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It's Probably Pretty Boring, But We Want To See It Anyway
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There IS one copy of the actual CBS broadcast of Super Bowl I. The guy who owns it wants $1 million for it. The NFL won't pay that, and all it has offered is a take-it-or-leave-it $30,000, even at the 50th anniversary. The two sides are so far apart that you'll probably never see the footage. What's weird is that a million bucks is a drop in the bucket for the league and they'd make it back almost instantly and then some in TV rights and video sales, and would have, finally, the broadcast footage they could use for countless productions and packages. $30,000 is really, really low; a million doesn't seem out of the question. The story's even sadder when you read about how the owner's father, who he never knew, recorded the game on 2-inch tape for reasons nobody will ever know, gave it to his ex when he got cancer, and it just sat there in his mother's attic until a friend realized what he had. And when CBS wanted to interview him and pay him for the talk and for a couple of minutes of the footage, the NFL allegedly stepped in to stop it. The league DOES own the underlying intellectual property, so he can't work with any third parties, but it won't work with him, either. It would rather do something like that "re-creation" they've been airing on NFL Network, which is NOT the same thing as a game broadcast. Why are they this adamant about this particular thing? (New York Times)
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