AFANA Footy BBS

This is pretty neat! All you need to watch footy live, or The Footy Show, or any Australian television is a broadband internet connection and a friend in Australia with broadband internet and cable TV. Oh yeah, and about $6500.

TV2Me (see the link below) is selling a device that will deliver local broadcasting to you anywhere. You install the server in the location of the local broadcasts you want, and then watch the programs anywhere you are.

Now on the surface this sounds like a toy for rich people. $6500, plus broadband internet access at each end, and you've got to watch the shows when they are broadcast. So maybe you go to your local USAFL club, and everybody kicks in $250, and somebody with a PAL/NTSC VCR sets it up and takes care of swapping out tapes, and one of the ex-pats arranges to ship the server to their folks in Melbourne, and well I suppose you could make it work.

But what excites me about this is the possibilities the technology presents. If this equipment can deliver a video stream to one user, how soon can they have a version that multi-casts? The equipment is designed that a server/receiver pair only work with each other, but how soon will there be versions that allow the receiver to pick servers? Yes, it costs $6500 today, but how soon will that cost drop to everyday consumer levels?

What also excites me about this is the possibilities the technology presents for a business model right now.

If I was running a Fox Sports World or EPSN-International or whatever, I would be talking these folks about a version that gives me better quality at a possible cost of time. The real value this company holds is their compression algorithm. If I've got a three hour match broadcast, and I'm going to time shift it six hours, then I've got nine hours to get the entire thing transmitted. I'm not sure what satellite time costs, but this has got to be cheaper. How much time and money could FSW save over flying game tapes across the ocean?

What about video-on-demand? From opening day to Grand Final, there are 185 matches in a season, each about three hours long, that's about 555 hours. Add in The Footy Show, Brownlow medal ceremony, etc., and you're talking about maybe 750 hours of programming. Now that is one heck of a Tivo to hold all that, but it is a reasonable prospect.

AFANA claims something like 15000 names on their mailing list. If 10% of those people would pay $5/month over the course of a season (six months) for access to that content, you're talking about $45,000 in revenue. Make it an annual subscription at $10/per, and revenue climbs to $180,000. What would it cost to make a service like this happen? If I owned the content, I know I would be looking into this technology.

  -- RW "KC Swan" Lipp 

TV2Me Web Site

This might be something to look into for AFANA I'm thinking.

I remember Rob was mentioning how expensive satalite time and how this was such a large impediment towards offering some sort of viable Pay-Per-View option for AFL games.

Perhaps we could get something like this going and have the feed sent over the net to the AFANA offices and have AFANA arrange some sort of North American Pay-Pew-View offering with the feed? Still, I'm a little wary of Internet video, even with high bandwidths it seems to cut out sometimes depending on Internet traffic. Nevertheless, I think you are right though that one day the problem of expensive international video distribution will be solved once the Net can be used as a reliable and cheap means to distribute video.

What this suggests to me is that the technology is rapidly becoming cheap enough for small businesses and moderately wealthy individuals to run their own video networks.

There already exist services that will deliver your video point to point, mostly over fiber optic cable, to do the same thing for TV networks and program producers. If the AFL or it's contracted networks wanted to do this tomorrow, they could. The use of the internet just adds one more, perhaps ultimately cheaper, option.

Right now, if you buy a Globecast TV dish, you can see dozens of foreign TV channels from Al-Jazeera to Euronews to numerous Asian channels. Almost all of the video is tranmitted over fiber optic cable and then uplinked from a US site to the satellite. Similar things are done to make CNN-International available worldwide, etc.

When I was at the AFL offices my presentation included discussion of the future of TV coverage here and I made the case that the economics of live or tape delayed full game coverage here is all but in place. It would be pay per view as you suggest. Cricket and rugby, both of which trailed footy in TV coverage only a few years ago, are now both extensively available as pay per view in the US. There are even competing packages in cricket on offer next year.

Lacking at this stage is the will by the AFL to make it happen and the underwriting. AFANA could arrange it any time, it's just a question of financial backing and subscriber support. If we could put together a syndicate tomorrow to get this done, we'd do it. And we would use whatever technology made sense, including this new one.

-Rob de Santos
AFANA Chairman

AFANA Blog