The shape of things to come? Or a failed experiment?

Yesterday Fabio Capello's undefeated spell as England manager came to an end with defeat against Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk. But perhaps the biggest talking point surrounding the match, had nothing to do with events on the pitch. Since the demise of Setanta TV, which originally held the rights to show the game, no other TV channel were willing to pay the asking price in order to show the game. Step forward 'Perform', a digital media group, who eventually bought the rights.

The premise was simple, subscribers would pay a fee which would allow them to watch the game over the internet through a specially created website. The fee would begin at £4.99 and gradually increase the nearer to the matchday, eventually reaching £11.99. Now we were always going to discover something about how the media was shaping up, depending on how successful this was. Were we seeing the future of broadcasting? Or just an experiment failing badly?

I would suggest it was more toward the latter. Almost all the people I spoke to about the matter felt it would not work, and that England games should not be shown on pay per view internet streaming. Around 300,000 people paid the fee to watch the game, and I would make a completely uneducated guess that the same number of people watched the game via other, shall we say, less legal streams.

There were so many things that could have hindered the interest in this game. For a start, England had already qualified, so nothing was really at stake here. Secondly, surely the whole nations "traditional" way of watching England games was at the pub with a few mates, cheering on your country over a few beers. Despite some pubs showing the game, most went without.

Media convergence is undeniable, but was this a step too far, too quickly? Sites that stream live sports from around the world for free are always going to be most peoples preference when torn between that and paying £11.99 to watch one game. With these sites around this form of media will struggle to make much impact on the way in which football and sport is consumed by the public.