Munich, FIFA and DRM

I was lucky enough to get a study trip to the World Cup. I have just spent 3 days in Munich, visiting the main technology locations and the International Broadcast Centre (IBC). The IBC is stunning – the best I have ever seen. I’ll post a few photos just now. FIFA run a very tight ship. Big thanks to Dick Wiles from Eurotech Global Sports for such an excellent trip 🙂

Mind you, DRM hovers all over the broadcasting of such events. Interestingly, on the way out to Munich, I bumped into Cory Doctorow at the airport. Cory is leaving London and heading out to LA to do a Fulbright Scholarship on DRM. I asked him if he wanted to come and talk to LOCOG about DRM and he said he’d think about it. If he did, it would no doubt place sports broadcast rights in an interesting space up against emerging technologies. Broadcast rights holders of course fall naturally into the camp opposing net neutrality. One to follow closely.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 16:19 and is filed under London 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Munich, FIFA and DRM”

  1. Cory Doctorow says:
    June 27, 2006 at 16:55

    Hey, Christopher — I’d love to find some time to come by and talk to you about this before I go. The issue is certainly fraught and complex, but for the Olympics, I think this is best thought of in terms of the mission of promoting amateurism. Amateur creativity on the Internet — remix, reuse, repurpose — has defined an entirely novel form of creative endeavor that reaches every corner of the globe. DRM effectlively walls that away. Indeed, because commercial pirates have no trouble breaking DRM (the average mean time between a DRM release to the iTunes Music Store and its appearance on P2P is three minutes) the *only* people you will hinder with Olympic DRM is amateurs.

    What’s more, any DRM you choose is going to have a single rightsholder or a small pool (e.g., Windows DRM) and if you do so, you’re going to force technologists in every corner of the world to license one country’s technology to see our global sporting event. Why should a French company have to license American technology to show the international Olympics?

  2. Administrator says:
    June 27, 2006 at 17:34

    Hello Cory, I get the honour of the first ever comment on my blog coming from you! I’ll be in touch about this. Thanks.

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