Paintball Journal

As many of you know, NPPL made a deal with Fox to produce a series and broadcast it on national TV. Well, that deal had a little bit of a clincher to it. Exclusivity rights for Fox on the center court, where a lot of the bigger games and pro games occur.

Why we are closing the NPPL Forum and blocking the NPPL web cast

Sometimes you just have to take stand. This is one of those times.

We just learned that our friends from Monkey with a Gun and all the other paintball filmmakers have been locked out of center court for filming during the entire Boston event.

The short story is that the NPPL President has cut a deal with Fox to put the event on TV but this deal excludes all of the paintball filmmakers from access to the center court. They can film all the other courts just not the center court. All of you know how important the center court is to a NPPL event. This is the first time in many years that the hard working, dedicated individuals who promote our industry with great paintball films have been locked out of filming on the main field.

This season many of you have noticed that we have greatly reduced our coverage and support of the NPPL series and now we feel that we have to completely end our coverage and support of this series.

Enough is enough.

So to that end we have placed the live broadcast sites, the home page and others on the swear filter and we are also going to close and lock the NPPL forum in a few days.

We hope that you will understand and support this decision and also voice your opinion to the owners and management of the league so perhaps things can be turned around.

As always your continued support is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Ed
President
PbNation LLC

Thoughts?

Mine are fairly varied. Fox was well withing its rights to want and claim the exclusivity. Really it’s SOP for any big company like that. Unfortunately, paintball is a fairly unique sport in that smaller companies create DVDs for people like you and me to watch. And I really, really enjoy those DVDs, and anything that affects them is certainly something to watch for. However, this could also just be the first step toward where the NFL is today, selling some games to different networks. It’s a bold move by NPPL, but there may come a day when we have to accept the benefits of coverage like this over the detractions such as a void that MWAG and DerDer have filled until now.