Those rights are also held by STV, Perform Group and BBC Scotland. The YouTube deal is not a typical rights deal – YouTube is really just providing its platform for a channel managed by the SPL and populated with its own videos.

That mimics the arrangement under which YouTube, which is becoming increasingly interested in sports video rights, broadcasts Indian Premier League cricket matches around the world.

Could we see YouTube gain English Premier League soccer as well as Scottish?

In England, the Premier League in June awarded live multi-platform rights for the 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons to BSkyB and BT, whose combined winning bids of £3.018 billion doubled the previous outlay.

But the Premier League is still yet to unveil winning bids for three outstanding packages – internet clips (including mobile), “near-live” long-form for on-demand and “near-live” long-form for linear. An announcement is expected by October.

If Google goes for anything, it would be the internet clips, currently held by Yahoo (the existing mobile package is held by ESPN). Bidders are likely to include Perform Group and ESPN, which has lost lucrative live rights.

If it paid money to the league, Google could cure court action the league has taken against YouTube in the U.S. for allowing unauthorised YouTube clip uploads. But observers shouldn’t expect a bid…

Whilst the EPL has an array of suitors, the SPL’s YouTube deal is motivated by trying to secure a wider audience for its product, which some consider sub-standard and devalued by the loss of its number-two club, Rangers, to relegation following financial insolvency. A big motivator for the SPL is that its YouTube highlights can be viewed globally, not just at home in Scotland.

Whilst the SPL tells paidContent it never gives its matches away for free, it’s hard to imagine the EPL giving its away for anything other than maximum value  - maximising audience may prove a lesser concern.

The way the SPL structured the deal with YouTube allows Google to go on being a platform rather than a content owner. That may rule YouTube out of a full-on bid for English Premier League rights.

But it would, no doubt, love to get its hands on legal Premier League video in any way it can. YouTube now has a senior director of sports for Europe, Middle East and Africa – Stephen Nuttall, the former commercial director of the EPL’s main live rights holder, BSkyB.

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Deal terms aren’t disclosed. Picklive investors included Passion Capital and several angels. The whole company, not just assets, was sold.

Picklive was founded as “Football 3s” by Tim Morgan, an obsessive Swansea City fan, when he left as CEO of multimedia production house Mint Digital in 2010.

A twist on fantasy football, it was designed to be played along with live soccer matches. Users form their digital team from on-field players, scoring points for their real match actions, as determined by Opta live match data feeds.

The execution was slick and the fanbase loyal. But Picklive was unable to gain greater traction – for instance, through relationships with sports broadcasters or bookmakers, which would have made logical partners.

“In-play” sports betting offered by the large bookmakers is going from strength to strength, advertised heavily during commercial breaks during televised sporting events. But few gamify the system using data and technology quite like Picklive has.

Apollo 13 encapsulates Picklive’s @thetimmorgan @ollyfrank @noamso. Although they never made it to the moon, they return to Earth as heroes

— Wil Stephens (@wilstephens) July 18, 2012

Sad about Picklive. I won 25 quid on the 2011 playoff semi-final and final despite falling asleep during the final.

— Dan Lowth (@DanLowth) July 19, 2012

Morgan told Picklive users on Wednesday:

“Three years ago, we invented live fantasy football as a form of second screen entertainment. Now we feel that we’ve taken the product as far as we can and that the new owners are better placed to develop Picklive in the future to fulfill its potential in other sports and to a wider audience.

“The new owners of Picklive have skills and competence in the gaming arena that mean we are confident that Picklive will go from strength to strength.”

Picklive team members are expected to embark on new projects. Morgan tells paidContent:

“There is unprecedented opportunity to build tech startups at the moment but there are also new models of early-stage funding emerging.

“It’s at this intersection I intend to operate next.”

Sports Millions looks like a good destination for Picklive. The three-year-old company currently operates several Premier League score predictor games, a spot-the-ball game and casino games.

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The league on Wednesday awarded 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2015/16 live broadcast rights across all devices to BSkyB and BT. But near-live, on-demand and internet clips rights are due to be auctioned separately.

The outcome of the live rights auction is bad for ESPN, which built its entry to the UK on its previous rights win but whose games have effectively been pilfered by BT for its BT Vision hybrid DTT-IPTV service.

This second phase the league’s first technology-neutral auction, it also abolishes a package of UK mobile highlights rights, which ESPN has held for the last few years and exploits through its Goals mobile app. Goals will remain available at least for now.

Instead, highlights will be auctioned for internet generally regardless of mobile or other platform. Yahoo currently holds  non-mobile internet highlights rights.

But paidContent expects fast-growing online sports broadcast specialist Perform Group, which raised millions in a 2011 IPO, to show an interest in the new-look highlights package. If successful, it could license Premier League highlights to many other websites through its Omnisport player.

When asked, BSkyB, BT, ESPN and Perform all declined to say whether they are bidding for the near-live and internet highlights packages. Bids are confidential.

With its new live rights, BT said it will syndicate to other operators a channel it is creating to exploit its games, but best interactive experience will be reserved for those who take BT’s Infinity fibre broadband.

Sky will continue showing live games via Sky Sports not just to TVs but over mobiles, tablets and, increasingly, to internet-connected TVs.

The operator previously acquired the out-of-home Wi-Fi network service The Cloud to support mobile viewing and recently bought IPTV service Acetrax as a beachhead to internet TV. BSkyB is also preparing for this summer’s launch of Now TV, its new pay-TV brand for internet TVs, which is also expected to carry Sky Sports.

The Premier League told paidContent it would not disclose the timescale for the separate and outstanding auctions.

At £3.018 billion, the new winning live bids beat the previous ones by £1.254 billion.

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This year it ought to be quite good, based on a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations Verizon is taking to beef up wireless connectivity at Lucas Oil Stadium. The GottaBeMobile site has the details, which are shared in this brief video.

Some interesting facts about the event’s special wireless infrastructure, according to GottaBeMobile:

• 9 antennas that are part of a distributed antenna system (DAS) outside the stadium to handle increased downtown traffic
• 400 antenna internal DAS to handle 3G and 4G LTE voice and data inside the stadium
• 600 antenna Wi-Fi system capable of handling 28,000 simultaneous connected users; free for Super Bowl 46
• 3 cell on wheels (COWs). Stand-alone generator-powered cell towers to handle the extremely high-demand areas

Of course, if you are spending a few thousand dollars to be a live spectator at the big game, you will probably want to pay close attention the live action. But it’s nice to know you can tweet about how good that $12 hot dog was at halftime, no?

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The increase in net additions was a big boost over previous quarters, as DirecTV only added 26,000 subscribers in the second quarter and 174,000 in the third quarter 2010. And it runs in contrast to weak subscriber numbers posted by many of its competitors in the pay TV business: Comcast lost 165,000 subscribers in the same period, with Time Warner Cable, Charter and Cablevision dropping 128,000, 64,800 and 19,000 subscribers respectively. Even gains at subscriber gains at IPTV providers Verizon and AT&T were lower than expected, with Verizon adding just 131,000 and AT&T adding 176,000 in the same period.

Much of the growth came from the strength of a promotional offer DirecTV extended to subscribers that gave them free access to its exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket package, as long as they signed up for a two-year contract. That led to a huge number of new NFL Sunday Ticket users. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Mike White said DirecTV had 1.1 million Sunday Ticket users sign up, compared to 300,000 in the prior year. And not all of them were free users: White said the number who paid for the package this year also increased over the previous year.

While it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, the increase in Sunday Ticket subscribers has led to an increase in viewership. White said viewers watched 70 percent more NFL Sunday Ticket content than they had a year before, and even viewership on mobile devices was up 40 percent in the first few months of the football season.

For DirecTV, Sunday Ticket growth not only means a big boost in subscribers this year, but a bigger pool of users to market renewals against next year. How many will actually pay for the service next year remains to be seen, and will go a long way toward determining the true value of the promotion. In the short term, though, DirecTV is just happy to be rapidly adding paying subscribers while other pay TV providers are struggling.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user Brian Cantoni.

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This isn’t the first event Comcast has broadcast in 3-D, but unlike this year’s Masters tourney, the 3-D comes courtesy of ESPN 3-D, which launches on June 11, just in time for the World Cup. The 3-D excitement will also be available to DirecTV subscribers (who will get access as part of a free upgrade).

Due to the time difference, as the Comcast blog post points out, many people may find themselves taking advantage of the On Demand service, though these games will not apparently be available in 3-D.

Per CNET, 25 matches over the course of the 64-match tourney will get the full 3-D treatment, including the finals. The list of matches below comes from 3-D TV Reviews, which isn’t happy about the lack of England games being covered:

June
11 South Africa v Mexico
12 Argentina v Nigeria
13 Gemany v Australia

14 Netherlands v Denmark
15 Brazil v Korea DPR

16 Spain v Switzerland
17 Argentina v Korea Republic
18 Slovenia v USA

19 Netherlands v Japan
20 Brazil v Ivory Coast
21 Spain v Honduras
21 Nigeria v Korea Republic

23 Ghana v Germany

24 Slovakia v Italy

25 Portugal v Brazil
27 Winner group B v Runner-up group A
28 Winner group E v Runner-up group F
28 Winner group G v Runner-up group H

July

2 Quarter-final

3 Quarter-final
3 Quarter-final
6 Semi-final
7 Semi-final
10 3rd place play-off

11 Final

The US isn’t the only nation broadcasting 3-D — Australia, as just one example, will have access to 3-D coverage from both Fox Sports and local broadcaster SBS.

The event could be a major factor in driving 3-D adoption in the home, though only 15 percent of consumers polled in April thought they would be buying a 3-D TV anytime soon.

We’ll update this post with more 3-D details as we have them.

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On Thursday, April 29, We Are ND, a music video featuring the funk artist Freekbass, was uploaded to Notre Dame’s official YouTube channel. After a week online, the video has racked up nearly 190,000 views — but the majority of them are hate-clicks.

The reaction to We Are ND has been vehement, especially by online writers who cover the Notre Dame football world and fiercely mocked the video within a day of its posting. This was followed by a Facebook group created so that the Notre Dame community might voice their anger — possibly because per University policy, no commenting is allowed on its YouTube videos.

The group “Protest ‘We Are ND’ Video” currently has over 3,600 members and its wall includes comments like: “I hate this video. The bug-eyed weirdo posing as an ND fan does not represent my school. I want him to make him eat his feather hat.” (That’s one of the nicer ones.)

The uproar over this video, though, is due to a major misunderstanding and, maybe, a bad couple of seasons. Because it was uploaded to the official Notre Dame YouTube account, We Are ND was assumed to be a new recruiting or marketing video for the school. But according to Notre Dame alumni and faculty member Ted Mandell, who produced the video, that was never its intent.

In reality, We Are ND was created by the school’s Film, Television and Theater department for the end-of-the-year student athletics awards ceremony (known as the O.S.C.A.R.S.). After it got a great reaction at the show, the school’s Office of Communications decided to put the video on YouTube — however, Fighting Irish loyalists online were not as pleased.

The reason for the misunderstanding, according to Mandell, came down to people’s expectations. “The fact that this is a fun, goofy, carefree video threw some people for a loop,” he said via phone. “People expected that when [a video] is on a university YouTube channel, it would have the same feel as the other videos, and when those expectations weren’t met, people got upset.”

When compared to other videos produced by Notre Dame, it’s not hard to see how Irish loyalists might have been confused. For one thing, Notre Dame’s music choices tend to be much more on the somber side — take as an example this Game Day in 90 Seconds time-lapsed video, which uses a choral orchestration of the Notre Dame Victory March as score.

In fact some people, according to Mandell, felt that this song was meant to replace the traditional Notre Dame songs — which was not the case.

Because the video initially spread through Notre Dame football blogs, the negative press it accumulated was impossible to counteract, even after Mandell wrote a post on the Notre Dame FTT site explaining the video’s origins.

But Mandell feels that “If this video showed up at the right celebratory moment, it would have been great.” That moment, however, was not during the post-season following the third consecutive poor season for Notre Dame football. Notre Dame commenter John Walters summed this up in his post on the video:

Hasn’t the Class of 2010 suffered enough? Four straight losses to USC. Two home losses to Navy. The 3-9 season… And now, just a week or so before graduation, this video.

“This stuff gets around so fast, you can’t stop it,” Mandell said. “It’s a runaway snowball. It takes a while for it to get to the bottom of the hill and stop melting.”

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Conan collected 215,145 tweets for the week, with a peak of 51,843 tweets on Tuesday, Jan. 12 — the same day that he sent out a statement declining NBC’s offer to move The Tonight Show to 12:05 instead of 11:35. Jay Leno was the third most-tweeted about TV topic for the week, with a total of 91,035 posts all week and a peak of 19,336 posts on Thursday, Jan. 14.

Not everyone was talking about the late-night drama going on between Conan and Leno, however. The Gleeks came out in full force when news of a second season of Glee broke early in the week. The show was tweeted about 98,067 times during the week, with a high of 29,715 on Monday. And Jersey Shore also did well, as viewers tweeted 35,007 times on Friday, and 66,254 times during the week.

It was also a big week for football, as the NFL playoffs were in full effect. If tweets translated into points, the Dallas Cowboys might have had a fighting chance against the Minnesota Vikings. Instead, the team’s embarrassing loss led to an outcry on Twitter — with 111,966 tweets on Sunday and a weekly total of 147,718. The Saints were second, with a peak of 57,023 on Saturday — the day of their game — and 120,664 in total. The Vikings were third, with 82,056 posts on Sunday and 100,236 total, and the Chargers came in fourth, with 74,073 posts throughout the week and 55,743 on Sunday. Fifth and sixth were the Colts, with 74,025 during the week and a peak of 47,059 on Sunday, and the Jets, with 72,001 for the week and a peak of 28,355 during their win on Sunday, who will play each other next week in the AFC Championship game.

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