Rights issues in sports are a major concern for companies like ESPN and also the leagues like the NFL and NCAA. You only have to look at the rights fees companies pay to cover sports live or at the money leagues like the NFL make signing away something as simple as mobile data rights. The latest example, and an interesting one at that, involves a Louisville newspaper that tried to have a “live blog” of the NCAA Baseball tournament.

From the article:

A reporter was ejected from an NCAA baseball tournament game for submitting live Internet updates during play.

Brian Bennett, a writer for The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, was approached Sunday by an NCAA representative in the bottom of the fifth inning and told that blogging from an NCAA championship event is against NCAA policies.

…

The newspaper said the university circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA’s manager of broadcasting, before the first super regional game Friday. It said blogs are considered a “live representation of the game” and blogs containing action photos or game reports are prohibited until the game is over.

If you think this is a relatively esoteric issue, consider the fact that mobile phones and even regular cameras are getting the capability to transmit digital images directly to sites like Flickr or Photobucket. Fans will be in a position to taunt their friends (”Wish ya were here!”) or instantly share accounts of the game as they happen.

This ought to be a fair use of admission. Fans are simply sharing their experiences, after all, and this doesn’t diminish the value of consistent, live data feeds like those provided by ESPN or the NCAA. This isn’t the case, however, as big money is involved.

Let me give you another example. The NFL is by far the worst offender when it comes to rights enforcement bordering on the stupid. They restrict any site, including partners like ESPN, from offering live play-by-play that offers any detail. They want to have a monopoly on that data on the Internet, and they want to control their partners on other digital platforms (Hello, Nextel).

So, every fall, we used to sit on our hands just waiting for the latest ridiculous demand from the NFL. Two NFL seasons ago, we literally had to rewrite parts of the site to pull any play description beyond “Rush, 12 yards” from the site because the NFL didn’t want us showing as much data as NFL.com. We also couldn’t show a drive chart that showed the results of each play (too much information!) and instead had to focus on a continuous line for each drive. It was stupid, and it wasn’t like it really increased the value of the NFL.com pages with the same data. We also had to pull the play-by-play summary for each quarter until it was completely over. It was ridiculous.

Ultimately, though, since online data rights are measured in the thousands and TV rights are measured in the millions per year, the online rights suffer to maintain the more lucrative TV rights. So, leagues like the NFL and the NCAA feel OK to beat up on small papers and web sites, even when they’re owned by places like ESPN.

I strongly recommend that fans punish such behavior by avoiding the league sites directly. They’re just trying to bilk you for even more money. I do have to point out that ESPN was probably indirectly the reason that this newspaper got shoved out of the NCAA baseball tourney, though. We had a big push to secure online rights to that tournament before I left, and I know ESPN is the TV partner for that event. So… boycott that if you must, but then again… it’s college baseball. I’m sure most of you are boycotting it without even knowing.

Seriously, though, these sorts of policies will leave only the leagues and big, big companies like ESPN or Fox Sports as your source for coverage of your favorite teams. Those of you that deal with MSG, YES, and NESN already have a taste of what this will be like, and an idea of why your cable bill is so ridiculous.

The FCC had public hearings on media consolidation where a number of Hollywood insiders, including actors, writers, producers, and musicians testified. This first day of hearings centered on “whether consolidation in the media has hurting the diversity of programming that Americans see and hear on the open airwaves.” CNET reports that “Of the producers and artists who testified in this first panel, the resounding answer to that question was a big ‘yes.’”

We’ll see what happens when representatives of the major studios and labels speak at future sessions. The article has some good background on how these hearings have come about.

I wonder if most Americans are aware of the extent to which consolidation has occurred in the marketplace. TV is pretty much completely owned by 4 companies: Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal (GE & Vivendi), and News Corp. Add a little bit of Time Warner and you’ve pretty much got every channel on my cable lineup. Movies and music are pretty much controlled by Vivendi, Sony, Time Warner. Disney and Viacom have some smaller holdings. It’s actually amazing how much these six companies control: Viacom/CBS, Disney, Sony, GE (with Vivendi), Time Warner, and News Corp.

If you’re interested in learning more, one of my favorite tools is Columbia Journalism Review’s Who Owns What. They have listings of just about every magazine, television station (e.g. WCAU, WPIX, etc.), cable and broadcast television network (ABC, CBS, FOX, HBO, etc.), radio station, radio network, record label, book publisher, and print journalism outlet and who owns them. Just look at the six companies I’ve highlighted above for some interesting reading. Although, they did break out CBS from Viacom for some reason that I can’t figure out yet.