The Festival of the Boot
Rugby season 2006 started this month, with the Six Nations commencing in Europe on the 4th of Feb, and the Super 14 kicking off last weekend. For a rugby fan like myself, this means some very good times. Since I don't have cable (and even if I did, they wouldn't be showing rugby, only repeats of Star Trek Voyager, CSI and Classic Hockey Finals) I'm grabbing the games off the net. It delights me that people in different countries are devoting their time to capture, encode and post games only a few hours after they're shown, and make them available to other fans all round the world. Games are typically about 900MB each and take many hours to download, so I run them overnight, or when I'm out wrestling bears.
Even more amazing is that the volunteer capture brigade has managed to get every game from both competitions so far. This poses a rather daunting equation: 10 games x 2 hours = 20 hours viewing per week. This is an insane amount of time, even for a rabid fan, and I'm happy to say that I don't have the stamina. There are certain games I just won't miss, but there are others that hold very little interest unless I'm at near-fatal boredom levels, and still others in between that could go either way. Anything with Italy or two South African teams is probably going to get skipped, although I wouldn't mind seeing the extended highlights.
These games (and other sporting events) are an interesting slice of the digital video content pie, being very time-dependent and rarely viewed more than once. If I know the outcome of the game, the content is suddenly a lot less valuable to me. The longer I wait to view it, the more likely it is that someone will let the final score slip, and I'll be forced to punch their lights out. Once I've seen the game, I may as well delete the video file (unless I wanted to give it to a friend or use it for my own highlight or blooper reel). This makes extended P2P trading unlikely, unless the game was something huge, like a world cup final or that infamous local derby with six hot Brazillian streakers. Sport seems like a really good fit for digital content delivery, but until a forward-thinking company offers official downloads of the games for US$1.99 per game, I'll stick with the swarm.