ESPN 360 - Net Neutrality, ETC
For the first time, ESPN put together their best version of the full assault. They had Miami vs. Florida State on ESPN, ESPN2, and their new online TV channel ESPN 360. All the stations had slightly different coverage, so that ESPN could provide some sort of ultimate fan experience.
What they ended up doing was over-covering a snooze fest as Florida State defeats Miami 13-10. And it serves ESPN right that they ended up with such a boring game.
Why am I so vindictive toward the “Worldwide Leader” right now?
ESPN 360, the new online sports video channel, is not available to me as a customer of Adelphia/Time Warner cable here in the Cleveland area. If you go to ESPN’s FAQ to find out why, you would think that it is the fault of my cable company. They say that my cable company doesn’t offer ESPN 360.
What they should say is that my cable company wouldn’t pay a service fee for the rights to carry ESPN 360 over the Internet. That might sound funny to some of you. How can something not be available on the Internet? Back in the AOL dial-up days there were differences between the offerings of Internet, but in the broadband world, the Internet normally looks the same whether it is coming via DSL or Cable modem. Not so with ESPN’s new 360 video offering.
This is a relatively bold and new business model in the Internet world, even if it has always been the norm since the beginning of Cable TV. Each cable service provider would have to pay for the right to have MTV, ESPN, TNT, WGN, and whatever other channels they wanted on their service. Then the cable company would make that part of a package, or leave a channel out on an island waiting to see if anyone wanted to pay extra for the right to view those channels.
In the Internet, it has never worked that way. It has pretty much always been, one person making their own Internet content decisions. The Internet Service Provider would never make any content decisions on behalf of the consumer, including the blocking of services. And this openness and freeness is how the Internet is usually thought of.
With ESPN’s new plan, they are throwing a lot of those things into question. Instead of allowing me to subscribe to 360 as an individual, they have decided to try to charge my ISP. I understand the business reasons that ESPN is trying this. They want to be compensated for their online video. They want to make sure their bills are paid to cover the cost of the service. They don’t want to take a chance that they won’t be able to recoup their expenses with advertising alone. They want to make sure they have as much adoption of their service as possible, and making it APPEAR free to Internet users is a good way to do that.
But none of this works for me. I am a member of ESPN’s Insider so that I get their stupid magazine and extra access to Insider articles. And even I can’t watch ESPN 360 by logging in. That is not the way to treat your most loyal customers, I don’t think.
But beyond that, this could end up being very harmful to the Internet as a whole, and this is why I applaud Adelphia/Time Warner for not paying ESPN’s 360 ransom. If other companies try to adopt this kind of business model, then it thrusts the ISP’s into more of a decision-making role as the service provider. The only decisions I want my ISP to make is on how much total bandwidth is provided to me. If I want to load up on Skype, iTunes, BitTorrent and other services and it is within the parameters of my own bandwidth usage, I want to be able to do that.
And while ESPN’s 360 is just one small thing, if it catches on, it could throw the whole culture of the Internet and how services are served to individuals on the Internet into chaos.
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Sideblog 
- FreeTheAirwaves.org Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 7:51 am
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The ESPN Full circle thing they were doing on ESPN2 was really stupid, who cares about watching close ups of Larry Coker and Bobby Bowden?
Sports Illustrated has countered the whole ESPN-Insiders360 thing with a nifty desktop application called MySI were you can get scrolling news,schedules, stats, weather,point spreads, etc on your toolbar for free…I have it at home, and like to peruse it for pitching matchups and fantasy news, all without having to watch close ups of coaches and listen to 35 different prognosticators argue about why Tony Gonzales is a bad fantasy football player…
wait… the internet is free?