It’s almost last orders for pubs showing unlicensed football broadcasts in the UK and not before time, writes Julian Clover.
It was with no great surprise that the Premier League largely emerged as the victor in it tussle with distributors of foreign satellite equipment. The disappointment is that at times it felt that it was a victory for Perry Mason rather than common sense.
Even in football’s parallel universe the reasonable man’s viewpoint – that when a rights holder sells their content to a broadcaster it is shown only in the country for which it was intended – must surely prevail. When the European Court of Justice first gave its opinion last year one might have thought the opposite.
So that the case has turned in part on the misuse of images and music on which the Premier League owned the copyright must surely be legal justice.
The licensed trade is undoubtedly facing hard times, you only have to pick up your local newspaper to read more stories of how pubs are struggling in the economic climate. But the grey market in unlicensed smart cards goes back almost as far as Arthur C Clarke’s famous article in Wireless World.
Long before the credit crunch came into our vocabulary, pubs were sneaking in satellite receivers for any channel that they could reasonably pull a signal from. The combination of additional kick-off times outside the packages sold in Britain and what they perceived as high charges from Sky produced an apparently attractive proposition.
Given the popularity of Sky amongst their domestic subscribers you could assume the satcaster has got its pricing about right, and there is no reason to think that the same calculations might not have been made for pubs and clubs. After all there’s no revenue to be made on a pub that has called last orders for the final time.
Of course the same works in reverse. I remember sitting in a bar in Geneva watching a Sky Sports match from one of the lower leagues. Unfortunately for the pub in question one of my drinking companions worked for Sky and during a break in conversation he went outside to make a phone call.
There remains of course a suitable alternative to those who still believe Sky’s charges to be too high. A quiet drink in the pub down the road.
