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Logging on

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Where would we be without the diet of live GAA they have afforded us every Sunday morning in the summers of our exile? Even in an era when the world has shrunk , the cost of calling home is miniscule, and nanas can see and hear their grandkids’ faces on webcams, it was Setanta who gave us our fix of the sports we missed most. We don’t even recognize them as this curious sports conglomerate that owned rights to the Premiership and the PGA Tour. To most of us, they are just the people who provide the technology for us to watch Cork or Kerry or whoever floats your boat on a Sunday morning in some foreign field.
The news reports of Setanta’s demise don’t offer much about how the service they provide to the Irish bars and clubs around the planet might be affected by their financial cave-in. There was a line in the New York Times the other day saying it’s likely to be unaffected. But obviously we should be a tad worried about where Setanta’s diminished status will leave those of us so reliant on that part of its network. One presumes the different parts of the empire will eventually be broken up and sold off and here’s hoping the overseas’ rights to the GAA part of the business fall into good hands.
In the meantime, it’s difficult to stomach some of the snide criticism of the Setanta operation. Sure, these boys over-reached terribly in recent years. Who didn’t, we might well ask, in Celtic Tiger Ireland? But, how quickly everybody forgets that Ryan and O’Rourke were the mavericks that changed the sporting landscape forever back in 1990. That’s when the pair of them were so dismayed at British television deciding not to show Ireland’s World Cup clash with Holland live that they took matters into their own hands.
Brazen as you like, they put in calls to FIFA and the BBC about buying into the satellite feed. Then, they rented the back room of the Top Hat, a dance hall in Ealing, West London, and charged fellow Irish emigrants a tenner each for the right to cheer on the boys in green. It was a little cameo of audacity that ended up begetting a televisual revolution. If it’s a long way from there to starting your own channel and buying up sports’ rights for massively inflated fees, we shouldn’t be thrilled at their failure either.
While most coverage of Setanta’s problems has concentrated on its financial impact on Scottish and English clubs, and the PGA Tour, there is an obvious question for the GAA to be asked too. Namely, what will happen to the overseas’ television rights in the long run? Do they remain a viable entity or has their worth been overtaken and changed by the Internet?
Watching the quality of the live internet coverage of the Tiger Woods, Padraig Harrington and Angel Cabrera grouping during the first round of the US Open last Thursday and Friday brought home the fact the GAA may have to rethink how it handles the overseas rights. Isn’t this the way forward given the availability of broadband in most countries and the ever-clearer picture quality? Especially since it’s already possible to tap into illegal feeds of matches online?
Might it not be better in the long run for fans far from home to be able to pay

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