Tethered Swimming

I have spent a great deal of time watching college basketball over the last couple of days and there are eight more games scheduled for this afternoon. It is a wonderful spectacle and for much of the time multiple games are occurring at once, helping to ensure that something worth watching is on at all times. There are more games than can be fit on a single screen or channel and for the low, low price of seventy dollars my benevolent conduit overlords at DirecTV allow me to watch every single game. Terms and conditions, as they are wont to do, may apply.

Take Thursday night for example. On my channel guide there are four standard definition and four high definition channels in the 700 range, one for each of the four different live CBS feeds coming from around the country. Of course, I also have a local CBS feed as well. Each of the four dedicated basketball channels is set to one; for Thursday night the last stanza of games was Notre Dame/George Mason, Wisconsin/Cal State Fullerton, West Virginia/Arizona, and UCLA/Mississippi Valley State. The local CBS station also lists one of the games, in my case it was the Notre Dame/George Mason game.

The dedicated channels do not break away from coverage no matter how lopsided the score becomes. That’s what they are there for after all, to give you the option to watch any game regardless of other considerations. The local CBS feed, on the other hand, is just a regular network affiliate broadcasting to a market and is under no obligation to stick with a single game. Indeed, they’ll switch from a blowout to a closer matchup and rightfully so.

Here’s where the fine print comes in to play. On Thursday night my dedicated Notre Dame/George Mason channel was blank because that was the game slated for my local CBS affiliate. Blackout rules keep satellite television customers shackled to their local affiliates no matter what. In theory I had access to all four concurrent games, but after just a few minutes of play Notre Dame pulled way ahead and my local CBS affiliate jumped to another game. Even though my channel guide had Notre Dame/George Mason listed for the local affiliate, of the forty total minutes of court time in that game it probably showed fifteen of them, ten at the beginning and five right after halftime. The dedicated channel stayed blacked out even after the local affiliate pulled away from its listed game.

I have no problem with my local CBS affiliate broadcasting television programs. I do have a problem with the idea that their license to broadcast combined with an agreement with the network results in a some kind of legal claim on what my eyeballs are allowed to watch. Of course if I was dead set on still watching the Notre Dame/George Mason game I could’ve watched it for free on CBS’ website. Apparently, reduced picture quality and occasional buffering problems absolve CBS of any non-compete obligation with its local affiliate. In the grand scheme of things this is hardly a serious issue, but it points to just how screwy the rules governing something as simple and fundamental as television are.

Without turning this into some kind of populist screed about television and media, I’d like to point out that these ridiculous blackout rules are just the tip of the iceberg. There was the feud Comcast got into with the fledgling Big Ten Network last year where football fans were deprived of the right to watch their teams because two large organizations couldn’t come to an agreement. It isn’t limited to sports either, on cable or satellite no one has the ability to choose which specific channels to receive. Oh no, you must choose which package of channels, ensuring you and your kids have access to channels you don’t watch and may not even want available. Next February the way television is broadcast is going to change and no one really knows how many ordinary people will be affected. The less said about infrastructure exclusivity, net neutrality and the embarrassing state of broadband internet access the better.

In the end it’s about finding the easiest and most efficient way to transmit digital data from one location to another. This includes being able to watch a live basketball game from 2,000 miles away just as much as it includes the simple acts of writing an e-mail or placing a telephone call. The current systems for doing so are rickety and riddled with legal and logical contradictions. At the moment it isn’t much of a problem, here in 2008 were are still in all but the most primitive stages of the digital world. But digital communication, on any scale, over any distance, is one of the most fundamental aspects of our lives. The technology that provides the bedrock of this world is constantly improving, our thinking about it needs to keep up or we’re going to find ourselves in a world where digital communication is fundamentally unfair or, worse yet, doesn’t work properly.