Why the NFL and YouTube would make such great teammates

I'm a long-suffering Philadelphia Eagles fan. Not only am I apparently destined to be perennially underwhelmed by the team's on-field results, but as a resident of New York City, I'm forced to make my way down to the local sports bar where I'm subject to the conversational whims of inebriated Giants fans. Since I’m not a DirecTV subscriber and therefore don’t have access to the NFL Sunday Ticket offering, the local sports bar is my lot in life if I ever want to watch my team on television on most Sundays.

But there may be a glimmer of light in the distance: According to reporting from AllThingsD, Google has begun early negotiations with the National Football League about putting out-of-market NFL games on YouTube. This could prove to be a wonderful thing, for both Google and for NFL fans.

First, we must note that these are little more than conversations between two large corporate entities. Companies have conversations all the time, but that rarely means that anything will come of it. Heck, Yahoo was having conversations with Mark Zuckerberg about buying Facebook back in 2006. Still, Google teaming up with the NFL at this particular time would make sense for a variety of reasons.

First, Google has a lot of money—certainly enough to best DirecTV’s $1 billion-a-year deal with the NFL (and Google has been more than willing to engage in billion dollar deals as of late). For its part, the NFL may indeed be interested in teaming up with Google, but at the very least is willing to let DirecTV—whose contract ends at the end of this season—know that it has other pigskin suitors.

Google has been on the fringe of TV for years, but has never been quite able to make its way into the endzone of the American living room. This is something the NFL can help with. Hands-down, professional football is the most popular sport in the United States. And aside from the eyeballs and attention it brings, NFL games carry the cachet of being all-American, mainstream, apple pie. It was arguably the NFL that gave legitimacy to the upstart Fox network (then associated with low-brow fare like Married with Children) when it first won the rights to broadcast NFC games in 1994.

Mainstream cachet—and ubiquity—is something that Google desperately wants right now for its video-on-demand options. This is particularly true now as the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant may have finally discovered the key to America’s collective living room in the form of Chromecast. At only $35, Google’s little TV dongle will give every modern TV access to the Web via Google in a way that Google TV has never been able to accomplish over the past three years. Since its introduction last month, Chromecast has sold at a brisk pace—so much that Google has had problems keeping up with demand.

It is also important to note that Google was represented in its talks with the NFL not only by CEO Larry Page but by YouTube content boss Robert Kyncle as well. YouTube has been steadily building its brand recognition as an original content studio, rather than a mere conduit for adorable cat videos and other meme-ish oddities. In just the past year, YouTube has championed paid subscriptions for its popular channels, established original content events like Comedy Week and Geek Week, and re-vamped its mobile app to make it more Chromecast-friendly (and therefore, friendlier to living rooms as well).

 Whatever happens, Google appears to be making all the right moves to make YouTube a content network, not just a user-submitted video repository.

Easy polyscreen access to America's favorite game might be coming soon.
As consumers lurch over the tipping point of comfort with streaming content, there is increasing competition to become the go-to conduit for streaming-to-TV access with suitors in the form of Microsoft, Apple, Roku, and countless others.

The NFL could prove to be just the product that could tie America’s heart to one preferred medium—as the league did for Fox two decades ago. And as with Fox in the early 1990s, Google may be willing to take a financial loss with expensive NFL rights—at least, at first—as the real return on investments will be further down the line in the form of brand legitimacy.

This is all conjecture, of course, but a theoretical YouTube NFL channel would give fans more affordable access to the out-of-market game across multiple screens. (It's very unlikely the NFL would give up very lucrative in-market network TV deals for now.) Unlike with DirectTV, YouTube would be able to offer access to just the NFL channel. Currently, Direct TV requires users to buy a DirecTV home subscription when available. (The provider does offer online access to Sunday Ticket without a home connection for $300-a-season, but only when DirecTV is not available).

Google could certainly offer a better deal than this. In the process it might sell a lot of Chromecasts and—more importantly—get more eyeballs acquainted with YouTube on the TV.

For the 2013–14 season, Sunday Ticket remains a DirecTV exclusive. So for the next several Sundays, as I’m forced to interact with with drunks recalling all of the Giants’ past Super Bowl victories, I will have at least some hope that in the not-too-distant future, I may yet get access to the NFL in the comfort of my own living room.

ISP did not throttle YouTube traffic at peak hours, telecom regulator finds

Allegations that an ISP throttled traffic from YouTube and other Google properties at peak hours were unfounded, according to the French telecommunications regulator.

Any problems with access to YouTube and other sites at peak hours were simply due to the overall volume of data flowing between the ISP, Free, and the rest of the Internet, said the regulator, Arcep.

Following a complaint from the French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir last September that Free appeared to be throttling traffic from YouTube, Arcep began an investigation, questioning the companies involved and their transit providers, and studying traffic flows.

Arcep spent six months studying traffic flows at Free, finding that Free and Google exchange traffic directly, via peering, and indirectly through a number of international transit providers, and that both routes are congested during peak hours, as they are at other ISPs.

Furthermore, there were no signs that Free was employing traffic management techniques on its network to discriminate against traffic based on the content, origin, destination or protocol used. In other words, Arcep said, “No practices contrary to principles of net neutrality were observed.”

At the time of the complaint, Free was known to be in dispute with Google over who should pay for additional interconnect bandwidth between the two. In January it briefly added a function to the DSL routers of millions of its customers to block ads served by Google and other major ad networks. The ad blocker, enabled by default although Free’s customers could choose to disable it, cut into the revenue the ad networks received from French surfers. Within days, the French government announced that such action was against the principles of net neutrality, and with the next router software update, the feature disappeared. There was no change in the number of complaints from Free customers on user forums and elsewhere about difficulties viewing YouTube videos at peak hours, though.

Neither Google nor Free immediately responded to requests for comments on the investigation’s findings.

Having recognized the importance to customers of the way in which ISPs and Internet companies balance their use interconnection and peering, the regulator now plans to conduct six-monthly reviews of operators’ practises and the effect this has on customers.

ISP did not throttle YouTube traffic at peak hours, telecom regulator finds

Allegations that an ISP throttled traffic from YouTube and other Google properties at peak hours were unfounded, according to the French telecommunications regulator.

Any problems with access to YouTube and other sites at peak hours were simply due to the overall volume of data flowing between the ISP, Free, and the rest of the Internet, said the regulator, Arcep.

Following a complaint from the French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir last September that Free appeared to be throttling traffic from YouTube, Arcep began an investigation, questioning the companies involved and their transit providers, and studying traffic flows.

Arcep spent six months studying traffic flows at Free, finding that Free and Google exchange traffic directly, via peering, and indirectly through a number of international transit providers, and that both routes are congested during peak hours, as they are at other ISPs.

Furthermore, there were no signs that Free was employing traffic management techniques on its network to discriminate against traffic based on the content, origin, destination or protocol used. In other words, Arcep said, "No practices contrary to principles of net neutrality were observed."

At the time of the complaint, Free was known to be in dispute with Google over who should pay for additional interconnect bandwidth between the two. In January it briefly added a function to the DSL routers of millions of its customers to block ads served by Google and other major ad networks. The ad blocker, enabled by default although Free's customers could choose to disable it, cut into the revenue the ad networks received from French surfers. Within days, the French government announced that such action was against the principles of net neutrality, and with the next router software update, the feature disappeared. There was no change in the number of complaints from Free customers on user forums and elsewhere about difficulties viewing YouTube videos at peak hours, though.

Neither Google nor Free immediately responded to requests for comments on the investigation's findings.

Having recognized the importance to customers of the way in which ISPs and Internet companies balance their use interconnection and peering, the regulator now plans to conduct six-monthly reviews of operators' practises and the effect this has on customers.

Pakistan court orders YouTube block to continue

A court in Pakistan has ordered a continuation of the block on YouTube in the country, after the government argued that a removal of the ban would have implications on law and order in the country.

YouTube was banned in Pakistan in September over a controversial video clip, called "Innocence of Muslims," which mocked Prophet Muhammad. The country's telecom regulator said it was blocking the entire site as it was not able to separately block individual URLs (uniform resource locators) linking to copies of the video.

The plaintiff, Bytes For All, Pakistan, has argued that the PTA has Internet filtering technology that is already used to selectively filter Internet content, said Shahzad Ahmad, country director, of the civil rights group on Friday. A report released in June by Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, claimed, for example, that Pakistan is actively filtering content, with Netsweeper filtering devices actively used to censor content on an ISP-wide level in Pakistan.

Bytes for All had asked the court for an interim order unblocking YouTube. "We wanted the government to go ahead and block the 700 to 800 URLs with the blasphemous content, and remove the block on the rest of the site," Ahmad said. He alleged that the government is intent on continuing to block YouTube as part of its overall plan to control Internet access in the country. The YouTube issue is part of a broader petition by Bytes For All against Internet censorship in the country.

Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court noted Thursday that the ban on YouTube is negatively impacting citizens, specially students, and asked the government to resolve the issue with information technology experts, and submit a report by July 25 on how to deal with the blasphemous URLs and make the rest of the platform available, Ahmad said.

Google last year blocked the controversial video in some countries like India and Saudi Arabia where it was illegal, but not in Pakistan where it did not have a local site. The company said at the time that where it had "launched YouTube locally and we are notified that a video is illegal in that country, we will restrict access to it after a thorough review."

Pakistan has a history of limiting access to YouTube videos.

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Court in Pakistan orders YouTube block to continue

A court in Pakistan has ordered a continuation of the block on YouTube in the country, after the government argued that a removal of the ban would have implications on law and order in the country.

YouTube was banned in Pakistan in September over a controversial video clip, called "Innocence of Muslims," which mocked Prophet Muhammad. The country's telecom regulator said it was blocking the entire site as it was not able to separately block individual URLs (uniform resource locators) linking to copies of the video.

The plaintiff, Bytes For All, Pakistan, has argued that the PTA has Internet filtering technology that is already used to selectively filter Internet content, said Shahzad Ahmad, country director, of the civil rights group on Friday. A report released in June by Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, claimed, for example, that Pakistan is actively filtering content, with Netsweeper filtering devices actively used to censor content on an ISP-wide level in Pakistan.

Bytes for All had asked the court for an interim order unblocking YouTube. "We wanted the government to go ahead and block the 700 to 800 URLs with the blasphemous content, and remove the block on the rest of the site," Ahmad said. He alleged that the government is intent on continuing to block YouTube as part of its overall plan to control Internet access in the country. The YouTube issue is part of a broader petition by Bytes For All against Internet censorship in the country.

Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court noted Thursday that the ban on YouTube is negatively impacting citizens, specially students, and asked the government to resolve the issue with information technology experts, and submit a report by July 25 on how to deal with the blasphemous URLs and make the rest of the platform available, Ahmad said.

Google last year blocked the controversial video in some countries like India and Saudi Arabia where it was illegal, but not in Pakistan where it did not have a local site. The company said at the time that where it had "launched YouTube locally and we are notified that a video is illegal in that country, we will restrict access to it after a thorough review."

The Internet company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Germany's Constantin Film Strikes YouTube Promotion Deal With Mediakraft

Constantin Film, Germany's leading independent film production company, has signed a wide-ranging digital deal with the country's leading Internet TV channel, Mediakraft Networks, that will see Mediakraft coordinate the online promotion of Constantin's film slate.

The deal, announced by Constantin's head of film and television Martin Moszkowicz, will mainly be focused on using YouTube as a promotion platform for Constantin film trailers as well as a distribution outlet for new exclusive online content.

STORY: Erotic Novel 'Beautiful Bastard' Getting Movie at Constantin Film

Less than two years old, Cologne-based Mediakraft, an association of online channels, boasts 8.5 million unique users, making it Germany's largest online-only network.

Late last year, Mediakraft received a seven digit capital investment from Shortcut Ventures, the media equity group whose partners include ex-Endemol CEO Ynon Kreiz and Martin Borowski, the former CEO of Sony Pictures Germany.