LONDON (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch’s Sky (SKYB.L) will pay 3.58 billion pounds to show 128 Premier League matches for three seasons from 2019/20 in a deal that brings to an end rampant inflation in the value of the domestic rights for English top-flight soccer.
There was speculation that a U.S. internet giant such as Amazon (AMZN.O), Facebook (FB.O) or Netflix (NFLX.O) would enter the fray.
But, unfortunately, they did not. We are in 2018 and it is still not possible to watch all soccer matches (or for that matter all sports competitions) on Internet. And I mean a sports competition anywhere in the world, not limited by your IP (the dreaded message "The broadcast is not available in your country.").
If Steve Jobs had lived perhaps he could have done something about the sports broadcasting rights the same way he did it for music. Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Reed Hastings could follow Steve Jobs' steps or perhaps they tried and it is not possible (not yet at least).
www.wired.com/2010/04/0428itunes-music-store-opens/
“When we first approached the labels, the online music business was a disaster,” Jobs told Steven Levy, author of The Perfect Thing. “Nobody had ever sold a song for 99 cents. Nobody really ever sold a song. And we walked in, and we said, ‘We want to sell songs a la carte. We want to sell albums, too, but we want to sell songs individually.’ They thought that would be the death of the album.”
www.rollingstone.com/music/news/steve-jobs-music-vision-20111007 (my bold)
Downloading music before iTunes wasn't hard, as long as you didn't mind breaking the law. But paying for a song online and storing it legally on a hard drive? All but impossible. Major labels had responded to the digital revolution by filing lawsuits against services like Napster instead of making it easier for members of the public to access music. By April 2002, the fans were starting to get pissed off – and so was Steve Jobs.
So Apple's CEO called the president of AOL Time Warner to complain. The president quickly patched in Paul Vidich, an executive at Warner Music Group, the storied label that acts including Madonna, R.E.M. and Neil Young called home. Vidich listened as Jobs snarled that the labels' digital-music services – clunky, pricey, unpopular options like MusicNet and Pressplay – had gotten it all wrong. Jobs had something better in mind, a new product that would actually get consumers to pay for online music in huge numbers. As he shared the beginnings of an idea that would eventually become the iTunes Music Store, Vidich listened in awe. "That's exactly what we need," Vidich told him.
The vision that Jobs started sketching out that day would soon redefine the future of music. Over the next eight years, Apple went on to sell 300 million iPods and 10 billion tracks via the iTunes Store, leapfrogging Wal-Mart and Best Buy as the world's biggest music retailer. And digital music helped Jobs transform Apple into the world's most powerful technology company after years as the underdog. "It was all intuitive to him," says Vidich. "He had a passion for music, and it was that passion that led him to iTunes."
....
In the months leading up to the iTunes Music Store's April 28th, 2003 debut, Jobs made it a personal priority. Many tech companies had already tried and failed to convince the labels to license their vast catalogs for online use – but none of them had Steve Jobs as their lead negotiator. "He pushed us in ways we needed to be pushed," recalls Roger Faxon, who, as CEO of EMI Group, helped license the Beatles' catalog to iTunes last year. "He sometimes didn't hold the executives in very high esteem, but he always put the creators of music at the pinnacle of the business. That's what he was trying to create – a way for their music to reach consumers."
A website with all the sports competitions does exist in fact. If the competition is broadcast, anywhere in the world, it will be on the website.
I do not know about the legality of the site, but it works (most of the time). However, I would prefer an 'official' website where I would not be afraid of being infected by viruses and malware.
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