It’s an issue that’s clearly on the minds of league executives, who are trying to prop up the traditional TV business while enticing digital companies to get hooked on their product the same way TV companies have. If digital TV companies such as Amazon, Facebook or even Netflix decide that they want to use exclusive sports to stand out, leagues will continue to rake in huge amounts in rights fees.
The problem is that the TV business still is booming for them. And that TV business is under siege, with aging demographics and declining subscriber bases.
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Duce630
(DustinK - I Stand With Israel - Bring Them Home)
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What was most important was at the end, if they can’t keep getting young people interested in watching sports, then it won’t matter how it is broadcast.
I completely agree. Above all this is a societal problem. Pause for a moment and see how men are portrayed on tv, especially tv commercials. Men are portrayed as dumb asses. The wife/girlfriend knows better it seems.
Hollywood has had in the last 25 years one message and one message only. Cut our balls off and replace them with a fantasy that there is no difference between a man and a woman. Excuse my crudeness but sadly they have partially succeeded. Just think how millennials are “sports wired” That is THE challenge. How do you reach an audience that has fundamentally evolved? Paul Allen is a god’s figure to these same millennials. There are other Tech/Sports owners like Cuban. It might not be a bad idea to get them involved and development a strategy to re-position the “steering wheel” where it should be. Just saying.
A big issue is the length of games, or rather, the length of broadcasts. Games have continued to lengthen due to TV, commercials, etc and the finger is always pointed back at the sports themselves. How many games have we gone to where a team scores, a commercial, come back to a kickoff, commercial, 3 plays and out, commercial, turnover, commercial. And those commercial breaks have gotten longer.
I know it will never happen, but it would be nice if more sports went to the soccer model and just rotated ads while the game played out on TV with minimal breaks. I bet you’d see a lot shorter games and a lot more interest from the younger generation.
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Duce630
(DustinK - I Stand With Israel - Bring Them Home)
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That might be one of the hangups about moving to all streaming is the ads. In the streaming model it might make sense to have less breaks and such.
That only adds to a society that seems to have a shorter attention span.
The NFL is going to have to make a decision. Their ratings for the first time went down at times. They want more commercials? They are losing their audience. It would make much more sense to increase the quality of the commercials, have less commercials and charge more for them.
The same can be said with college football but the creation of the P5 has had a double impact. What made college football so popular was the local/geographical identity of each team vs conference. The P5’s message is we are elite and everybody else is garbage, second class and does not belong with us. What kind of a message is it for any potential viewer?
How do you have people not look into their phone every five seconds? Is it time to have another type of cheerleaders/field animations?
Here’s another article for what may be coming in the future
We saw one element of this recently with the Mountain West Conference, which actually has it pretty good by the standards of smaller leagues (their games are televised, just at bad times and sometimes on low-distribution networks), but is contemplating going all-streaming in their next deal to improve their kickoff times and in-stadium numbers.