Tipping point: latest free-to-air review is timely opportunity to change things

To paraphrase Casablanca's Captain Renault, I'm shocked, shocked, to find politicians and sporting organisations choosing money over principle. Whatever next – alcohol companies sponsoring sport in order to boost profits?

Still, we may not have to wait too long for more bureaucratic expediency. You might have forgotten but last June the Department of Communications announced its latest review into the list of designated sport and cultural events which are deemed of major importance to society and thus kept on free-to-air television.

The announcement got a few headlines at the time – the usual populist grandstanders spouting what they believe we want to hear – and then got forgotten. However, a quick phone call to the Department of Communications has revealed that Minister Alex White will outline the results of this review soon.

All interested parties, we are assured, have made submissions, and since most sports bodies with a good hold of the pay-per-view money-hose have the same “don’t-rock-the-boat” default setting as government, the outcome is almost certainly to be another grandiloquent take on “steady-as-she-goes”.

Arguing against pay-per-view is a waste of time. That telly ship has gone, sailed over the horizon with any stray altruistic barnacles long since scraped from its bottom-line. Now, instead of outrage, there’s a sense of inevitability.

British Open

Look at the reaction to recent speculation about the R&A flogging the British Open rights next year: a few objections but mostly of the half-hearted going-through-the-motions kind.

The telly horizon is no different in Ireland. The days of one national sport – live English Premiership soccer – being the devil incarnate vanished when the other national obsession, mother GAA, piously held its Gaelic nose and togged out for the pay-per-view game too.

And as rugby has found out, once you’ve gorged on some exotic pay-per-view soup it’s all but impossible to go back to local free-to-air tack. Rugby’s fortunes are as conjoined with flogging rights as two front rows.

So painting crude boogie-man cartoons is a cop-out. Since most everything is a commodity, how can sport be any different? Orwell was off beam with his war without the shooting line but it’s hard to argue with him about money trumping faith and hope every time.

Still, it’s hard to stomach the platitudes organisations come out with when presenting straight-forward money-grabs as something somehow more worthy: funding mechanisms for the grassroots, broadening potential support bases, building for the 21st century, yadda-yadda.

The GAA especially likes the whole new multi-media platform and reaching out to the global Diaspora bit, easily ignoring uber-green Gaels bitching about heritage, community and ethos because no country board bean-counter is ever going to worry about intangible principles when there’s a chance of planting a foot in the corporate door.

So after all this time it really must still be discomforting to suits everywhere that the majority of people persist with free-to-air for their sport. It’s a reliance which means a diet of mostly second-rate stuff that there’s no demand for, but it nonetheless remains a reality that most of us either can’t or won’t pay to view.

Access is always possible of course, usually down the pub. But whatever grandiose “machine-that-goes-ping” future is outlined, the reality remains, and is likely to remain for some time to come, that going pay-per-view reduces your audience, which pitches up some rather fundamental questions.

The most high-falutin’ is actually whether sport should be commoditised like everything else or is it worth more than that.

Much more mundane, but also probably much more relevant though, is whether Ireland’s list of guaranteed free-to-air events can be made broader and more meaningful for the good of the majority in Ireland and for sport in general.

This latest review is actually a timely opportunity to change things; not settle for “steady-as-she-goes” but legislatively recognise that live terrestrial coverage actually contributes something to sport.

You can’t immediately count it on a balance sheet but the cost of not factoring it in will eventually occur, and become very calculable indeed in terms of audience.

Because building the next generation of sports consumers – God, the corporate jargon – depends on getting their attention young, a bit like alcohol in fact.

It’s not like the challenge of maintaining a serious designated free-to-air list of events is some scary unknown.

That sporting backwater called Australia manages to pull it off rather well to such an extent that most of the subscription channels down under are so underwhelming that compromise ideas about simultaneous access, both free-to-air and pay-per view, of specified events and allowing the public to decide, have been floated.

Resonance

The department criteria for judging what should be on the Irish list is based on “the extent to which the event has a special general resonance for the people of Ireland”.

Does anyone believe Ireland rugby internationals, for instance, don't contain such a resonance? Or a Munster hurling final?

Of course not, and now’s a time to actually act to ensure free live coverage of resonant events, which are worth treating better than mere commodities to be horse-traded.