博彩公司想免费试用赛马场照片？不可能！

wanbet-bc518

大家都知道，英国的博彩公司每年要向赛马场缴大量的费用，甚至使用赛马拍照都要缴钱。不久前，博彩公司联合起来准备不与赛马场签约，最后每个博彩公司的没有信号。现在关于照片的官司也出来了，法官判定：照片也要付费才行。


Bookies lose turf war with racecourses over rights to broadcast pictures
· Turf TV's legal victory ends 20-year monopoly
· OFT may launch inquiry into betting-shop chains

Simon Bowers
The Guardian,
Saturday August 9 2008

Some of Britain's best-known race courses, including Ascot, Newmarket and Cheltenham, have won a bitter legal battle with leading bookmakers over the rights to market pictures for broadcasting in betting shops.

The victory in effect breaks a 20-year monopoly where the buying of all media rights was carried out by a firm controlled by high-street bookmakers.

The move affirms the legitimacy of Turf TV, a joint venture backed by 31 race courses, including 13 of the 14 tracks owned by the Jockey Club. It is the sole rival to Satellite Information Services (SIS), a business which since its formation in 1987 has been controlled by the large bookmakers.

Alan Morcombe, executive chairman of Turf TV, said: "We are delighted with this outcome ... This is a judgment that allows Turf TV to continue in business and maintains healthy competition in the supply of picture and data services."

Asked why it had taken so long for a competitor to emerge, Simon Bazalgette, chief executive designate of the Jockey Club, said: "We were dealing with an entrenched monopoly supported by Ladbrokes and [William] Hill's to an extraordinary extent."

Last night, several betting shop chains privately repeated warnings that attempts by the racetracks to wring more financial value from media rights were likely to have knock-on consequences for the amount of money bookmakers handed back to track operators through other channels, particularly through the horse-racing levy and race sponsorship.

Bazalgette dismissed these suggestions, noting that last year's levy had risen to record levels and race sponsorship was still being taken up by bookmakers. After Turf TV's launch in January last year, most leading bookmakers refused to sign up to the new service, claiming prices were too high. But in June last year the government-owned Tote broke ranks.

There followed a flurry of private emails between directors of the Association of British Bookmakers, read out in court, which laid bare the disappointment felt at this decision. ABB's chairman, Warwick Bartlett, wrote: "The Tote are irredeamable [sic] bastards and everyone their [sic] should have been shot at birth. Members of the ABB? I don't think so."

Six months later, despite the court action against Turf TV having commenced, Coral also signed up to the new service, withdrawing its participation in the legal claim. Unable to afford to boycott the service any longer, Ladbrokes and William Hill reluctantly followed suit, but continued to pursue their legal claim. They told investors the additional media rights would cost about £10m a year.

Of the big five, only the privately owned Betfred has held out. It too is expected to sign up to Turf TV now, after admitting in court that not having the pictures was harming business.

In a written judgment, Mr Justice Morgan threw out the bookmakers' claim against Turf TV. He even suggested some of their claims "stood arguments as to competition on their head".

The judge is expected to rule in the autumn on a counter-claim alleging the bookmakers colluded to prevent Turf TV entering the marketplace. That ruling is expected to be closely watched by the Office of Fair Trading.

The court ruling is also a major victory for Alphameric - a joint venture partner in Turf TV, providing the technology - which was on the brink of collapse last year.

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Activist punter accuses sport of misleading public
Ruling body is implicated by snowballing internet campaign over going reports

    * Greg Wood
    * The Guardian,
    * Wednesday August 6 2008
    * Article history

Horse racing

The introduction of the GoingStick promises to standardise measurement of the state of the ground at racecourses. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

It is part of the fascination of racing that so many different factors can affect a horse's performance in a race. The state of the ground, though, may very well be the most important factor of all and one dissatisfied punter is mounting a successful campaign to highlight what he feels is the inaccuracy of many going reports.

On April 8, Nick Davis started a thread on Betfair's internet forum - surely the largest aggregation of punters anywhere on the web - inviting fellow punters to "put all observations [about going reports] for Flat racing this season on one thread so we can send it to the Gambling Commission in October under the file 'giving misleading information to the public'".

Most threads on the Betfair forum last a day or two at most before dropping into internet oblivion, but Davis's effort clearly struck a chord. Four months and nearly 700 individual posts later, it is still going strong, providing what he believes is an ongoing record of serious discrepancies between the reported going and the true condition of the ground.

It is a broad subject and contributors' complaints fall into several distinct categories. These include apparent contradictions between GoingStick readings and going reports, possible attempts by course officials to even out draw biases by targeted watering and tracks' watering policies in general in pursuit of "safe" ground. But it all comes down to trust. If the going is described as good to firm, punters will place bets on that basis and have a right to expect that information to be as accurate as humanly possible.

Davis, who is 49, has been betting all his life and is not surprised that his internet campaign has attracted so much support. "It seems to be something that no-one in authority wants to talk about," he said yesterday. "The British Horseracing Authority's directive for Flat ground is that clerks should aim to provide good to firm going, but many clerks seem to go beyond that and keep watering so that it ends up good or even good to soft.

"Also, there is no way to correlate what GoingStick readings actually mean when you compare between different courses. A reading of 8.6 at Ayr could mean the same thing as 9.4 at Goodwood. Until tables have been compiled that compare the readings given at different courses with the actual race times, there is just no way for anyone to know."

Davis cites the watering at Glorious Goodwood last week as an example. "I was there on Friday," he says, "and as I was leaving the course, the taps had already been switched on, despite the fact that on one of the most competitive afternoons of racing in the calendar, there wasn't a single winner that managed a time below the Racing Post standard.

"To me, that suggests it was good ground already, rather than the good to firm that was advertised, and then they went and watered even more when there was rain forecast. To me, that's altering the going, not maintaining it at good to firm according to the BHA's directive, but on Saturday morning it was still being described as good to firm."

Seamus Buckley, Goodwood's clerk of the course, said yesterday that watering had taken place to ensure the safety of jockeys and horses. "We had some horses that slipped on Friday, and I wanted to get some water into the ground so that any rainfall on Saturday would not lie on top and make it dangerous and slippery," Buckley said.

"I have no doubt at all that I did the right thing. The jockeys and horses are our number one actors, as it were, and we have to look after them. I wouldn't want to be the person responsible for ending Frankie Dettori's career because there was not enough water on the track and he slipped up coming down the hill.

"If what I did upset some punters and owners, then I will just have to take that on the chin, but we had over 500 runners last week and I did not have a single complaint from a jockey about the ground."

Davis remains determined to highlight the issue. "Who benefits when courses give out inaccurate going reports?", he asked yesterday.

"Clearly, it's the bookmakers, but it is also the racing authorities, because the Levy is based on bookmakers' profits. I think it's a relationship that needs looking into and, at the end of the season, I will be sending the whole thread from the forum to the Gambling Commission and asking them to do so."

However, some progress may already be on the horizon. "This is very much an issue that is being looked at," Paul Struthers, of the BHA, said yesterday. "The problem is that to be able to make realistic comparisons between GoingStick readings at different tracks, we need to compile sufficient data. At the end of this year, we will have two full years' of readings, which should enable us to do just that.

"Use of the GoingStick will be required at all tracks from January 1, when we would also hope to encourage clerks to take readings much closer to racing, which could be published on our website." For the keyboard warriors on Betfair's forum, it would not be a moment too soon.
Ron Cox's tip of the day

Count Ceprano 4.00 Brighton

While it would not have been the most competitive event of the meeting, the concluding apprentices' handicap at Glorious Goodwood on Saturday was won in tremendous fashion by Count Ceprano. The four-year-old, who gets no penalty for that success, came clear to win by three and a half lengths in the hands of the promising David Probert, who takes a valuable 5lb off here again.