ITV Digital, the football clubs and the future of UK online

It is hard to know which side to take in the head-to-head between ITV Digital and the Football League. For each side, this weekend would appear to be extra time in what's turned out to be bruising match.

Take a look at newspaper back pages and it looks like ITV Digital renegotiating its contract for football rights would spell the end for anything between 30 and 50 clubs. That's what the Football League says.

Read the business pages and a similar tale of 'make or break' seems to be coming from the mouths of albeit unnamed execs from ITV Digital's backers.

Does the future of around half of the clubs in the top four English divisions really rest on a TV deal well in excess of what had previously been on offer? We're not so sure.

At the same time, should ITV Digital have allowed itself to have been backed into such a corner?

This is a story about sport and business and media but it's also more. At the heart of the UK government's policy of getting the population online is interactive TV. That whole strategy will be blown out of the water if ITV Digital is allowed to fail. And that's to say nothing at all about the millions of consumers who have bought their set-top boxes and paid their subs.

More likely is an eleventh hour rescue package for ITV Digital which still sees the football clubs get some cash. Question: Name a broadcaster that knows how to make interactive TV work and which has had successful dealings with football? Answer: Well, you know the answer.

BSkyB is monitoring the situation closely, that we know.

If it does become involved the ultimate irony will be that the present government, the same government that cannot allow interactive digital TV to flop, insisted BSkyB couldn't be part of the original British Digital Broadcasting consortium along with Carlton and Granada that spawned ONDigital, now ITV Digital.

The government ruled out that alliance on grounds of competition but would doubtless have a different view now.

Now those Football League clubs could teach us a thing or two about competition...