No Social Media In These College Stadiums

RawJoe writes "Today, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is expected to release a final version of its new media policy that, at the moment, can best be described as a ban on all social media usage at SEC games. Earlier this month, the conference informed its schools of the new policy, which says that ticketed fans can't 'produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.' Translated, that means no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event. In the case of the SEC, authorized media coverage rights belong to CBS, who has a $3B deal with the conference over the next 15 years, according to The St Petersburg Times." Good luck with that. To quote Clay Shirky, "The idea that people can't capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition."

Re:Or Whatever the SEC version is. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but what does the Securities and Exchange Commission have to do with college sporting events?

Re:Seriously? 15 years?

[timeOday]

That's 200 million a year, that really is not that much money.

Yeah, the seller sure got bamboozled!

Who knows what kind of tech we will get in those 15 years? It's going to be very difficult to control that over the long term.

Yeah, the buyer sure got bamboozled!

Uh, I mean... everybody sure is an idiot!

Re:How many lawsuits are they willing to file?

[dangitman]

When the first SEC game is held, and 10,000 people all tweet (or post to Facebook, etc,) from their cell phone "Take that, SEC!", what will they do?

Nothing, because that doesn't violate the rules. If they described the game, that would be a different matter.

Re:Times like this

[Anonymous Coward]

And then they came for the Twits. And I sang "Thank God Almighty I'm free at last!"

Re:Or Whatever the SEC version is. . .

[ToadProphet]

Football. Seriously, football talk on /.?

I'm confused and scared all at once.

Re:Physical enforcement is easy

[Brian Gordon]

I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. The operator verifies that it's illegal information. He looks up my cell number in a police database and forwards my name and number to the SEC quick response team. They search their ticket order database for credit card payment information corresponding to my name. There are 2 Brian Gordons at the game, so a technician dashes down to the video surveillance command. He hunches over an open workstation at the back of the room and calls up seating plans for the stadium and the camera coverage layout. He brings up a still frame from the correct camera. He can't tell exactly what he's looking at so he opens a 3D model of the stadium, counts off the seats to find my seat number, and zooms out toward the camera's position. He switches between the still frame window and the 3D model window until they match up perfectly. He registers a video stream from the video processing cluster since it hasn't been offloaded to storage yet. He connects to the stream, seeing a live feed from that camera. He sshes into the cluster and with a few quick commands to the stream server navigates to the exact time of the text. He zooms in, but my seat is too far from the camera to get a clear image. He has an idea- he'll try to see if the TV cameras passed over that section. He sshes into the producer's control workstation and downloads the XML cache of the camera location control software. The archive was never closed for writing so it's corrupt but WinRAR extracts most of the control commands. He filtered out every command except those 10 seconds around the call. There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon. He dashes back up to the quick response center and quickly opens a security ticket, assigning the E section attendants and marking it Immediate Alert so it will send them a text. They get the alert, containing my seat number. They spot me.

"Excuse me sir, please come with us."

Re:Times like this

[JoshuaZ]

Dude, its a freaking sporting event. Comparing not letting people use Twitter from inside the event to Nazis killing people is like an archetypal example of Godwin's Law. In this case we have a group trying to enforce a (stupid) restriction which anyone is free to simply ignore by not buying tickets or going to the games. This isn't the same as a regime systematically killing people. No, for that matter, does your comparison work at a deeper level. The people in a position to "speak up" are the people who go to games normally but don't care about this restriction personally. Someone who isn't at the games (correctly) has no part in it. They can point and laugh. But I doubt that will influence the SEC.

Re:Or Whatever the SEC version is. . .

[stiggle]

Actually - it appears they say that "ticketted fans" cannot Tweet.

So if you have a ticket and hate football, or don't have a ticket and are a fan then you can still tweet :-)

Re:Or Whatever the SEC version is. . .

[SQLGuru]

Dude! I'm in Baton Rouge at the [removed by SEC] game. You should have seen that awesome hit that [removed by SEC] just laid on the quarterback for [removed by SEC]. He forced a [removed by SEC] and ran it in for a [removed by SEC] bringing the score to [removed by SEC] to [removed by SEC]. It was AWESOME!

Re:Don't mix breastfeeding tinto this debate.

[machine321]

Besides, how else would Slashdotters get to see titties?