Highlights banned. Gazprom-Media has banned other sites from showing fragments of sports matches

The largest sports sites of Runet Sports.ru, Championat.ru and others were forbidden to broadcast fragments of football matches and other sports competitions - goals scored and the best moments. Now they have no right to show any videos at all. As it became known to Vedomosti , the rightholder of Gazprom-Media decided to give all the highlights to the TV channel and the Match TV site in order to increase the audience of this site.

Match TV is a relatively new project. The sports TV channel was created in November 2015 at the suggestion of Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Board of PJSC Gazprom, in accordance with instructions and Decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now this company and NTV-plus (also part of Gazprom-Media holding) own the overwhelming majority of the rights to broadcast sports competitions in Russia, including the rights to their Internet show. Nevertheless, “Match TV” loses to competitors in attendance. According to TNS, the monthly audience of Championat.com is 4 million, Sport-Express is 2.7 million, and Match TV is only 1.1 million.

Popular sports sites Sports.ru, Championat.ru and others do not broadcast all the matches entirely, but usually they posted small video clips with scored goals and the most interesting moments in the news. With the help of converting to GIF or other video formats, some bypassed the ban on video broadcasting. Others officially collaborated with NTV-Plus, receiving a share of the displayed advertising in highlights.
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But now it is forbidden to do both. The co-owner of Sports.ru, Dmitry Navosha, confirmed to Vedomosti that this site was left without a highlight from NTV-plus. The same was confirmed by representatives of another major sports site.

Russian copyright holders, who have bought exclusive rights to broadcast football matches, are trying to extract the maximum benefit from this. If it goes on like this, then Russia can follow the example of Great Britain, where football can never be seen on any free TV channel, but only through a paid subscription.

Russian rightholders are not alone in their aspirations. The official rules of the International Olympic Committee also state that websites are prohibited from publishing fragments of video broadcasts of the Olympic Games in GIF, GFY, WebM, and “other short video formats” formats.

Despite the efforts of copyright holders, now the video broadcast of football matches can be watched live via peer video services Sopcast and ACE Stream . Links to video broadcasts are distributed in relevant communities of social networks, on the same sports sites and on specialized sports video portals like Gooool.org .

Oddly enough, the actions of right holders can lead to the opposite result. All the interlocutors of Vedomosti expressed confidence that the Match-TV site would not be able to increase its audience in this way, and the level of piracy in sports video content would rise sharply.