SMH article - CrownBet 'accidentally' breaches AFL's $2.5b rights deal

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald has a lot going on from my perspective.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/crownbet-accidentally-breaches-afls-25b-rights-deal-20170729-gxli8h.html

CrownBet accidentally breaches AFL's $2.5b rights deal

Basically, it outlines how people using a betting application could get virtually free access to AFL games on televisions, that should have been hidden behind paywalls.

This situation is interesting to me for many reasons:

• It demonstrates the overlap of sport, gambling, television, new media, technology, and users.
• It demonstrates an inability of the AFL to govern the terms of it's own licence agreement.
• It demonstrates Telstra's inability to monitor the way it's product was being used.
• It demonstrates how users are always alert to opportunities to circumvent the walled gardens
• It demonstrates the evolving and fluid nature of technology, especially mirroring technology that can allow content that is supposed to be limited to mobile devices can become content that can be consumed on a television.
• It demonstrates the way that live sport has far greater appeal in being consumed in this way (i.e., that the prefered viewing expeirence of the sport fan is on large screen)
• It demonstrates the insidious and pervasive relationship between gambling and sport, and the way that sport welcomes in gambling.
• It demonstrates in some way the produser or informal media economy, because people were circulating this knowledge on forums for 4 months before Telstra was alerted to it.
• It demonstrates the power of news media, because it was only after an inquiry from a newspaper that Telstra became aware of the problem and shut the service down.

I'm also cyncical of the headline that CrownBet 'accidentally' breached the terms of the deal. Who's to say CrownBet didn't know about this and knowingly did nothing to act on it, as it would have attracted customers they could pitch their marketing to. 

This also relates to my own research, as it demonstrates another way, outside of using VPN's or pirate websites, that people can circumvent the measures put in place to try and protect the exclusivity of content.