Mobile DTV Broadcasts of Super Bowl and NFL Games Were To Be Blacked Out
Tens of millions of viewers were expected to tune to CBS Sunday to watch the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens face off in the Super Bowl. Increasingly, the game is available on more devices and online. Through an agreement with the NFL, Verizon Wireless NFL Mobile customers were to get a live stream of the game on their mobile devices. But one place the Super Bowl was not scheduled to be seen this weekend was on TV stations’ mobile DTV broadcasts.
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Dozens of TV stations, including some of the major networks’ owned and operated stations, have added mobile DTV simulcasts in the last 12 months. But because of rights restrictions, NFL games have been blacked out on those transmissions all season, including the championship game.
Few TV viewers skip the Super Bowl. The event has drawn an average audience of nearly 110 million in the U.S. over the last three years, according to Nielsen figures. Gathering around a TV in a crowded living room or bar to watch the game and accompanying ads has become a modern tradition. But the lack of NFL rights for mobile TV is seen by some in the industry as a missed opportunity for the fledgling mobile DTV service.
"We are at the start of this market, and we sure hope the relevant stakeholders can iron out their copyright issues, because it would certainly enhance the service even more,” said Brian Steinberg, vice president-marketing for Elgato Systems, which makes mobile DTV receivers.
"These are decisions made by the individual networks,” a spokeswoman for the Mobile Content Venture, a joint venture among Fox, NBC, and 10 station groups that introduced the Dyle TV mobile DTV service last year said: “Dyle is required to comply with the network’s decision on the programming made available to users through Dyle.” CBS, which isn’t a member of the Mobile Content Venture, has yet to add mobile DTV broadcasts at any of the CBS-affiliated stations it owns, a spokesman said. Some of its CW and independent stations do offer mobile broadcasts.
The restrictions go back to the league itself. “The NFL’s network broadcast partners have the rights to distribute via over-the-air television,” a league spokesman said. “They do not have the rights to use technology to make that signal available to mobile phones,” he said. Verizon Wireless’s mobile rights are exclusive, he said.