England’s Football Association may not have had much of a say over last month’s groundbreaking online-only PPV England-Ukraine match – but now it’s embracing online-only distribution for itself…
After testing exclusive free web streaming for England’s U21 UEFA Cup qualifier against Macedonia – two days before the more talked-about Ukraine game – the FA properly, if quietly, launched its own streaming portal, FAtv, at TheFA.com, kicking off with Saturday’s Oldham-Leeds, first-round FA Cup tie.
And the association is hailing it a success, claiming over 176,000 live video views, so it’s following up with this Saturday’s U21 England-Portugal game and more FA Cup matches – the November 17 Stevenage-Port Vale replay and Norwich City’s November 28 second-round visit to Carlisle or Morecombe; all for free.
It’s unusual for a sports body to broadcast its own matches rather than go through a commercial distributor. ITV (LSE: ITV) recently expanded its FA Cup TV rights deal, but there are some matches involving lower teams that just aren’t as lucrative to advertisers. Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an audience for such games amongst those clubs’ fans, so the FA is going it alone.
It’s a great way to satisfy audiences unserved by conventional TV – internet capacity isn’t limited by spectrum availability, so, in theory, the FA could broadcast as many matches as it wanted, assuming it has enough camera crews available. The problem of advertising attractiveness might even go away if the FA were to market the broadcasts to either football accessory retailers or small advertisers in only the two towns involved in a match.
FA CEO Ian Watmore, in the release: “As more and more people become used to viewing premium content online The FA is determined to remain at the forefront in the evolution of new digital delivery technologies for sport.