by William Engelman

Created on: August 19, 2009

The Online Audio and Video Policy in the NFL is one of the most un-American policies in the Wide World of Sports. Granted NFL Football is an American Sport it is a policy that hinders the publics right to speech and media and is Anti-Fan.

The Policy states simply, that no sound or video can be longer then 90 seconds also cannot be posted more the 24 hours and can for no reason be archived. So if you miss it that day, tough luck. This policy pertains to interviews, games, and practice etc. even all the captions must say to go to NFL.com if not it will be pulled.

The NFL has stated their reason for this policy according to the NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello,

"We have no interest in controlling or limiting what news Web sites do, except limiting the use of video that undermines our own Internet operations. We have important business interests on the Internet, and we have to be careful about that."

Greg is simply telling us in this statement that the NFL is so popular that we don't need to promote any teams or the league. The public or websites could be taking away from any profits the NFL might have chance to garner from footage according to Greg's statement.

The amount of time that a clip could have has recently changed. Before the extremely generous amount of 90 seconds, it was a favorable 45 seconds that a clip could be in length. But once those 24 hours are up, then there is no archiving you will have to find your clip on a NFL owned site.

Local tabloids could never affect any traffic for the NFL or any other sports site. For the NFL to make this policy is truly monopolizing. The NFL is absolutely strict about this policy and spends quite a bit of time and money tenaciously surfing the Internet to make sure the policy is not being violated.

Though the policy is extremely unfortunate, there is little that can be done about it. It will be hanging around as an inconvenience to Online sports sites until it will be amended again. Hopefully we can get two minutes and 36 hours!

If one thing is at least looking up is that the NFL and the Team Websites are posting more information. This means that you might be able to catch some more clips and actually get some decent news. It could be an issue for the teams making sure the website is up to snuff, but that is still a win for the fans since they are the true losers of this policy.

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