayette creates a high-quality feed for every game with lots of cameras, instant replay from several angles, a telestrator and professional talent in the booth. The exact same feed is used for broadcast on channel 60, RCN, MASN, CBS College and ESPNU as well as for webcast on All-Access and ESPN3. The only difference is how much, and by whom, the signal is compressed for purposes of webcast bandwidth limitations. As more and more people subscribe to high-bandwidth cable and fiber-optic services, the distinction between DTV/Cable TV, on the one hand, and what we now refer to as "internet," on the other, become blurred to the point of indistinction.

Right now the distinction is not so much the quality of the camera and the on-air talent as it is the means by which the signal, regardless of its quality, reaches your home, as well as the manner in which the signal is rendered and decoded in your home. With web-enabled televisions and cable television providers now in the internet business, the signal increasingly is brought into your home by the same provider and rendered by the same device. So at the end of the day the "webcast" can look just as nice on your TV as the "broadcast" - you won't even be able to tell the difference. It then comes down to who "owns" the picture and the audio.

If ESPN owns FCS championship "broadcast" rights, and Turner owns FCS championship "webcast" rights, and if you have a web-enabled television capable of rendering either broadcast or webcast, what then happens? Do the Media Police break into you living room during the game and tell you that "you're watching it wrong?" Confusion will be rampant as digital signals are micro-encoded and end-user receiver-decoders become more and more complicated in order to make sure that you're receiving only a signal that someone has paid for. And as the webcast signals become higher in quality, the off-shore repeater sites will be better and better, too. But will the notion of unfiltered web access (as we now enjoy) in the U.S. become a thing of the past? Or will congress make certain that ALL internet service is filtered through a regulated media conglomerate? Note the headlines today that congress wants to get into the World Police business in order to shut down repeaters in every country, everywhere. Take THAT, Kim Jong-il.




This is the digital rights only. I don't think it has anything to do with the broadcast rights.



Remember that everything now is digital. As of last June, by law, there are no more public analog television broadcasts. All television broadcasts are digital. The digital signal that goes out over the air is the same one that feeds a digital webcast. It's just a matter of how that signal is processed, compressed and encoded intermediately. But the initial feed is the same.