Modern ‘live’ football: moving from the panoptican gaze to the performative, virtual and carnivalesque

Drawing on Redhead's discussion of Baudrillard as a theorist of hyperreality, the paper considers the different ways in which the mediatized ‘live’ football spectacle is often modelled on the ‘live’ however eventually usurps the ‘live’ forms position in the cultural economy, thus beginning to replicate the mediatized ‘live’. The blurring of the ‘live’ and ‘real’ through an accelerated mediatization of football allows the formation of an imagined community mobilized by the working class whilst mediated through the sanitization, selling of ‘events’ and the middle classing of football, through the re-encoding of sporting spaces and strategic decision-making about broadcasting. A culture of pub supporting then allows potential for working-class supporters to remove themselves from the panoptican gazing systems of late modern hyperreal football stadia and into carnivalesque performative spaces, which in many cases are hyperreal and simulated themselves

Selling soccer

In July 2002, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) announced that it had sold the live television rights to all of the Republic of Ireland’s home international fixtures during the period 2002 to 2006 to British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) for €7.5 million. In addition, the rights to delayed coverage of the internationals and coverage of the association’s domestic league were sold to the independent commercial station TV3. The state’s public service broadcaster, RTÉ, was left out in the cold thereby ending a forty-year relationship. Only one fifth of Irish homes had access to Sky Sports and although the announcement was greeted with dismay in almost every quarter the FAI described the deal as ‘too good to turn down’. If the deal had gone ahead fans would have had to subscribe to Sky Sports to watch live coverage of their national team playing in the qualifiers for the 2004 European Championship and the 2006 World Cup

(G)hosting television: Ghostwatch and its medium

This article’s subject is Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), a drama broadcast on Halloween night of 1992 which adopted the rhetoric of live non-fiction programming, and attracted controversy and ultimately censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council. In what follows, we argue that Ghostwatch must be understood as a televisually-specific artwork and artefact. We discuss the programme’s ludic relationship with some key features of television during what Ellis (2000) has termed its era of ‘availability’, principally liveness, mass simultaneous viewing, and the flow of the television super-text. We trace the programme’s television-specific historicity whilst acknowledging its allusions and debts to other media (most notably film and radio). We explore the sophisticated ways in which Ghostwatch’s visual grammar and vocabulary and deployment of ‘broadcast talk’ (Scannell 1991) variously ape, comment upon and subvert the rhetoric of factual programming, and the ends to which these strategies are put. We hope that these arguments collectively demonstrate the aesthetic and historical significance of Ghostwatch and identify its relationship to its medium and that medium’s history. We offer the programme as an historically-reflexive artefact, and as an exemplary instance of the work of art in television’s age of broadcasting, liveness and co-presence

Towards Hybrid Cloud-assisted Crowdsourced Live Streaming: Measurement and Analysis

Crowdsourced Live Streaming (CLS), most notably Twitch.tv, has seen explosive growth in its popularity in the past few years. In such systems, any user can lively broadcast video content of interest to others, e.g., from a game player to many online viewers. To fulfill the demands from both massive and heterogeneous broadcasters and viewers, expensive server clusters have been deployed to provide video ingesting and transcoding services. Despite the existence of highly popular channels, a significant portion of the channels is indeed unpopular. Yet as our measurement shows, these broadcasters are consuming considerable system resources; in particular, 25% (resp. 30%) of bandwidth (resp. computation) resources are used by the broadcasters who do not have any viewers at all. In this paper, we closely examine the challenge of handling unpopular live-broadcasting channels in CLS systems and present a comprehensive solution for service partitioning on hybrid cloud. The trace-driven evaluation shows that our hybrid cloud-assisted design can smartly assign ingesting and transcoding tasks to the elastic cloud virtual machines, providing flexible system deployment cost-effectively

I'd hide you: performing live broadcasting in public

We present a study of a mixed reality game called 'I'd Hide You' that involves live video streaming from the city streets. We chart the significant challenges facing performers on the streets who must simultaneously engage in the game, stream compelling video footage featuring themselves, and interact with a remote online audience. We reveal how these street performers manage four key tensions: between their body and camera; between the demands of online audiences and what takes place on-the-street; between what appears 'frontstage' on camera versus what happens 'backstage'; and balancing being a player of the game with being a performer. By reflecting on how they achieve this, we are able to draw out wider lessons for future interfaces aimed at supporting people broadcasting video of themselves to online audiences while engaged in games, sports and other demanding real-world activities

TV MEDIA IN THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA – CURRENT SITUATION AND PERSPECTIVES

The aim of this paper is to present the situation in the Republic of Macedonia by analyzing the number of TV media, their geographical distribution, current legislative and perspectives in TV media development. There is a general agreement among media experts that the number of registered TV media in the RM (56, out of which 6 operate as national TV media) is quite big, having in mind that in RM live about 2 million inhabitants. Recently a new Law on Broadcasting Activity has come into force in order to ensure better regulation of the requirements and the manner of pursuing broadcasting activity in accordance with the international treaties that RM has ratified or acceded to.national TV media, local TV media, geographic distribution.

A review of the viability of creating an Indigenous television broadcasting service

Australians are currently served by two public broadcasting networks. While both the ABC and the SBS have charters that require them to broadcast programs that, in the case of the ABC, “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community”, and, in the case of SBS, “contribute to meeting the communications needs of Australia’s multicultural society, including ethnic, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities”, both broadcasters are inadequately funded and consequently constrained in their ability to fully realise their obligations. Given that Indigenous Australians comprise 2.75% of the Australian population, live in areas across the length and breadth of the country, are disproportionately located in remote areas where access to broadcasting is already limited and speak more than 90 languages, some of which are spoken by only a handful of people, it is not surprising that adequately providing for this sector of the broadcast audience has proved difficult for broadcasters with mandates as comprehensive (and appropriately so) in their expectations as those of the ABC and the SBS. The Alliance believes that all Australians have the right to see and hear stories that reflect their own culture

The Premier League: European Commission broadcasting negotiations

This intervention analyses the new arrangements for the sale of live television rights to FA Premier League (FAPL) games. The new procedures have been produced as a result of ongoing discussions between the FAPL and the European Commission. To ensure compliance with European Union competition legislation, the Premier League has accepted the Commission’s calls for an end to its exclusive distribution of live broadcast rights, bringing to an end BSkyB’s 15-year monopoly of its main subscription driver (Buck and Terazono, 2005). Here, we examine the aims of the European Commission in pursuing the FAPL’s exclusive deal with BSkyB (Sky) and consider whether the deal that has been brokered provides any tangible benefits to the consumer