GAA’s new streaming policy well-intentioned but completely unworkable
THERE is a sense that the GAA’s new streaming policy that is very similar to how Noel McCaffrey’s motion to Congress around the volume of games inter-county players should have with their club was viewed: well-intentioned but completely unworkable.Even among the broadcasters the new agreement seeks to protect, there would be an admission that if it were to be applied in its literal form, the advent of streaming club championship games would effectively be over.That is unlikely to happen.What the GAA want out of this process is twofold: protect and uphold the contracts they signed with broadcasters, and tighten up on the quality of streaming productions elsewhere.Let’s take the first one first.Streaming has been about a while but it really came to the fore as a means of generating income during the Covid championship in 2020.RTÉ had only just started screening live club championship (and even National League, unbelievably) games as recently as 2019.TG4 have always carried the winter.But since Covid, both have grown more and more frustrated with counties that have routinely preferred to keep their big games to themselves.Some counties happily played ball with broadcasters, particularly Dublin, but they are unique in that they stream their games for free through YouTube. The fee from RTÉ was money in their pocket but the exposure in a county where the club game is very much second fiddle was seen as invaluable.Not so by others, who would either point-blank refuse to hand the games over to TV or else manipulate their fixtures in such a way that they fell out of reach of the traditional broadcast slots.There’s more money to be made by counties showing their own stream, so why give it up to TV?That opened up a can of worms the GAA hadn’t really envisaged when RTÉ entered the market in 2019. Of all the things Croke Park might be inclined to stick their neb into, the internal setting of fixtures is not one. Weddings, funerals, stag dos, village tractor runs, big fundraising nights – you name it, CCCCs have to avoid it.They’re all handy cover stories. If you set your county final for 5pm on a Sunday and tell TG4 ‘sorry lads, nothing we could do’, they’re in no real position to argue.And so it became the Wild West. The broadcasters felt the deal they’d signed with the GAA was not being upheld, with the in-built recognition that there wasn’t a huge pile Croke Park could actually do about it.So this updated streaming policy is what they’ve come up with.It is at its most unworkable at the point where it decrees: “Irrespective of the competition, GAA Units are not permitted to stream a match at the same time as any national broadcast partner coverage.”In its literal form, that would mean that if TG4 were showing the Clare hurling final on a Sunday afternoon, the other 31 counties would not be permitted to stream any game.In fact, if you took it literally, streaming of club championship games would be outlawed altogether.“If the competition within which the match occurs falls under any existing rights granted by the GAA to its Official GAA Broadcast Partners, GAA Units are not permitted to stream the match,” the policy says, having earlier outlined that all club championships fall under that agreement.In 2025, there were 18 counties streaming their own games. A number of them were doing so through third-party platform Streamsport. The other 14 counties were operating through Clubber.It feels as though this new policy is aimed at Clubber, and to a lesser extent Streamsport.At last year’s Special Congress, Jarlath Burns talked about “ambush marketing”, which felt like a none-too-subtle reference to Clubber’s big-money deals and their own partnership with Aviva.“We have to be very careful that these chickens don’t come home to roost because some of these companies are doing side deals with sponsors, which are in direct contravention to our national GAA sponsors, ambush marketing, really,” said Burns, adding: “All of the rights we negotiate on behalf of you go back to the counties as do our main sponsors here out on the field.”Aviva’s position in the insurance market was in direct competition to Allianz, the major GAA sponsor caught beneath the spotlight. Aviva have themselves been implicated in helping finance Israel’s unending bombardment of Gaza.If the GAA were in a position to make that an issue then they might, but given Allianz’s own position, that’s a road they cannot walk.It was reported when Cork signed a three-year deal with Clubber that it was worth €180,000 a year, a total of €540,000 over the lifetime of the contract.It’s understood that Streamsport are paying figures not dissimilar to some of the counties on their roster.They wouldn’t both have been paying that kind of money to each of the counties they’d signed up but those figures raised eyebrows as to the financial sustainability of the project.There was a naivety in that some of the contracts signed by counties offered exclusivity that wasn’t theirs to gift because the GAA already had a deal with RTÉ and TG4.Just this week, RTÉ head of sport Declan McBennett called on the GAA to decide whether its policy around coverage was weighted towards “attendance or TV”.There is a wider frustration among the public that so many high-profile games are not available through either TV or some of the streaming platforms.This document won’t change that. All of that stuff will come under the umbrella of a new broadcast deal that will come into focus very soon, but not into effect until the end of the 2027 season.The issue of quality is a secondary one, but still important. Counties would have to provide a certain quality of camera and commentary. It recommends setting the price of streams at “80/90% of a physical match ticket” and offering bundles and season passes where possible, a lot of which is already happening.Tightening up on TG4 and RTÉ’s access to the best of the local club championships is effectively the whole point.But there is a balance. TG4 rely on the club championships as much as the club championships rely on TG4. If that marriage dissolved, both parties might struggle to get over it.The whole thing feels like a bit of a scare tactic. Parts of the document will have to be casually ignored or face obliterating coverage of the club championships altogether.Other parts of it, the GAA will call upon as they need to.If it is to be applied in black-and-white, the technicolour days of streaming would be over before they’ve truly begun.That could not possibly be the GAA’s intention.
