Station Web Sites Miss NFL Highlights

What a difference 45 seconds makes.

Or does it?

For the upcoming NFL season, TV stations can put on their Web sites a full 90 seconds of video of interviews with players and coaches and other non-game team activity from the stadium. This is up from last year’s limit of 45 seconds per team.

But stations still can’t shoot any game highlights for the Web and any highlights used in over-the-air newscasts have to be deleted before they are posted.

Even the 90 seconds of non-game video has strings. It must have a clearly visible link to NFL.com., and those precious seconds can only stay on the Web site for 24 hours.

The restrictions are making it near impossible for TV stations that want to take their successful news-weather-and-sports formula to the Web. What’s sports without the winning catch?

It’s all part of the NFL’s strategy of holding on to the rights of all video shot in and around their stadiums and carefully regulating its use.

The regulations that went into effect prior to the 2006-07 season also limit what stations may air.

The NFL gives stations the right to broadcast a total of six minutes of highlights on Sunday and two minutes every other day for either news reporting or coach and fan shows. That includes highlights shot by the station itself as well as by anybody else.

And the game video must be removed from any show before it is archived.

For Chris Musial, GM of CBS affiliate WIVB Buffalo, N.Y., the NFL’s demands have been “pretty major, and hit me kind of hard, having spent 26 years in a newsroom.

“What the NFL was doing was reducing how we could cover our home team. My assumption is that they want to drive viewer traffic to their own enterprises.”

Those other enterprises would include the NFL Network and the video-rich NFL.com.

As Musial and other news directors know, things could be worse.

Broadcasters, led by the Radio-Television News Directors Association, have managed to win some concessions from the NFL since the rules first went into effect.

In addition to the extra 45-seconds in non-game Web video, stations now have the right to place their own crews on the sidelines to capture game action and other video — for broadcast only, of course.

In the past, they had to use settle for video from a five-person pool.

And there is hope, in the form of a little asterisk on the credentialing agreement between stations and the NFL.

The asterisk indicates that the nature and number of hoops the NFL wants local and regional broadcasters to jump through haven’t been finalized, and that signing this year’s credentialing agreement does not mean that you agree to the rules and restrictions in perpetuity.

That asterisk also means that broadcasters will continue to fight for more access and more control over what they shoot, says RTNDA President Barbara Cochran.

“This isn’t going to go away, and we’re not going to let it end,” she says.

“This is about who is going to present the news,” she says. “Should it be the interested party that’s going to maintain control over information and image, or is it going to be journalists who will tell the whole story, warts and all?

“Right now we’re talking about sports, but in the future we could be talking about business or even a government agency being the sole source of information.”

As goes the NFL, so goes the rest of professional sports, Cochran says.

“Other sports leagues are looking at the NFL,” she says. “They see the NFL as leading the way. In 2006, after the NFL restricted sideline rules, we got the same thing from NCAA. Now MLB has come up with rules restricting video on a station’s Web site. We’re negotiating that, too.”

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello sees professional football as a team player, not necessarily a leader of the pack.

“We’re doing the same thing that all sports organizations are doing. We’re balancing extensive news coverage of our sport, which is healthy and something we want, against the need to manage our own video and content assets, so we can generate revenue and protect our business.”

Part of the NFL’s business is developing its cable network and Web site, he says.

The NFL is not out to control what journalists do, nor is it trying to replace hometown broadcasters with its own media sources, he adds. “It’s part of a balancing act.”

But where is the balance in completely disallowing the posting of game highlights on a Web site, some broadcasters ask.

“We have never, ever permitted the use of any game video on any Web site but our own,” Aiello says.

“As for team interviews, a station can print, and archive, an entire transcript of the interview for the fans to read any time they want. For the protection of our players and our staff, we’re saying no more than 90 seconds of video within 24 hours, and no archiving.”

As much as Musial would like to see the NFL “loosen this up a little bit and return more toward the relationship we enjoyed in the past,” WIVB is following the NFL’s credentialing agreement to the letter this season.

“As onerous as it’s been, I don’t see a lot of people pushing back.”

But they could — in the courts and in Washington.

“It has to be challenged,” says Sandy Padwe, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.

“The NFL has become almost like a nation state. It feels that it’s entitled, because of its popularity and its huge success. They can, and will say, that this is all product, and that we can do whatever we want with it.

“But it comes down to who owns the right to communicate with the American public. Most of the teams are using stadia financed by the public. How can they not give the public full access to that facility, be it on the media or the Internet?”

Jonathan Taplin, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, calls the NFL’s position “wacky” and likens the situation to book reviewers quoting brief passages of text or film critics running a clip from a movie.

“If it’s fair use to rebroadcast a few minutes of game highlights in a newscast, then why isn’t it fair use to let this go into an archive?

“They’re not asking to rebroadcast an entire game, just enough to show the people what they’re talking about. This is a matter for the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office. It’s for them to determine what is and isn’t fair use of copyrighted material, not the NFL.”

Kathleen Kirby, a Washington-based First Amendment lawyer retained by the RTNDA, knows of no legal challenges to the NFL’s credentialing agreement. “I know a lot of lawyers are thinking about this, but that’s as far as it goes.”

The issue of restricting media access to publicly financed stadiums has come up, both in state legislatures and in Congress, but has not gained much traction.

And there’s that asterisk, which indicates “an understanding that the credentialing agreement will not be strictly enforced, pending a future agreement,” Kirby says.

“This doesn’t mean that issues won’t occur between the teams and the media covering them. It means that the burden is on individual stations. They must consult with counsel and determine how they’re going to proceed.”