Motivation

There's some irony in the fact that I set up Narrowstep to enable an efficient marketplace for content after I was stuck in San Francisco unable to watch a rugby international between Ireland and Wales.

Frankly, things haven't improved a lot.

Setanta show the odd game online in decent quality and provide some coverage of French domestic games. The BBC show the Welsh rugby games they have rights for in dreadful, dreadful quality - most of these are also available on BBCi, which makes up for this.

And laggards S4C have finally got round to showing events long after they've finished (but I haven't got any of their streams to work to date).

Otherwise, just about everything (Currie Cup, NCP, Super 14s, Guinness premiership) is available on Sky and Sky only.

Now, this may seem boring to non-rugby supporters, but surely this is symptomatic of what the online tv business needs.

Why can't I watch the Sky covered games without subscribing to their broadcast service (which I can't do in a London conservation area)? What do I have to do to watch rugby games in Scotland, which seem to be covered by no one ?

All of this would be a trivial thing to achieve technically at broadcast quality on the Narrowstep platform. But it isn't about technology any more.

It's about people either being short sighted or trying to hang on to their meal ticket rather than maximising content yield (using secondary media and distribution to add to primary revenue sources).

So much for TV 2.0 in the real world..

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