GAA moves to defuse alarm by clarifying rules around streaming club fixtures

Counties and streaming companies had reacted with consternation to the original wording of the new GAA policy.

Pic: Laszlo Geczo, Inpho

The GAA have clarified they will not be enforcing a national streaming black-out while games are being televised.

The association’s new streaming policy, which was published earlier this month, stipulated counties were “not permitted to stream a match at the same time as any national broadcast partner coverage”.

However, the restriction was only meant to apply to the county in which the fixture was being televised, as had been in place previously, and the words “from their county” have now been inserted into the clause.

The addendum will ease concerns for counties and streaming companies who had reacted with consternation to the original wording of the policy.

What will be just as comforting to counties is clarification on the requirement that streaming requests have to be made six weeks in advance of games. This now pertains to competitions and not on a game-by-game basis. In the request forms, the word “competition” has been added alongside “match or matches”.

Nevertheless, the updated document carries an additional check for counties. Written approval must now be sought for the streaming schedule for the year.

Clause 4.3 now includes the sentence: “The GAA Unit should submit their overall streaming plan for the year, quantity of games and start and end date of the streaming plan.” If those schedules include high-profile championship games, they could be later asked to remove them so that the GAA’s national broadcast partners, RTÉ and TG4, may show the matches.

The new policy insists protecting the GAA's media rights is a priority and they have “a right of refusal on broadcasting games of their choice”. That had previously been the case but counties chose to turn down RTÉ and TG4 requests.

While RTÉ are known to chose their matches several weeks out, TG4 often select theirs only when the identity of the competing teams is known.

The Irish Examiner also understands several counties have recently been contacted by Croke Park about their streaming contracts. There is concern at national level that are not in the county's best interests.

At Special Congress last October, GAA president Jarlath Burns aired his concerns: “A lot of counties are doing very bad deals.” He added: “We're not luddites. We're in the streaming market ourselves at GAA+. But it's just we want to make sure that our counties are getting best value for money.

“We want to make sure that the contract is commensurate with something that gives them the advantage, that allows them to keep the footage, that the footage belongs to them, and also then that there isn't any ambush marketing, that any company that comes in along with a county is respectful of the fact that the GAA has sponsors and that we have to be very careful about how we go about that business.”