Extending the Broadcast: Streaming Culture and the Problems of Digital Geographies

Abstract

This article examines the recent move by many television sports broadcasters of streaming their content online behind geographically restricted “geofences.” Despite the increasing use of this distribution method, we argue that Internet users are increasingly bypassing geofences that center sports consumption within a nationalized television broadcasting framework through the use of VPN (virtual private network) technologies. Importantly, the geographic fluidity of the Internet often allows users to do this legally—producing meaningful ruptures in the logic that seeks to replicate the structures of mediation central to the television broadcast model within the space of the Internet. We argue that the streaming of sports content, then, should be understood and analyzed as an enforcement of corporate media strategies and reflection of telecommunication policy, as well as a cultural practice and tactic. Large transnational media corporations, typically the holders of popular sporting rights, attempt to bend digital sports content consumption to the broadcast models that they have historically employed. Yet, amidst this emerging model of digital broadcasting lie the problems of digital geography and the cultural practice of a streaming culture within the conditions of post-convergence. This practice often rejects the restrictions and stipulations of digital broadcasting in favor of a globetrotting, station-hopping exercise of content hunting.