Sky's powers need a limit

This caught my interest yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11452434

You'll see, if you read the piece, a reference to this case potentially being the Bosman of broadcasting. That may not mean anything to you if you don't follow football but it could mean a complete freeing up of broadcast consumers' right to choose, with pub landlords such as Ms Murphy being able to buy their satellite football coverage from suppliers based overseas. Personally, I wish her the best. I realise that it's the Premier League who have brought the action, not Sky, but we all know who stands to benefit most. Sky's water-tight relationship with the Premier League, and their resultant dominance of football coverage in this country, is so overpowering that they're changing the face of the game, and not necessarily for the better.

I'd like to know which other business limits your right to choose so zealously - if you want a Mini, for example, you can buy one not only from any Mini dealership but plenty of other sources. The good people who make Minis are not going to come after you for failing to buy them from a single outlet, nominated by them, who charges you ten times the price of the bloke down the road.

Ms Murphy is not even stealing intellectual property in my opinion, because she's been paying an authorised supplier of the images, merely one that's authorised in another territory. She describes Sky as 'greedy' and argues that they run a zealously guarded virtual monopoly, free to charge pubs for example, almost what they want for their coverage in this country.

I realise it's not as simple as that - I know that Sky supply a lot of the infrastructure and bandwidth on which many other satellite channels rely, for example - but anything which prises open Sky and the Premier League's vice-like grip on football can only be a good thing for me.

Priced out, then charged to get back in

Heard a very interesting advert on TalkSport today. It featured Kris Commons (I think that's his name, the bloke from the BT ads at any rate) reciting a poem about how the modern game has changed and the average fan has been priced out. It then goes on to say that there's still an affordable way to watch your football, by subscribing to the new BT offering of the Sky Sports channels.

Now don't get me wrong, I think Sky do what they do extremely well, but they and BT must think fans utterly stupid if they believe we'll fail to see the inherent connections and contradictions in this marketing approach. Part of the reason (not all, I readily accept, but certainly part) that fans have been priced out of going to the games in the first place is the huge amounts of money pumped into the game (the top flight in particular) by Sky when paying vastly inflated sums for the rights to screen the bloody games in the first place.

"Ah - so we've helped make the game so commercialised and expensive that you can no longer get to the games? Never mind, join our lament for the good old days and you can then pay us for the privilege of watching a sanitised and over-hyped version of the same product on telly. It's just the same as going, honest..."

I'm not saying that Sky putting money into the game was a bad thing. I'm just asking that we don't be taken for fools when the game we were watching long before Sky turned up is sold back to us as a 'bargain' by one of the original agents of its over-inflation.