BWF Media and Youtube

Discussion in 'General Forum' started by Giga01, Mar 11, 2013.

  1. Giga01

    Giga01 Regular Member

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    This is something I have been thinking about lately and I might just as well post this here, I think BWF-Media should makethemselves more independent from youtube and other external videodistributing sources.

    Imagine if you could stream superseries,perhaps also Grand Prix, tournaments from some sort of official BWF website, like the one at BadmintonEurope( And I can't imagine why it's only Badminton Europe that doesthis , the other regions should should also be able to. ) or to take an example from another sport, the ITTF site ( http://www.ittf.com/ittv/ ).
    There are many people who can't or won't watch badminton on Youtubeand BWF should make the tournament videos available to that audienceas well.
    I'm guessing there aremillions of badmintonfans that aren't able to see nearly as much ofthe top players as they would want to because of Youtube beingblocked from their country etc.

    Also, they should make manymore of the videos available offline. I don't always have internetconnection and might still want to watch badminton.

    BWFshould perhaps offer EVERY competition for download at their site,the more courts being recorded and made available from the tournament the better.
    And, and many will not agreewith me about this, charge you for it.


    Badminton as a sport needsmoney. They could perhaps offer all of the videos at an onlinearchive outside of youtube, so that everyone can watch it ONLINE forfree, but if you want to watch it OFFLINE or download it so that youlater could watch it on your tv, charge you a very, very small fee. Ihave no clue how much those matches should cost, or if you should pay letfor matches or the whole tournament or perhaps pay monthly or yearlyetc.

    So what I think BWF should provide is:
    A way to watch badmintonoutside of youtube. And some official way to watch it offline, thatthe sport maybe makes money from.

    And that's it. Any thoughts?
     
  2. kwun

    kwun Administrator

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    AFAIK, the major country in which youtube is not available is China. however, if i understand correctly, China also has a license on BWF videos which means they are not available in youtube due to licensing anyway even if youtube were available.

    the remaining countries are smaller and likely won't be as influential.

    as for youtube vs. home brew. there are certain advantages in going with youtube:

    - youtube is a social platform, there are many people in all walks of life who access youtube for one reason or another (my 5/7 yrs old sons regularly watch cartoon on youtube). and badminton fans certain will be referred to the BWF videos during such accesses. homebrew platform won't have this power

    - youtube has pretty much all the technical problem resolved. BWF won't need to hire a person or companies to develop all the servers and technical infrastructure to support their own.

    - as for revenue, all the videos in BWF are monetized. and i think BWF is earning a decent if not quite handsome sum from the live streaming as well as the replay of badminton matches. this is also done completely by youtube/google which means BWF don't need to go out to find their own revenue source.

    while being our international body, i don't think BWF has the technical resources to do it effectively, and youtube seems like a really good solution and i think it was a really good choice and it is working out fine.

    however, it is not perfect, i do hope to see some improvements:

    - cover more than just SS+ events.
    - cover more than just one court.

    badminton fans are interested in not just the TV court. we will be happy to see non-commentated videos if it means we can see matches of our favorite players in non-TV court.
     
  3. Giga01

    Giga01 Regular Member

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    Thanks kwun for your insight on this, I mostly agree with you.
    Perhaps this sort of site should mostly be there as an alternative, because as you said even if those other countries outside of China are small there are still probably fan's there that want but can't watch badminton.

    What do you think about BWF offering the videos offline? BC is doing a very good job of providing videos but it would be nice if BWF could do something more, some of the videos from the non-tv courts aren't the best quality, and some videos are very hard to find etc. If BWF could host some sort of online archive of some sort, might be kind of hard to do though.

    One thing about those last improvements:

    http://www.swissopen.com/index.php?id=8&L=1

    Here it seems like Swissopen have provided live-stream for many courts, without commentary and graphics of course, but still!

    It feels somewhat strange that a Grand Prix level tournament has this and that All-England didn't. Just can't believe that BWF doesn't have the resources when Badminton Europe can have their own video thingy with matches from qualification to final for some tournaments and Swiss Open having livestreaming on all courts. How much of this limitation is because of Youtube I don't know.
     
  4. lordrogue

    lordrogue Regular Member

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    Badminton Europe isn't perfect either. Their stream won't go full screen and when they compress to live stream youtube the quality is terrible. YouTube is a decent platform that support high quality streaming, although i don't know why they insist on low quality 480p, i think they regressed in comparison to last year, where many tournaments were at least 720p.
    But badminton Europe doesn't force Gill down your throat, thats a plus.
     
  5. demolidor

    demolidor Regular Member

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    I think charging for offline downloads will not work anyway because it only needs one person to sign up who can upload it to wherever so the rest can download for free ...
     
  6. cobalt

    cobalt Moderator

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    My 2c....

    BWF wouldn't really view the youtube live streaming as a singinficant revenue source -- not yet, in any case. Their revenue would be mainly from the broadcasting contracts. This news item doesn't say much but gives an indication of BWF's priorities....

    http://www.bwfbadminton.org/news_item.aspx?id=70576

    Last year's Swedish Open International had excellent live streaming - handled almost completely by twobeer and it wasn't on youtube - but then the viewership was never in danger of exceeding a couple of thousand at most.

    Youtube has massive advantages over almost any other streaming/online option because of the reasons Kwun outlined, (scalability, reach, redundancy, centralized management, marketing) among others.

    There has been some related discussion in this thread as well...
    BWF: get with the program
     
  7. Giga01

    Giga01 Regular Member

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    I was thinking about posting it in your thread cobalt but thought it might not fit and perhaps get more exposure if it had it's own thread...close this one if you think it's better to have it there.
     
    #7 Giga01, Mar 11, 2013
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2013
  8. cobalt

    cobalt Moderator

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    No no! This thread is good! :) Just thought I'd point out some info there in case you were looking for....
     
  9. Giga01

    Giga01 Regular Member

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    Yeah, agreed, Badminton Europe is FAR from perfect! I think it's quite nice of them however to archive so many videos, from qualification rounds to finals, and that they are able to do that shows for me that BWF at least COULD do something like that for many more tournaments. I don't want to only be able to watch it starting from Round 16...
     
    #9 Giga01, Mar 11, 2013
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2013
  10. amleto

    amleto Regular Member

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    how the hell does an offline download work?
     
  11. demolidor

    demolidor Regular Member

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    Downloading for offline viewing purposes, simply put: a downloadable copy you can watch without having to be online/streaming. Not that you can't already do it with all the YouTube plugins available for various browsers of course ...

    "Also, they should make many more of the videos available offline. I don't always have internet connection and might still want to watch badminton."
     
  12. cobalt

    cobalt Moderator

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    A lot of events have feeds from Bet365 or other sources, and regional sports channels buy up broadcasting rights for "affordable" prices. The serious viewership generally isn't on in the early rounds, and for anything less than SS/SSP it becomes a question of economics.

    As for SS/SSP in the early rounds, again, BWF has to adhere to the contracts with the broadcasters, who may actually be broadcasting early rounds live, but not providing an uplink/encoding stream for BWF, who may have figured out they cannot afford to outlay the expense for so many courts in the early rounds. Each court means one more stream. BWF needs to budget for each stream as well as what encoded quality they will uplink at.

    So, if BWF is not provided the stream, it does not have the rights -- those belong to the broadcaster who has paid for them. Therefore BWF cannot post-match upload the videos either. Unless they pay the broadcaster for limited rights say, one week or one month after the event. Just as NBC (was it NBC? :confused: ) restricted viewing of live matches during the OG 2012, but made the videos public after, I think, a month.... and that would amont to just a public service for BWF, so why would they want to pay for it?

    Broadcast/licensing rights. The bigger the event, the more the cash and infrastructure/production outlay for the broadcaster, and he would exert more control over filming/broadcasting/streaming. BWF/Youtube streaming piggybacks off the broadcaster's feed. That's most likely the deal.

    The Int'l/GP/GPG events don't (yet) have that kind of broadcaster's investment, and that makes it easier for the organiser to promote the event with off-the-shelf technology and "acceptable" uplinks. It's that same off-the-shelf technology that allows the organiser to save the video even while it's being streamed, and later upload it somewhere and make it available.
     
    #12 cobalt, Mar 11, 2013
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2013
  13. renbo

    renbo Regular Member

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    If I may add something to our wishlist, it would be more intelligent programmation. In the last AE, for example, we had LCW - WZM in R16, LCW - NTM in Quarters, LCW - Tanongsak in SF and LCW - CL in the final. Can we think of something more stupid? Can't we see different players from time to time? I am sick of it!
     
  14. SigH-Max

    SigH-Max Regular Member

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    From the last All England, I have noticed that a lot of Thais are watching their favorite star Ratchanok Inthanon. The viewer count went up to 40000 :eek:
    I think there is something to do here. This hopefully calls for more quality. The All England videos were perfectible : the earlier ones were laggy, and we even had one cut match. I am not even talking about the poor resolution ...
     
  15. PoonSlayer666

    PoonSlayer666 New Member

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    hey guys, feather flare here. i want to make shortened badminton clips. can i download bwf tv videos of the games, edit it, and post it on my channel afterwards? thanks for your help.
     
  16. phihag

    phihag Regular Member

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    I am not a lawyer, but Canadian copyright law (the one that seems to apply to you) seems to have a fair use exception (called fair dealing), like most western countries. This exception allows you to cut together short scenes, especially if you're adding value (say, highlights for technical purposes/slow motion, discussion, music, ranking of top plays and the like).

    There are also numerous similar channels are already flourishing, so it's not a problem in practice. And of course, both BWF and streaming rightsholders appreciate free marketing, so have no interest in pursuing any video deletion.

    However, the above assumes that your videos contain excerpts, no more than a few rallies of a game in a single video. If your plan is to upload a video of all the rallies of a game without the downtime, fair use is very questionable. In this case, the better approach would be to publish the timecodes of the video, and then instrument a YouTube - or similar - player to just show these, or let people apply the timecodes themselves with their video player.
     

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