'Forest World is fine' says webmaster
23/02/03 | Interview by Alex Walker

Geoff Peabody, webmaster of the Nottingham Forest official site, has hit back at claims made by LTLF that his site and its Forest World spin-off might be in trouble, in an extensive interview with us. Speaking to LTLF last Wednesday, Geoff insisted: "Forest World is making a profit. It is making money for the club." But he also revealed that the club are not receiving as much money as was promised by PTV (the marketing company owned by NTL who started the World projects at all 72 Nationwide League clubs last summer) and that they are apparently powerless to stop unofficial sites running their own commentary services, despite PTV owning exclusive rights.

"Forest World is making a profit. I can't say how much right now because we haven't had a whole year yet," Geoff told me.

He also revealed that PTV's involvement in the deal has been cut drastically since the summer, when, in the aftermath of the ITV Digital collapse, the company tried to pull out of the contract with the Nationwide League clubs that standardised all the club websites.

In the first year of the deal, Forest received £1m from PTV in return for the rights to manage the website contents and design, as well as the establishment of subscription-based services in the form of the World services.

However, the company now only provide hosting for the sites and their influence is kept at a minimum. "Obviously we're not going to make the million pounds we did last year because that was a one-off situation," said Geoff.

Despite this, PTV still have some say over what goes onto the sites and recently forced fans to register before they could view any of the official sites. "I hate it," Geoff admitted. "But unfortunately that's one of the things all 72 club sites have got to."

He assured fans that their personal details provided on the registration form would not be sold off to advertisers: "E-mail addresses won't be sold to third-parties." But for supporters who still have concerns he suggested that they should register as "Noddy" and put their e-mail down as "xyz@xyz.com".

The move to registered-only has proved unpopular with fans who do not appreciate the added inconvenience. "When it first started I had the usual suspects running their 'campaigns' against it. We don't wake up in the morning and think 'how can we piss people off today?' We want to give people what they want."

He also addressed concerns about the advertising that seems to have taken over the sites, in particular the prominent betting services: "Betting makes us a lot of money. Of the commercial element, you should see some of the things that don't go up there!"

He added that he himself has the final say on anything that goes on the website, insisting: "I've got complete control."

Nottingham Forest's website is visited by an impressive average of 23,500 people every month. "On the viewing side," said Geoff, "we are vying with Wolves to be either the first or second most viewed [Nationwide League] website"

However, of the 23,500 regular visitors, only 1,400 have so far signed up for Forest World, at £35 a year. The recent 'Free Trial' promotion has pushed the total subscription figures across the whole PTV network up from 25,000 to 28,000 this month.

Each match commentary broadcast costs in the region of £2,000 a time (per club) to cover bandwidth usage. It is not clear exactly how the measly total of around £50,000 currently being made from Forest World subscriptions this season will pay for the cost of broadcasting at least 49 Forest games over 2002/03, not to mention the added costs involved in running the site, the equipment used and the television crew who put together the daily news updates. However, Geoff Peabody still insists that the project is making a profit and is considered to be very successful by the club.

Another issue that was raised by LTLF's article two weeks ago was that of the relationship between Geoff Peabody and Karl Pridmore, the editor of The Discerning Eye, a website which has been broadcasting illegal internet commentary all season under the full knowledge of the club.

Geoff admitted that The Discerning Eye's broadcasts were against the law, but claimed that neither himself, the club, nor PTV could do anything about it, saying: "We have not given The Eye permission to broadcast - we know he does it, but at the moment we can't stop him."

However, when I questioned that The Discerning Eye's broadcasts might be costing the club money by stealing the audience from Forest World, Geoff defended Mr Pridmore (with whom he has a long-running friendship) saying: "Actually, we're gaining the audience from him because he can't broadcast to enough people. We're now getting that the people on there are now listening to Forest World."

The Discerning Eye, based in Canada, currently has the capacity to broadcast free commentary of Forest games to 100 people at a time, although he claims to only broadcast to around 20. "If he were broadcasting to 100 people," said Geoff, "I'd slam down on him as quick as anything."

He added that the situation has been "well-looked at" but insisted: "He's not allowed to do it, but he is still doing it, and that's two different things."

He repeated: "We know he does it and he's been told that we know he does it. At the moment, we can't do anything about it."

When asked what had been done about it, Geoff refused to comment.

This is all rather different to the treatment that the website Forest Fire received in 2001 when the club stopped it from providing its readers with free Forest goal videos and audio clips to download. "That was at the time when we had just started with PTV," Geoff commented, "and it was all to do with copyright. PTV paid out a lot of money for those highlights packages."

In the case of Forest Fire, Geoff Peabody himself saw to it that the website stopped providing what were now illegal pieces of media and the site's editors complied very quickly.

When I compared the two cases mentioned here, Geoff replied that stopping The Discerning Eye breaching PTV's exclusive right to broadcast internet commentary was "slightly harder to do".

Geoff's relationship with unofficial Forest sites has often been questioned by those of us involved. He raised the issue of Empics pictures being used on LTLF without being paid for, a situation that we are gradually trying to resolve with the full knowledge and understanding of Empics themselves.

Geoff told me: "My philosophy for fan sites has been that if people e-mailed me and asked permission [to use my pictures] then I've never turned anyone down. Since the summer it has been made harder for people to copy because things were being taken off by commercial sites.

"What I've always said with people who have taken pictures is 'fine, but give us a credit'. What you can't do is take off the commercial photographs because they are owned by Empics - any action pics."

When the difficulty that unofficial fan sites have in obtaining pictures was pointed out, Geoff said that it was in Empics' interest to protect their own copyright and also said: "We don't stop people bringing cameras to the ground."

That much may be true, but other clubs do stop fans from taking pictures in their grounds (Port Vale and West Ham are two recent examples I've encountered). What's more, it is very hard for unofficial fan sites to get hold of legitimate pictures, even if they have the money to pay. To buy Empics match photographs you must first have a Football League license (costing £587, inc VAT, for the season) and the Football League are currently very reluctant to grant licenses to unofficial fan sites as they have a vested interest in monopolising the content on the official versions.

The plan seems to be for the FL to make running a decent unofficial website so hard that eventually everyone will give up and the official sites will have the entire market to themselves.

Another tactic they have used is to place a database copyright on fixture lists, meaning no-one can publish a fixture list without first paying an extortionate fee. One would think that it was in the interest of the league that this information would be widely available, but last week I was ordered to remove the fixtures page from LTLF by a company called NetResult which manages the use of fixture lists in the UK. After requesting more information about this rather dubious scheme and the legality of such an arrangement, I was quoted a piece of case law set in 1959 - many years before the internet was even introduced!

When I asked Geoff to comment on this matter he said: "They are very strict on it. They own the copyright. As another club have done, you could do a 'diary' of where you might be: you're going shopping in Watford next week, aren't you? As you've done with your Lego thing - which is an interesting one - there are always ways round."

When questioned about whether or not these kinds of restrictions were a deliberate attempt to indirectly censor unofficial sites by shutting them down or putting people off, he said: "I'm not going to get into any discussions about the way the league runs."

I asked if the official site would not benefit from a better relationship with its unofficial counterparts and suggested that they assist unofficial sites by sending out press releases and photos that editors could use legally on their sites. Geoff had two arguments against this, first saying: "I don't see competing newspapers putting articles into other people's papers." I said that unofficial fan sites do not 'compete' with the official ones at all, for revenue or readers, to which Geoff replied: "For news, we have to be the first with it - that's the criteria. We want exclusivity on it."

After discussing various issues at great length for nearly two hours solid, I asked Geoff if I could have a look at his office and he took me up to the Forest marketing department which is situated in the building opposite the Main Stand.

For some reason, which he didn't make entirely clear, Geoff wouldn't allow me to take any photographs inside the office from which the official website is run - a smallish room containing one computer, a television editing suite, and two desks piled with papers and files. There was also a large selection of Forest videos, from which the Forest World team of Andy and Fraser take various clips to be included in the Forest World archive.

Geoff took the opportunity to demonstrate some of Forest World's finer features to me. "I hate these as well, you know", he said as the front page advertisement for the Forest World free trial appeared.

Much to his embarrassment, Geoff's internet connection timed-out while trying to access one video on the Forest World site, and he was also plagued by a pop-up asking him to register while trying to navigate the standard site. "Never demonstrate anything to someone who is going to write about it", he reminded himself.