google and NFL

Just read this ...Google and NFL meet; Sunday Ticket up for grabs?

After some initial thought, why not? DirectTV has always been limited to satellite subscribers, but the internet is a far bigger market, not just here but overseas. I wonder if Google will need to pay re-transmission fees of local broadcast game to Fox, ABC/ESPN, CBS and NBC?

Since the conferences are split up among divisions of East, North, South, and West I always thought it would be nice to have the each of the major broadcasters have a division and have the broadcast rights for the home games of that division. Instead of the current convoluted mish mash of Thursday Night games, Sunday Night games and Monday Night games as well as Sunday football. There's also DirectTV and their out-of-market games broadcast as well as Dish and their Red Zone broadcast.

Google could consolidate all of this much better and really saturate broadband links on game days/nights. It's interesting that their is speculation that DirectTV is losing money.

One thing I do know is the regular TV broadcast is the first to be transmitted out to the world as the DirectTV broadcast is seconds behind I'll estimate about 5-6 seconds. Enough to make a difference in the betting world for in-game betting. Imagine if Google had control of all the broadcasts, they could cut that delay down to milliseconds (or a least a second or two), thus no advantage would be gained by an informed gambler (with access to real time broadcast of the game).

With Google in the game, a new bidding war appears to have begun and this time, the normal TV broadcaster will probably play the regulation rules and fees to gain an advantage, but the NFL should move on to the most successful online presence if they expect to grow the sport as well as revenues.

Well we'll see how this all plays out....