By Mark Baber
December 22 – The UK Twitter account of The Bleacher Report was temporarily suspended by Twitter over the weekend after the Premier League complained the feed was sharing videos of Premier League action to which it did not own the rights.
The rights to show Premier League clips are owned by News UK and fans have been told not to share unofficial videos of Premier League goals. The Bleacher Report apparently breached the guidelines and Twitter reacted to the Premier League complaint by suspending the @br_uk account until the matter was discussed between the two company’s lawyers.
The @br_uk was quickly back on line, posting videos of a Bayern goal via the Bundesliga YouTube channel.
The Bleacher Report was bought by Turner Broadcasting System, a Time Warner subsidiary, in 2012 for $200,000 and the UK section focuses heavily on soccer.
News UK bought the online rights to Premier League goals and have been using them to push subscriptions for its newspapers The Times and The Sun.
How valuable these rights are, and how concerned other online media are to be excluded from the action should become clearer in the next auction for the online rights package but without enforcement of the exclusivity rights, they clearly would not be worth much at all.
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