Dade City judge and University of Florida grad Pat Siracusa is such a big Gators football fan that he sometimes wears a replica Tim Tebow jersey under his black robe on Fridays in the fall.
His profile picture on his Facebook page is a photo he took with his phone from the stands at last January’s national championship game.
It’s a good memory.
But the Southeastern Conference might use a different word to describe that image: illegal.
The SEC, one of college sports’ biggest, richest, most prominent conferences, earlier this month sent to its 12 schools an eye-opening new media policy. It places increasingly stringent limits on reporters and how much audio, video and “real-time” blogging they can do at games, practices and news conferences.
But even more interesting is that the policy also includes rules for fans in the stands. No updating Twitter feeds. No taking photos with phones and posting them on Facebook or Flickr. No taking videos and putting them on YouTube.
A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS — which are paying the SEC $3 billion for the broadcast rights to the conference’s games over the next 15 years — and also on the SEC Digital Network — the conference’s own entity that’s scheduled to debut on SECSports.com later this month.
#29 GatorEngineer
You said: “Here is a new flash to the morons…”
I think you meant to say: “Here is a newS flash to the morAns…”
So they can’t prevent prison inmate from using celphones to commit crimes, or arrange death contracts. But… some sports franchise CAN limit or curtail the freedom of speech of thousands of law abiding citizens from talking about football games. Cause it might cost the biz some profits! Yeah, we’ve obviously got our priorities straight, in this country.
FOR GODS SAKE I NEED TO SEE THIS LEGENDARY ORIGINAL PICTURE!! I just see two hot chicks on a gator’s back. Okay, back on topic, I hope the fans snap untold millions of stills, take hundreds of hours of video, put it all on PTP, and Twitter until their thumbs fall off.
Another group of business people to blinded by greed to understand they are running a popularity contest and if they lose no money.
# 25 Thomas said, in part:
“Third, it will kill their affluent audience who are the only ones that afford games any more. They’ll sit at home with better beer, better food, a better picture and TiVO and stop going to games (I know I have).”
I think that’s the point. Eventually, they’ll ban people with working eyeballs. No one will be allowed to attend the game who can see or hear or talk. You’ll _have_ to watch the game on TV, to maximize the ratings. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they tried to make it illegal to record the game in any way, VCR, Tivo or other DVR, anything.