With the Premier League season ready to kick off tomorrow, we have an article over on BBC Newsbeat about posting clips of Premier League goals and highlights on Vine.
In the interview, Dan Johnson, the ‘Director Of Communications’ at Premier League, is quoted as saying “You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law. It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity”
There’s also a lovely sentence within the article: The S*n and The Times bought the online rights and they don’t want people to be able to see the action for free.
I’ll let that sink in for a second. They don’t want you to see it for free! Cheeky bastards. It’s the national game. It’s your football team. You’re being priced out of being able to go to football matches by the team you blindly follow. The team you blindly buy the three shirts every year for.
As some of you may or may not know, I was quite the regular on the goal scene, and was able to bring you Premier League goals and incidents of all games very very quickly, smoothly and of high quality, and I imagine, without loss to the Premier Leagues money laden pockets. It was quite a loss to my own pockets, as I was paying considerable sums to access TV channels, proxies, keep my website up whilst 1,000s visited at peak times etc etc, but I still carried on until I risked losing my website and my Twitter account. I’ve expressed before in a very angry post somewhere on this site that I was more than willing to sit down with the Premier League and show them how easy it is to do what I did – hell, if they paid me a reasonable amount, I’d do the whole thing for them. They need a YouTube Channel. We, the football hungry public, need to be able to view goals from the past, matches from the past, top 10 goals per season etc etc. It’s a god damn must. They’d even make a fortune from Google Ads alone.
What the Premier League need to realise is that these Twitter accounts exist, these Vine accounts exist, these GIF accounts exist, these websites exist because there is demand, and there is a high demand, for goals, incidents, yellows, reds, highlights, silly reactions. We live in a technological age and we have done for a number of years now. We don’t live in an age where we have to wait until the pink paper gets sent to the shops to find out the results. Carrier pigeons died out a fair number of years ago.
But what do we know? We’re the poor suckers who pay to go to the games. We’re the poor suckers who pay £80 for a Sky Sports subscription. We’re the poor suckers who pay for the TV licence just to watch a bunch of ex-pro’s chat bollocks on MOTD.
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