No more internet audio from Charlton

[kevruth]

The club today announced the end of audio match commentary from their website:

http://www.charlton-athletic.co.uk/newsview.ink?nid=31087


The only way to hear Charlton will be to subscribe to any of the other Football League's clubs' multimedia services. That will cost you about $60 per season. I signed up today with Nottingham Forest so that I could access live Charlton commentary provided by any of our opponents.

[SAFC Yank]

Interesting, but there's some gaps in that announcement.

Yes, dropping into the Football League does cause some rights issues. They can't stream commentary for free anymore, and I think Charlton may have been the last club doing it.

But, they imply that to do it, they'd have to break their relationship with the two BBC local stations, and to give up control of the website. Both are untrue. Many of the FL clubs use BBC commentary online, in fact, I think a majority do. And they don't have to give up control of the website, either - Sunderland and Leeds both maintain websites outside the Premium system, but have links on the page into the system for commentary and video archives.

None of that would change the having to pay the annual fee, but it would allow you to hear Charlton commentary rather than that of other clubs.