Rugby vs audiences

Another interesting moment in sports reporting history this week with the stand-up fight between the International Rugby Board and most of the world's newswires. As Roy Greenslade points out, the claim that the IRB is infringing press freedoms because ITV and not the newswires happened to secure exclusive rights to broadcast the matches are mere hypocrisy on the newswires' part. However...as I speculated when the NCAA expelled a sports journalist for liveblogging a college baseball match in the states, it isn't useful for sporting associations to kid themselves that this fight will continue to be about which media owner pays them for broadcast rights.

Today, the problem seems to be that almost any journalist has access to tools that let them record TV-standard sports coverage and post it online, undermining the commercial value of exclusive contracts with traditional TV broadcasters. That at least gives the IRB, NCAA et al someone to shout at. But what is their plan when the fans start liveblogging matches, and posting up videos captured on mobile phones, or simply posting still photos somewhere that a quick-witted editor can aggregate them into near-live coverage of the match?