Who's showing the next match? YouTube...
- 25 Jun 06, 01:50 PM
(Don't stop commenting on my previous post. It is now getting vitriolic down there in the 90+ region of the comments. More to follow on Sven - but..)
Meanwhile, back at the business end of the World Cup, the 大象传媒/ITV have announced how their coverage of the QFs will be divvied up. The good news (bad news if you hate the Beeb) is that we have got the England-Portugal match. However, it is all becoming academic if you watch what's happening on the web: enterprising fans have been taking DV cameras, or using mobiles, of the match action. This being the "me" generation, most of the footage is of them gurning into the camera - but occasionally you get match action. Another popular thing going on is people videoing the TV screen during games and then posting it so that we can all share what it is like to be in Ghana and see them score.
Other spin-off coverage is the rise of the montage-to-music genre of football imagery to make a point. This excellent by a S Korea fan of their trouncing by Switzerland is a case in point....though because it is composed of copyright images you will have to to it rather than running it on this site...
This, therefore is turning out to be the first "user-generated-content" global sports event. Much of the content is pretty scrappy but it shows the potential of the medium and how hard it's going to be for Sepp Blatter and co to defend their intellectual property (image rights for individual players, no Visacards allowed etc).
Up to now football has managed to ride the big business waves of the 1990s: paid-for content, pay-TV, below the line advertising budgets and sponsorship. How will it cope with a world where all intellectual property rights are under threat? Right now the monopoly on images is easy to defend but the monopoly on sound commentary is effectively broken because you can see numerous people in the crowd giving commentaries to their mates live. This is the untold story of the WC and I would like to hear from you if you have been doing any sneaky guerilla broadcasting or reporting of any kind.
And for those of you who know nothing about YouTube, click and see what your kids/grannies are getting up to!
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YouTube is brilliant, if you miss a goal or a sending off, just search for it and 99 times out of 100 someone has uploaded it and you can watch it.
Some of the original content on the site is also interesting.
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I've found that, in fact, 99% of the stuff on YouTube (not football-related) is a complete waste of time and bandwith. Call me old-fashioned, but anything good involving sounds and pictures ends up on the tellybox.
While the internet is an amazing invention, it could do with an editor.
I guess this is where blogs come in.
But someone needs to edit the blogs too! Half the links on blogs are either dead or (in this case) rubbish.
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