I don't watch sports networks of any kind, but I've seen anecdotes online that ESPN, especially sportscenter, is losing viewers because of politicization of content, where people just want sports talk.
Not sure since I don't watch much ESPN either but this is a trend across media properties. I just saw MIT Technology Review tweet something about Trump's politics...didn't make me very happy.
MIT is an institution of higher learning. When the president says that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to ruin the American economy, it goes beyond politics. Science isn't conservative or liberal. Science institutions are right to speak out against foolish policies that aren't rooted in science.
This is a pretty interesting, fact-based article, what's the problem? I understand not wanting political opinions in a publication like this, but there's no discussion of whether the wall is a good idea or anything like that in here.
"The mission of MIT Technology Review is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology." I don't think ignoring any story that happens to involve a politician would help serve that mission.
I think directing funding away from things can be political. It is like saying, "we don't want this question answered." Directing funding towards answering certain questions isn't political in my mind, though.
How about directing funding toward creationism, or alternative views of the causes of climate change (i.e., non-human ones), or the benefits of authoritarianism? How about when the Koch brothers fund research into the benefits of their brand of libertarianism?
First, it's an investment; it's not taking away money; it's not robbery. It has a return, a benefit that generally exceeds the cost (I'm not sure how much I paid to fly Cassini to Saturn, but wow was it worth it). People make investments all the time and are happy to do it, in everything from houses to the local homeless shelter to a new computer.
Second, people normally and frequently participate in group decisions, even though they rarely get exactly what they want. To suggest that anything besides an individual choosing alone is extraordinary - that isn't how people really operate.
Recently I was watching on Netflix a show about 80s in US. It showed how funding for AIDS research was forced by activists. Though it might be a common incident, but it changed my perception how any type of funding seems forced either from outside by activists or by sympathizers who are in control of funding.
People clearly seem to justify funding to their favorite cause as progress to humanity. However a progressive or otherwise agenda is itself purely politics.
I like to watch sports for the competition, not preachy politics. Life in America is already too polarized politically. It's a shame broadcast sports can't be at least one place for common ground.
> It's a shame broadcast sports can't be at least one place for common ground.
I don't know. There's a "sportsmanship" mythos out there, but I'm not sure it's the dominant one.
I see a lot more of the love-my-team-hate-your-team culture in sports that looks a lot like modern "my team" politics. I'm just struggling with the implication of that. Do we encourage rabid sports fandom to give a relatively harmless space for the tribal impulse? Or does it just train people to support their parties and politicians the same way they support their favorite jerseyed heroes?
Also, trying to exclude politics often plays out as the majority promulgating their own "neutral" political positions and traditions unchallenged. It's much harder to create a truly apolitical space than it is to just get people with grievances to shut up or leave.
is losing viewers because of politicization of content
They're losing viewers because we're turning away from television. That much is obvious to all. There are many ways to view, every event has countless streams, we get our sports news in granular form on our mobile, etc.
However in the wake of that, some very sad people have decided to get on their soapbox and claim that they're really declining because they don't parrot whatever their personal position is. I've seen these people claim that ESPN is faltering because they have a problem with players who rape or beat women. Others -- the same ones who say that they don't want it to be "preachy" -- get up in arms if ESPN isn't preachily attacking the Colin Kaepernick's of the world. Etc.
So as is often the case, the most partisan of all are the ones claiming that everything is some crazy partisan slant.
It's not even about personal opinions. Every second they spend talking about whichever pro-athlete got a misdemeanor this week or scolding some college because its athletes were at a party where shit went down is a second they're not talking about actual sports content.
The professional leagues all have conduct policies. So do colleges with sports teams. If a player violates those policies and faces consequences such as being suspended from play, how is that not "actual sports content"?
You might as well say that if a politician commits crimes, political coverage shouldn't mention it -- after all, that's not "actual political content", right?
Because they're sports players, first and foremost, and people aren't watching ESPN for evaluation of role model behavior? Scrutinizing the behavior of celebrities outside of their work is more along the style of gossip channels like E!.
The thing is, in our society athletes represent one of the few paths to life-altering financial success that's still somewhat open to people from poor or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds. While there are people who win the genetic lottery and get well-above-average physical capabilities, and people who win the birth lottery and get parents who can afford private coaching and training, there are still plenty of athletes who lack either of those advantages but still manage to succeed through putting in work.
Which means they do end up being role models, because "work hard and you can succeed" is something we desperately want to teach children, even when it doesn't seem to be true. So athletes' stories get told as a means to inspire people to better themselves, and that makes their character extremely relevant.
I don't have a problem with Harold Reynolds (technically no longer with ESPN) because he sexually harasses women (I do, but I'm not changing the channel solely based on that). I have a problem with him because he's an idiot and I lose brain cells watching him. The same is true of so many network talking heads.
I later saw how terribly I worded that, however regarding the sexual assaults I was mostly talking about how extensively and forcefully ESPN covered incidents of sexual assault / domestic assault / etc of players in various sports (particularly football). To a certain contingent, doing so was being a "SJW", and many of that group decried it as leftist or liberal, absurdly.
espn's best performing shows (other than live broadcasts of actual sports events) are it's most politicized. 'First Take', 'Highly Questionable', 'Pardon the Interruption', 'Around the Horn', etc
the same is true for Fox Sports 1. it's simply not true that consumers are watching sports programming that isn't politicized more than that which is
My first thought is, what's the ratio of those shows live vs. on-demand viewers? If you're looking at mostly live viewers, the time-slot the show is given could be the driver of the volume of eyeballs as much as the content.
In otherwords, perhaps their best watched shows are the ones in the worst decline / their best watched (i.e. tent pole shows) are bleeding the most viewers. I can't speak to the cause.
Is it possible that ESPN/sports channels are facing a demographic change and are guessing that mainstreaming their content, by appealing to non-sports fans by way of personality content that's just like an entertainment channel? This would be no different than the weather channel that changes from hardcore weather data to reality shows about bad weather.
no. these shows have been popular for years. pardon the interruption first aired in 2001. around the horn in 2003. first take in 2007. espn isn't flailing around looking for a new business model, it's following the money
espn's problems are overpaying for content (live sports), paying a huge number of employees who barely move the needle in the twitter age (all of their reporters, basically) and the rise of alternatives to cable like netflix, amazon prime, hulu and bamtech
Also: the sports themselves starting to get savvy. MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL all have their own television networks, and MLB is setting a strong example of how to do a streaming sports service right. In fact, ESPN has announced they'll start airing one of the MLB network's daily shows and massively scaling back their own daily baseball show (which will now only air once a week).
Add in rumors that the NFL influences its schedule to give ESPN less-desirable games for Monday Night Football, and the NBA strongly favoring TNT/TBS, and what's left? They can't run Sportscenter 24 hours a day.
Overpaying for content is such a huge part of the problem and I'm surprised there are so few comments here that even mention it. This 2 year old graphic[1] from the last set of layoffs is telling:
Basically ESPN's executives shit the bed over and over for a number of years and the rank and file workers are the ones that end up paying for their mistakes.
ESPN would be in trouble without pushing progressive politics. The business model simply isn't holding up. But alienating half of your consumers probably isn't the best way to deal with a failing business model.
> ESPN would be in trouble without pushing progressive politics. The business model simply isn't holding up.
I agree that ESPN's decline has more to do with over-extending themselves on rights deals while cord-cutting has become "a thing" than politics. However, I don't think you can discount the politics angle as a reason that a sizable number of people have finally decided "you know, I can do without ESPN." The amount of people who I've seen, online and in person, citing the absolutely insufferable, constant politicization of ESPN (and the media in general), regardless of which side of the aisle these people sit on, leads me to believe that a lot of people are simply exhausted and just want "sports". Barring that, they're quite willing to just drop ESPN. I think it really is a legitimate factor here.
>However, I don't think you can discount the politics angle as a reason that a sizable number of people have finally decided "you know, I can do without ESPN."
I don't. In fact I agree entirely with the notion that ESPN is shooting itself in the foot by constantly pushing politics that play well in NYC & LA, but actively turn off viewers in the rest of the country. I'm just saying it would still be failing; albeit more slowly if it "just stuck to sports".
I see the politicization as an effect, not a cause. They are trying to get market by becoming "more than sports." MTV tried to become "more than music" in the same way decades ago. It's a not a trend limited to cable but there are many examples.
I don't see ESPN's content as politicized. Politicized content would be to support a candidate or political policy (e.g., for or against national health care).
I see ESPN addressing social issues, such as abuse of women, but I don't call that political. Of course, any person can say: X is against my politics; but on that basis everything is politics.
The reality is that there's a segment of the public that's part of an ideological political movement. Consistent with such movements, everything and everyone that doesn't share the political ideology are viewed as political enemies; the goal is to wipe out all apostates and non-believers. If ESPN doesn't share their ideology, they are portrayed as political enemies. In the end, that group is a small minority (per surveys, not per online volume or representation on cable news); we can't be intimidated into silence on important social issues.
> I've seen anecdotes online
As a basis of knowledge, that has been so misleading for so long, especially regarding politicized issues like this one, that IMHO repeating it mostly magnifies misinformation.
A simpler way to explain what you're getting at is: if reporting is about someone the viewer identifies with, or an issue the viewer sees as relevant to/personally affecting them, then they see it as fine. But if it's about someone the viewer doesn't identify with, or an issue the viewer doesn't see as relevant to/personally affecting them, well, that's "politics".
Thus: male viewers see it as "political" to cover women or issues affecting women. White viewers see it as "political" to cover people of color or issues affecting people of color. And there is some research to show that even small amounts of representation get perceived as a much higher percentage, by an audience used to zero as the baseline representation of people unlike themselves.
Oddly, they never seem to realize just how much "politics" had to happen to create and maintain the situation in which those other people and issues weren't considered fit to cover or even mention.
As a millennial consumer (rolling my own eyes but it's true) who cut the cord, the biggest thing that pushed me toward doing so was seeing all of the sports channels I was paying for and never had an ounce of desire to watch. The way my cable company breaks out a mandatory $15 fee for ESPN specifically was the nail in the coffin. Personally, sports programming was dragging the already shaky value prop of the cable industry down much further.
Like you, there's plenty of people who aren't interested in sports and aren't interested in paying extra for a sports-bundled cable package.
Then there's people like me who like sports and don't like the programming on ESPN. Two decades ago, ESPN reporting used to be legitimately great. They'd talk about strategy, roster moves, interviews with players/coaches, etc. These days it's TMZ with a sports focus. Even something as mundane as Tom Brady's new haircut became a talking point on ESPN. The most recent example I have of ESPN's decline was the recent NFL draft. It was nothing but baseless conjecture on who's getting whom. It's a lot of random guesswork and hot takes portrayed as journalism. The talking heads would just shout about the most outrageous conjecture with no rationale.
ESPN has gotten complacent and they're paying for it now. In my opinion they were relying on cable subscriptions when that's going away, and they haven't invested in quality programming to keep the sports fans in the longest time.
And it's only going to get worse. The article notes that most of the 100 laid off were reporters and that ESPN was moving towards opinion. This is the beginning of the end for most sports fans, I'd imagine. I remember the days of being home in the morning from classes in the early 90s and seeing Australian Rules Football or a quality discussion of some sport on ESPN. Now it's Mike and Mike or some other inane uselessness.
What I was thinking when I saw the lay-offs is that this is exactly the wrong move for them. I understand why ESPN did it, to cut costs, but they're cutting them in the wrong area.
ESPN needs more reporters and more people doing direct content production.
ESPN needs to go back to content producers (sports leagues) and tell them that they're no longer able to force effectively 100% of the population to subsidize subscription costs for the percentage of the population that watches their sport and that their license payments need to be renegotiated to compensate.
No kidding. I miss the old days of ESPN. Doesn't help either that ESPN isn't showing good games anymore and that it has big competition now.
For football, this past season they were only showing the MNF games. In the Bay Area, NBC Sports Bay Area has broadcast rights to all the Giants and Warriors games. IIRC, NBC broadcast holds the rights to the Sharks. In San Diego, Fox Sports San Diego has the rights to the Padres. I can't remember the last time I tuned into ESPN to watch a game I wanted to see beyond "Oh that's on, I guess I'll watch."
Even ignoring the broadcasting rights, sports talk on other channels have become vastly superior to ESPN. My two favorite segments on sports this year (ARod + Pete Rose discuss batting, Isiah Thomas discusses dribbling) came out of Fox Sports and TNT. I'd pay good money to hear more detailed analysis from former players, rather than talk endlessly about how Tom Brady looks like he's from NSync with his haircut.
In my opinion ESPN just got too complacent with their status and is digging themselves into the grave. I swear I can go on for hours over all the things ESPN is doing wrong in the sports media today.
Well the giants were on Fox before (at least in 2001 when I followed them religiously) and tbh ESPN has never carried MLB games in the home region since the network (non cable) channels with bigger viewership can outbid them?
Not to mention them turning down their hockey coverage dramatically after they lost the TV deal (remember when they had an hour show devoted to NHL?), followed by them laying off all their competent hockey guys in the recent round of layoffs.
There's still some legitimately good content, both on the channels and in print, but you just have to wade through a mountain of keep-you-engaged filler content to find it. The 30 for 30 series had some really high quality, poignant documentary content that, more often than not, transcended sport to become a commentary on other walks of life. I especially liked "The Two Escobars" because it recontextualized an event from my childhood (the US victory over Colombia in the '94 World Cup) that I remembered very differently. And here's two articles [1][2] that, while long, I found very engaging reads. But I see your point that the constant bombardment of drivel you get on the channel and online could give the impression that there's nothing of value there.
I've posted this elsewhere, but it's relevant here too. The problem that's affecting ESPN is the same problem that's affecting newspapers and the same root cause that's behind reality TV, and buzzfeed and the like. The issue is the advertising model and the cost of creating content.
A number of people here complain about ESPN swapping to talking heads and opinions. The reason for doing this is because it's significantly cheaper to have people give opinions (everyone has an opinion) than the costs of doing journalism. ESPN isn't swapping to these shows because they have worse ratings, comparatively they get higher ratings.
Everyone talking about he glory days of the 90s and ESPN. That time is in the past. People turn to the internet for sports updates and scores, as well as highlight reels.
Ultimately, it's a failure in the "advertising model" of paying for content. As long as content creators are paid a roughly flat fee per viewer, their only incentives are to get more viewers and cut costs. Previously the market was inefficient enough to sustain it, but now that there are alternatives the inevitable is happening in all areas of content creation. Moving to cheap to produce, easy to digest low substance, high viewership content.
Imaging you were running a restaurant, and you couldn't charge a customer per meal. You only received a small flat rate for the number of customers who ate there. You're not going to run a top end steak house where your payment doesn't even cover the materials. You're gonna run a mcdonalds. Get as many people in there for as cheap as possible. You have no choice, the money doesn't support an intimate fine dining experience.
The that the same thing happening in all aspects of content creation. The market is becoming efficient, and the only way to survive is low cost production. Fast-food of content.
You really missed the point, the article nailed it and your analogy is entirely wrong. ESPN got a flat fee per user + the ability to advertise to them. That gave them a huge financial incentive to overspend on the best content they could get to build the greatest sports "steakhouse" of all time and they did it. They spent up the wazoo on content. But the bottom is dropping out of the model because of cord cutters so now they have change and adapt to not getting flat fees for much longer.
"Because of cord cutters" seems awfully accusatory here. The real confounding factor from the article is that ESPN was being subsidized by fees from customers who don't watch the channel, but still were paying high bundled fees compared to other channels.
This is shifting to them receiving fees from those interested in their programming, which seems much more reasonable in concept.
It's not that cord-cutters are a bad thing, but isn't that the crux of ESPN's financial woes? Nearly everyone and their mama had cable about a decade ago. No matter if you were a 4 person family, living off campus where utilities were covered, or in the military - people had cable. If you were fancy, you had satellite programming. Then cord-cutting happened.
It is the fault of cord-cutters, because they aren't subsidizing the cost of ESPN for people who want to watch ESPN. Then ESPN could not pivot quickly enough to stop the bleeding. So yeah, ESPN is getting money from people who are interested in sports, but it is because cord-cutters had enough.
That is definitely a huge part of it. And it's not just cord cutters. Many cable stations now don't include sports channels in the basic package. So many people who pay for cable no longer pay for ESPN.
Another factor is that the Internet is a better source for sports news. Highlights are on YouTube. Twitter feeds post links to analysis from all over the web. Nobody needs to watch sports center for news anymore.
I'll explain it less confrontationaly than you did. First, the argument you presented actually is evidence for what I wrote.
> But the bottom is dropping out of the model because of cord cutters
As I wrote, the market across the board is becoming efficient. This is restating my point. Previously the only option was for cable, now there are other options for consumption. This is increased market efficiency.
> so now they have change and adapt to not getting flat fees for much longer.
Yes they have to change from their previous fee structure, but there are many things they could've changed to that would've supported quality programming. Instead ESPN changed to an advertising model, which doesn't support it. (Ex. Why does HBO get showered with awards year after year? And how do they monetize viewers?).
To understand the difference, imagine a directed graph with a transition between two nodes. You're too focused on the node it's leaving - instead I'd recommend focusing on the node it's arriving at (efficient market advertising model). Regardless of where you come from, if that's where you end up you will quickly produce fast-food content or you'll go under.
ESPNs problem from before is not that they had a subscription model. It's that they had a bundled subscription model. It was bundeled with Cable, and they were making money from people who never watched them. Their revenue was inflated. Rather than trim and find the true medium, they're throwing it all away and going advertising.
Sports can absolutely be supported via expensive subscription (see NFL Game Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Packages, ...). Up to $400 / year for it. But ESPN is going a different route. One that will unfortunately turn them into the MTV of sports. But they won't be the only one.
The article should have gone further then — as ESPN suffers, so will the NFL, NBA, etc. They're not going to be able to get astronomical payouts for their content. Soon we'll start to see the owners of the teams losing millions.
People always say this as if the people running ESPN don't see their own ratings numbers or aren't professional television producers. They see that shows like First Take, Around the Horn, and Pardon the Interruption get higher ratings than NFL Live or Baseball Tonight. The in depth stuff simply doesn't attract viewers. Almost no one cares about what strategy decisions lead to the Minnesota Twin's winning the 28th game of a 162 game season outside of Minnesota and the people who do care have already watched the game, read a recap of it, seen the highlights on Twitter, or found some other quicker way to get the information they wanted about the game. The reason ESPN has been shifting to a "TMZ with sports" focus is because that is the only thing outside of live sport that has consistently been garnering them viewers for the last decade plus.
This may be true. But, if they switch from adding color commentary to being solely color commentary, will people still tune in? I get the sense that people tune in to have their opinions validated. ESPN analysis opinions matter because of ratings. It seems to be a risky strategy.
I've found myself wondering lately if ESPN dumbed down and sensationalized their programming or if they are just accurately making programming for the current American citizen. A sort of chicken or the egg situation. I pray that it is the former.
Having to fill up 24 hours of daily airtime, across multiple channels (how many do they have now? four -- espn, espn2, espnu, espn classic?) has to require thinning out the content.
I'm mostly like you. Sportscenter is largely useless with highlight available on-demand, and the only time I've watched it over the past few years was when major events happened around a team I like. I think that was twice -- Lebron James coming back to the Cavs and the Cavs winning the championship.
There is so much garbage content and I can't imagine spending an entire Sunday morning watching their NFL pregame shows. They are so bad and rehash the same things over and over again. None of their content is any better. PTI set the standard for what a lot of their programming has morphed into, but PTI worked because the guys on it were smart, took interesting angles, and the show was novel. Now that there are 50 other programs just like it, the novelty has worn off and the hosts are largely "hot take" machines.
Really, besides their national NBA game broadcasts or college football, I can't think of any reason why I'd watch ESPN on a routine basis any more. There are sports podcasts that are far better and don't require my full attention than the studio shows ESPN produces.
> PTI set the standard for what a lot of their programming has morphed into, but PTI worked because the guys on it were smart, took interesting angles, and the show was novel.
Slightly off-topic. I didn't watch a lot of ESPN when I had cable. When I did, it was mostly SportsCenter and PTI. Are you saying that PTI marking the beginning of ESPN's programming declination or that other opinion shows failed to capture what made PTI good. It really doesn't matter, but I'm genuinely interested in your opinion here.
Not the OP, but I think (and I agree) he or she is stating that other shows failed to capture what made PTI good. When there were a couple of shows like PTI or Around the Horn it was great. Now there is basically national, local sports talk radio. Except with none of the fans, just yelling journalists. At least with local sports talk some of the redemption is that they are fans. I cut out sports talk radio almost a decade ago for podcasts. And I cut out ESPN about 3-4 years ago when I could get what I wanted elsewhere and none of what I didn't want. I am a sports person. However, I will not watch ESPN unless it is for a game. I just don't get any value.
I'm also a cord cutter but the only thing I miss is ESPN. Seems like more and more of the college football games I want to see are on ESPN rather than broadcast channels and Sunday Night Baseball and Baseball Tonight are institutions for me. However with MLB.tv (my favorite team isn't local), Amazon, and Netflix (streaming and DVD) I have more than enough content to watch and can't justify the full price of cable just for ESPN. Might not even be worth $15 for me but I would definitely spend five or ten a month for streaming ESPN.
+1 for SlingTV with the sports addons for CFB. I subscribe in August and cancel in February every year. It even gets you an ESPN login so you don't have to use Sling's app.
Yeah, We do SlingTV with the SEC Network addon. Then drop it for Netflix. We ran into some quality issue with Sling so I am hoping that Youtube TV will be in my area by this fall. It would be nice to have lower cost alternatives. It seems that there might be a good selection(3 or 4 choice in this market in the years to come.)
Baseball Tonight is basically dead. ESPN announced the other day that (along with laying off a lot of their baseball coverage staff) it'll now air only once a week, as an intro show for the Sunday night game.
for me, it wasn't just the ESPN cost, which was buried in the package. it was also the "regional sports fees" that Comcast lists as separate line items and have very obvious increases.
The only reason I have cable is BECAUSE of ESPN. Live sports is basically the primary value proposition of cable. Every other type of content out there is suitable for internet services, but having 20,000,000 TCP connections simultaneously streaming the Clemson vs Alabama title game vs 20,000,000 people tuning into a single broadcast is just a recipe for problems.
ESPN is partially a victim of it's own success as well. They do such a great job with online content that where you used to have to tune into Sportscenter, glued to the TV waiting to catch YOUR teams highlights now you can just hop online and catch all of them...immediately.
I remember in college having a roommate who was such a big UNC fan that he bought a VCR just so that he could tape record Sportscenter and rewatch Vince Young highlights.
You're describing IP-based cable TV, minus the splitting because the ISP can do multicast on their internal network which stretches to your router. Exactly the same way many ISPs do it today. This doesn't change anything about how content is sold and consumed.
My mistake if I misunderstood the post I was replying to, I thought the poster was concerned about the number of clients the source stream would need to supply.
So as opposed to ESPN needing an individual stream for every single (for example) Comcast subscriber who was watching, they send one stream to Comcast, who would then replicate it within their network to each subscriber.
I'm not a networking expert though, so maybe it's not that simple.
The thread started with brightball suggesting that ESPN and cable TV will not be killed because of Twitch, Youtube, and other streaming services, because those services cannot stream one feed to all consumers cheaply.
schnable then suggested that cable companies are switching to IP-based streaming which will have the same issue. I pointed out that it doesn't have the same issue, because multicast can be done internally to the ISP's network - though it can't be done on the wider Internet, so Twitch, Youtube, etc, still can't compete.
It's not exactly "replicating it within their network" - i.e. there's not individual connections to every single endpoint. That would quickly overload the networking equipment for no reason - you'd be sending thousands of duplicate packets, just to different endpoints. This would have no benefit over streaming from Twitch, Youtube, etc.
Instead, you have one source (which might receive its stream over satellite, unicast IP over the internet, whatever else) within the ISP's network which sends a multicast packet to its router, which then automatically duplicates it and send it to all the routers it's connected to, which does the same, and so on and so forth. This is similar behaviour to existing cable infrastructure - each packet only hits each router once.
Some small cable ISPs, and apparently maybe AT&T, do this today quite happily.
Basically, we're agreeing, but you don't seem to think we are because of the details?
but having 20,000,000 TCP connections simultaneously streaming the Clemson vs Alabama title game vs 20,000,000 people tuning into a single broadcast is just a recipe for problems.
I'd beg to differ. The League of Legends eSports 2016 World Championship had 43 million unique viewers, 14.7 million concurrent. It is possible some viewers were from a cable TV in Korea, but it is unlikely to be a significant chunk of those figures.
The broadcast on Twitch.tv was also of much higher quality (1080p60) than what you receive from any cable company.
If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared? Was there any other option to tune in? Would you have been getting scoring updates via push notifications on your phone? Would you have family and friends texting you with reactions during the game?
the delay is about 30 seconds. and yes. people text and talk about esports all the time. it's the fastest growing market of entertainment for men 18-35.
I remember watching the 2006 Super Bowl at a friend's apartment. One room had the SD broadcast going and the other had an HD brodcast. We'd be watching them line-up in HD and hear cheers from the other room because they already saw the play.
There are lots of delays today between different broadcasts. Just try to follow a sporting event on twitter or a forum and you will see.
Yes to all of those things. I used to work for Riot and the level of fandom is no less than any other sport I've ever seen. I'm not personally a fan, but people definitely watch together and chat/text/tweet each other with what is happening. The community in America is smaller than NFL fans.
>If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared?
Depending on the significance of the game in question, a delay of even a few seconds can be noticeable and annoying, because one of my friends on GroupMe is going to make a comment about an important goal the instant it happens.
I don't think I'd really care. There are often times where I'm forced to watch VODs of these matches due to the difference in time zones.
I don't converse with anyone about the games. It's just me and my cats. I also greatly despise push notifications to my phone, with the exception of email.
Though I agree a service could definitely come about to handle millions of concurrent viewers (I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube could/almost could handle it), I just want to point out those 14.7 million concurrent viewers were across all services. So not one service handling it all. Twitch, Youtube, Korea's Twitch (forget the name), and I believe China has a few major streaming companies.
You are correct. And that's the beauty of Riot's distribution. They do not lock you into a single platform. I'm not very familiar with traditional sports, but it seems most broadcasts have very limited viewing options.
How are they doing a great job with their online content? Their website is such a dumpster fire of unhelpful design that I can't bring myself to go there anymore.
There's a 65 pixel bar at the top with scores, and a 300 x 260 pixel block with headlines. The entire rest of the page on a 1920x1080 monitor is filled with garbage, auto-playing videos, embedded tweets, or wasted space.
Maybe. It's not clear that these TV rights deals are unprofitable. If those deals are the drag on ESPN's financials, the leagues will take a big hit. Those deals are longer-term though and the leagues have lots of existing and emerging opportunities.
You also have to consider that some owners treat their franchises like fancy sports cars, not businesses, and they are extremely rare cars at that!
ESPN makes its money from cable subscriptions, on average about $7 per subscriber. A lot of those subscribers value ESPN ... but a lot don't. They're all paying around $7 / mo for ESPN.
Every cordcutter is a loss for ESPN. This is affecting not only ESPN, but The Walt Disney Company's profits substantially. ESPN makes up ~30% of their gross revenue. They've seen losses most of the last several quarters, in large part due to bad numbers from ESPN.
Guess: Franchises have more flexibility in their revenue model. Somebody will be bidding billions for broadcast rights whether OTA, premium cable, or streaming. ESPN has a ton of inertia to overcome and an uncertain future if they can't rely on an ever-growing "bundled" subscriber base.
Sports franchise values are increasing, in general, because they're artificially limited in number (there are only 32 NFL teams) and specifically because of (a) increased rights fees,
(b) rising value of local broadcast deals, especially in large markets like LA and NY and (c) taxpayer-subsidized stadiums. At the same time, there's more competition than ever for the national broadcast deals which is why ESPN had to overpay for its NFL and NBA deals. And those broadcasting rights keep decreasing in value as each league gets to sell its product multiple times (for the NFL there are games on broadcast networks, ESPN, streaming-only games, NFL network games, Sunday Ticket, and RedZone). ESPN is in a bad spot since they have to have NFL games, because even though their Sunday Night Football deal only lets them air one (usually terrible) game a week, it means they get to fill their network the rest of the time with NFL highlight / analysis shows.
Comcast keeps reporting subscriber growth (almost 300k last quarter). People are definitely watching sports on tv, just not ESPN. You need more than one large, bloated, continuously failing channel to convince me that we're at the beginning of giant slide, but it's not like you will ever predict that anyway.
A TDG study showed nearly 101 million U.S. households subscribed to television at the industry's peak in 2011, but the number would fall below 95 million in 2017.
I'd expect a wave of mergers/consolidations and player/staff contract re-negotiations around that time. For teams, though, TV broadcast rights are just one of many revenue streams. Ticket sales, attire and souvenirs, concessions, various online subscriptions, endorsements, etc. are all refenue generators.
Efficient markets assume rationale participants. Sports fans are anything but. Sports is all about emotions.
While valuation of sports franchises may be only loosely coupled to reason the salary of players is connected to cash flow into the company. That is even more true if the company will have struggle to get more loans (lenders tend also to be more rationale).
ESPN is essentially a service and the franchises are a capital asset. As you know long term economic policy for a couple decades has been to inflate and bubble capital assets (real estate, for example). Meanwhile services get a mixed bag of tagging along or declining. So a capital asset like real estate or a pro sports team "must" go up 10x in price over a couple decades and a service may or may not keep up. ESPN kept up for awhile, not so much recently.
Why would they make less money by moving to a streaming model? I would imagine more people would go and buy just that instead of getting a cable package. They can also start charging a reasonable amount based on what it costs to produce the content.
If right now they rely on people paying for the channel but not watching it. Wouldn't switching to a streaming model mean that advertisers would be more interested because more people were actually watching the channel and saw ads?
ESPN's contracts forbid it to sell to anyone other than a Cable system. Otherwise it would be selling direct like Netflix. This is the terrible deal that major sports networks forced on it (and it took on anyway). Some day all that massive money will vanish and sports leagues will be gasping for income.
> I would imagine more people would go and buy just that instead of getting a cable package. They can also start charging a reasonable amount based on what it costs to produce the content.
ESPN probably expected that as well. In the US, you would expect almost any sports channel to have enough fans to make a profit. If people are going to drop channels they don't want, you would expect sports channels to be immune.
Apparently it hasn't turned out that way.
I can say that the last three times I went shopping for cable TV, the sports bundle was extra. Personally, I like hockey, but not much else. I would be happy to pay $7 a month for hockey games, but I wasn't given that option. I needed to pay much more, for a much larger bundle, and I chose to live without it.
It's that way in Australia - and worse. You've got our pay TV provider doing silly things like [1] and something strange with the broadcast rights meaning I can't really stream all the games until 2020.
Cable/satellite isn't really as big in Australia as it is in the States and Canada, but the last time I looked it was still $30+ a month if you wanted sport in HD (you know, so you can actually see where the ball is)
AFL streaming right now is broken due to the rights deal. Telstra paid such a small amount compared to 7 and Foxtel for the online rights that they had to accept a lot of restrictions, such as only steaming on mobile devices and no tablet full screen.
I suspect Foxtel will be in a similar position to ESPN come the next rights deal, where they can't afford to pay as highly due to people cancelling cable. Hopefully though that just results in a better streaming deal.
"If you see any article that tries to blame ESPN’s economic struggles on the 'liberal' tilt of the network, use those to line your birdcage. First, it’s not true. Second, it seems to be a reaction to the fact that ESPN actually has a laudable commitment to diversity and putting women, black people, and people of color in a position to actually talk about sports. This sends the alt-right sewers of the Internet and their minions at publications like the National Review into fits of hysterics. It’s an unserious argument made by unserious people."
IME, the premise that such a thing exists (with any meaningful impact at any meaningful scale) almost defines the white nationalists (alt-right). The racists with some intelligence rarely will outright say something socially unpopular; they try to make themselves palatable - 'we don't hate people based on their skin color, we just want to protect people like you with white skin from the victimization we are facing'. It's an old tactic: Adolph invaded other countries to protect Germans; Russia recently invaded Ukraine to protect Russians; everyone is a victim.
> "We need to protect minorities and women from the white male oppressors" is basically the slogan of the identity politics wing of the left.
No, that's something white nationalists say to each other; I don't see it elsewhere (in any significant quantity). There is overwhelming evidence of discrimination against people who are in minorities and against women, and as these people are largely excluded from power due to that same discrimination, they have little ability to protect themselves. If we believe in liberty, opportunity and meritocracy, and basic morality for everyone, then everyone should do something about it.
For the most part, only white nationalists say white-skinned people are discriminated against (with any significant scale or impact). There is no evidence of it that I've seen and a look around SV and the IT industry, corporate offices, governments and legislatures of every Western nation, college campuses, and any other locale of wealth, power and privilege shows how absurd the idea is. But the argument is not about discrimination, it's propaganda that is about creating hatred, trying to get people to see everyone as friends or enemies based on skin color (which is perhaps why white nationalists think there's some sort of bizarre us vs. them team competition), and providing a (transparent) excuse for racial hatred. Few people are fooled.
>There is overwhelming evidence of discrimination against people who are in minorities and against women, and as these people are largely excluded from power due to that same discrimination
I'd say there's more "overwhelming evidence" of confusion of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, but this is an unpopular opinion to even suggest, because people like yourself immediately throw around accusations of fascism and white nationalism for asking the wrong questions.
You say "we need to protect minorities and women from the white male oppressors" is not an accurate representation of their viewpoint.
Then you proceed to say that minorities and women are discriminated against, and we need to do something about that. Who is doing this discrimination, then? You point out that white-skinned people tend to hold power in (traditionally white) Western nations. I would say that my description is accurate.
Corporations are literally (including my former company) and publicly creating initiatives to hire more minority and female employees. This means that race and gender are now being considered alongside merit, and white males are now at a disadvantage. If this isn't the very definition of bias, I don't know what is.
It's the usual conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.
The fact that is that this is racist behavior, but people these days ignore it because it's en vogue.
There is literally never a thread on HN where comments like these --- or whatever their left-leaning equivalent might be --- are appropriate. This isn't discussion, it's vandalism.
This is exactly the kind of dangerous censorship which I am alluding to. We label certain topics as simply "forbidden" and then the appearance is that they are settled and anyone with an alternative opinion is wrong.
And for the record, this arguably is genuinely new content, because the "alt-right" is a recent epithet due jour with other connotations. This is a contemporary social issue which is currently evolving and should not be censored.
Users flagged the comment because it violates the guidelines, which is how this site works. The way to avoid this is to not violate the guidelines, which in this case would mean increasing the information-to-inflammation ratio in your comment significantly. This is asked of every commenter, no matter what opinion they're expressing or "side" they're on.
Well to be precise the National Review is referred to as a minion of the alt-right. Also it's a quote from the Nation so, as a liberal I think they shouldn't have wasted the keystrokes.
The National Review is a vociferous opponent of the alt-right, and has been since the beginning of that movement. The National Review is American conservative small government. The alt-right is European-style nationalist big government.
The National Review has opposed President Trump from the beginning for this reason. Its editors, perhaps most notably Bill Kristol [0], has been a leading voice for the Never Trump conservative movement.
The National Review made a famous issue "Against Trump" and constantly has editors slamming Trump and "the new right." The "new right" is actually the "alt-right." Trump himself openly attacked the editors and everyone that is Alt-Right essentially despises the publication. The Nation doesn't even pretend to approach things objectively.
The Nation is not exactly a great source to use on this particular topic. It also has virtually nothing to do with the "alt-right" I know a lot of moderate people that stopped watching ESPN simply because sports is an escape and ESPN has attempted to make it not one. I guess "the alt-right" is now what the left is using on everyone on the right because people associate it with racism. To be fair, the alt-right is entrenched in racism...but that's not the National Review, nor is it conservatism or libertarianism. It's like when people on the "right" call everyone on the left a Communist. Not even remotely true, though some are. Blanket statements and broad categorization of political views is not good for political discourse, it's actually part of the problem, imo.
I grant you it's an anecdote, but I think there are poll numbers to support that people tend to shy away from sports broadcasts that are more political. I believe they did polling on Colin Kaepernick and his effect on NFL ratings. I can't find a direct ESPN study, but I can link you to tons of articles of them being political and generally left leaning.
> I can link you to tons of articles of them being political and generally left leaning
Isn't that falling into the trap of repetition = truth? People repeat falsehood and rumors as much as the truth, and they rarely check the facts. Humans are hardwired to follow social norms not verify facts - e.g., the scientific method didn't arise for thousands of years, and takes great discipline - if everyone is repeating something, that becomes the norm. Propaganda campaigns, some that lead people to far more awful things than criticizing ESPN, rely on it.
I can find a ton of articles and far more online posts saying that the science of climate change is inconclusive, but that's not true. (And a related point: For thousands of years humanity had misconceptions about nature; everyone repeated them; but they weren't true.)
That's why I'm interested in a factual basis, but not in what people repeat. If they are repeating something factual, then there will be a basis for it.
> I think there are poll numbers to support that people tend to shy away from sports broadcasts that are more political
That would be valuable. But I'd like to see it (and it depends on the definition of political).
No, I mean I can link you to ESPN published articles that are overtly political. I don't mean to say that I can link you to a blog article claiming it's political.
What a ridiculous quote. I like how if you think that ESPN has become politicized you're a racist and a misogynist. And likely a member of the alt-right, I guess. Not surprising from The Nation of course, which is for the feeble minded.
ESPN stated they're becoming more political. That they're going to focus more on how culture and politics intersects with sports.
could not rtfa because of the china gfw, but i'd venture a guess that netflix and all the other download based services are hurting cable sales. anyone who cannot move in this direction will face declines in revenue. everything i need i can stream. i dont want a potpouri of channels, just give me nba, or nat geo. to be fair, espn does have a streaming service, but i've been out of the us for too long to understand it. it was probably too late to the game and it probably has complicated rules if you own cable already where you'd get charged twice if you wanted it or had to go through some cable company's crappy app to get the stream.
i guess the other thing is the inflation set by all these pseudo celebreties or ex-players, they must have demanded a lot. some of these guys are worth it, but probably not most of them.
for the record, i used to watch sportscenter everyday before work, and i'd often times watch it twice in row just to see all the highlights and witty commentary. sure i sometimes had to flips channels through the hockey or golf highlights, but most if the other content was good. i enjoyed the shows like pardon the interruption and nfl countdown, so there was quality content. now when i take business trips back home, i still turn on and enjoy sportscenter, so i dont think it's the content, probably more so the packaging and over pricing of the package, look at the nba tv deal.
laying off should help reduce long term costs, but that doesnt solve their primary issue which is where the industry is going due to new tech innovations from netflix, hulu, etc. nba league pass is a great example, i just want to watch nba, i get access to all games, post game interviews, and commentary. i can imagine this being the future, more customized content, deeper, not a melting pot of sports news.
Many posts here fail to address one very salient point. And I don't think we can overstate the importance of it.
Most "sports" fans are generally not "sports" fans. They are STANFORD fans. Or Arkansas fans. Or Michigan fans. Or Packers fans. Or Golden State fans. Or what have you.
The pure football fan is rare. As is the pure baseball or hockey fan. Most fans are normally watching because they want to see their team. There certainly is a sub-demographic that are sports fans. These are people who watch every game of their chosen sport looking for tactics and strategy. Most, however, are watching because Manchester United is playing. Or because they like the Cleveland Cavaliers. Or they're fans of the Boston Red Wings. Or maybe PSG. You get the idea.
What I'm getting at is that sports coverage would need be more personalized than ESPN is capable of in its current form if it wants to be of value to consumers today.
It boils down to this...
Why should one have to pay for ESPN if one doesn't watch it?
Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway. So making any changes to appease non sports fans is a foolish endeavor. Those resources are best deployed producing content that non sports fans would like to consume. I don't pretend to know what that looks like, but I'm certain it doesn't look like ESPN.
Now let's say for the sake of argument that a person is a fan of some team or school or city. I'll take myself as an example. I might watch my alma mater play a few football games, and if they go to the basketball tournament then I watch that. Sometimes I watch the super bowl, maybe, but I have never watched a Halftime show.
Now... why would a "sports" fan like that, which is the majority of us, pay $15 to $20 a month (MANDATORY) for an entire year when they only want to watch MAYBE 6 to 12 games between football and basketball that are usually not on ESPN anyway??? Answer: They shouldn't pay. And I'd imagine most of them won't in the future.
ESPN will need to offer more customization. Be it through live streaming or time shifting or whatever. I'm not an expert, but I think the days of forcing a $20 fee on people every month for non personalized sports coverage are just not sustainable long term.
True, the average sportsfan only watches whole games of their favorite teams.
However, people love highlight reels. That's why Sportscenter is so huge.
Unfortunately, ESPN is moving more and more towards "personalities" and gossip and whatever. Just give me the highlights on loop. That way, bars, restaurants, people in their own homes will have it on in the background constantly.
EDIT: Sure, they need to do more content on the web and on-demand or whatever. But their core TV programming should be less TMZ-y. I don't care what athletes did on vacation.
> However, people love highlight reels. That's why Sportscenter is so huge.
Which is rapidly being replaced (to some degree) with things like twitter, instagram, snapchat, subreddits, streamable, and other social media/video streaming websites.
It takes next to no time or effort for somebody to roughly cut a highlight and post it to social media. Meanwhile ESPN sees diminishing returns polishing various replays and putting it in a half hour program that repeats 6+ times every morning. It's to the point every team/league even has their own social media accounts, and post the best highlights themselves. If I can see the major highlights directly from NFL's instagram account, why bother waiting halfway through sportcenter to (maybe) catch the right segment?
This. I'm a huge baseball fan. I haven't watched SportsCenter in about a decade. I get my highlights from Twitter or a daily email blast sent out directly by Major League Baseball.
I feel like this is their own fault though. It sounds to me like they've got obsessed with the gossip model of journalism and turned people off. If you look at the UK, the BBC's Match of the Day is still wildly popular because the beeb doesn't really follow those annoying American trends.
A generic sports channel like ESPN seems to appeal primarily to the gambling crowd. Someone willing to wager on many games a night will watch whatever sports-ball game is broadcast. Daily Fantasy Sports players fall into this group as well. The question for ESPN is: Is this market large enough to sustain the network?
Localized networks like the various Regional Sports Networks, Fox Sports (insert City or State Name Here), Big Ten Network and Pac12 Network are stealing the casual fans of specific teams. All of the major sports offer streaming of pretty much every game a fan of a specific sport could want.
It's telling that the first new program ESPN added following the layoffs was a simulcast of MLB's Intentional Talk. Yet another talking heads show with a TMZ bent. I don't see this ending well for them.
"...All of the major sports offer streaming of pretty much every game a fan of a specific sport could want..."
Only they don't. If you think about it...
whenever you want to stream from the web... you generally have to enter your TV provider credentials. So if you don't have cable, you can't stream a lot of those games.
I have cable and subscribe to MLB.tv and they still blackout games because (I think) some local station bought exclusive broadcast rights.
MLB.tv is interesting because they generally don't have commercials. Oddly, I wish they did. When the broadcast pauses for commercials, my screen basically goes blank and the TV gets silent. I wish they would just switch to a whole stadium camera with crowd noise.
Personalized subscription in sports is infeasible because of how TV broadcast contracts are setup. Take the example of the Premier League. When Sky or NBC pay for PL broadcast rights, they do it for the entire league and the Premier League divides the money equally to all the 20 teams. By the way, this equal division is a recent change and IIRC the Spanish League only started doing this in the last couple of years.
Now let's say I want to subscribe to only Manchester United content on NBC. Man United and the other top clubs are extremely popular globally. So this means the broadcast contract has to be tailored to each team and the more popular the team is, the higher the contract value for that team. Now this means clubs don't get equal money and if they don't, the smaller clubs will never be able to compete with the top clubs. This is the exact reason why TV money is now divided equally in England. So we're back to square one if we were to implement this.
> Most "sports" fans are generally not "sports" fans. They are STANFORD fans. Or Arkansas fans. Or Michigan fans. Or Packers fans. Or Golden State fans. Or what have you.
> Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway.
boomers. And they're economically dying out as they retire and the medical industrial complex wrings out the last of their money. Plenty of things cost a multiple of ESPN's cost and are doing fine because they sell well to young people, think of the stereotypical $100+ cell phone service. The vast majority of ESPNs viewers remember when they heard JFK was shot, their viewers are not the Challenger explosion or 9/11 generations.
Baseball has died among youth and the average fan age is now going up more than a year per calendar year. NBA average fan is much younger, like middle aged gen-x. The majority of PGA viewers are nursing home age, golf is so dead, so cringy 90s/00s. The youngest sports are major league soccer and hockey about a third millennial or younger for both, the only pro sports of 2050 are going to be spanish speaking soccer and the few remaining northern state whites watching hockey, the other sports are dead when the boomers are gone.
There is also a compression effect not seen in the past such that the NFL superbowel now gets over 10x the viewers of the world series. The average baseball game has fewer viewers than my county has residents. The average NBA game is only slightly better. In the old days there was a "wide world of sports" concept which is already dead. There isn't a "sports" industry anymore, there's american pro football, soccer for the spanish speakers, hockey and nascar for the legacy being eliminated whites, basketball for the blacks, and the also-ran sports that statistically no one watches.
I've noticed the baseball thing. Baseball is the only sport I sometimes enjoy, and our stadium in Seattle (Mariners) is usually decently attended when I go to games, but watching away games on TV, I sometimes wonder, "Are they playing in a stadium that doesn't allow spectators? Because it's basically totally empty."
No one in England is going to stop watching Manchester United games to start watching Chicago Blackhawks games, or even to watch some sucky MLS game. That's not happening man. Get that out of your head.
No one in China, Europe, the MidEast or Brazil is gonna stop watching basketball and start watching some sucky hockey game. That ain't happening either.
Do you have any idea the YoY revenue growth global sports leagues like PL or the NBA enjoy at the moment?
What you are saying may happen, MIGHT happen in your small neighborhood... though I doubt even that... but it certainly isn't gonna happen on a scale large enough to actually make the money that PL makes in a year. In fact, I doubt that American soccer and American hockey will even make the money something like the NBA pulls out of just China. Let alone global basketball in general.
Basically, you need cheap, accessible sports to challenge the global soccer and basketball behemoths. Something that could be played barefoot in a field. Or you need to JOIN the global soccer and basketball behemoths.
But yeah... sports leagues like American football, American hockey, or American soccer stand little to no chance of challenging those more global leagues growth wise. Best outcome for them would be to somehow link into those behemoths. And I can only see American soccer being able to do that... MAYBE?
Decades of experience in the USA indicate that no matter how popular soccer is internationally, the locals in the USA don't care. See also to a much lesser extent, nascar vs F1.
In the short to medium term I don't think the business entity known as ESPN or MLB can survive USA cutting the cable cord. You're probably correct that someone is going to buy most of the pieces at the bankruptcy auction and probably right for example that baseball will be popular in Japan and central america yet that won't matter for folks in the USA who will not be watching.
I totally agree with you...but I do think you are missing the large swatch of NFL fans that are "pure" football fans driven almost entirely by the popularity of Fantasy Football. I saw some crazy stat where close to 70% of regular NFL viewers played FFB.
It forces you to care about the performance of players across multiple teams as well as whoever your opponents players are that week.
The football fans I know tend to fall into two demographics: College and Pro. Basically determines which day of your weekend will be committed to watching football all day; Saturday...or Sunday?
Personally, I've been a die hard Clemson fan since before I was born so it's definitely Saturday for me. I haven't watched but maybe 2 NFL games a year for the last 10 years or so but I still play fantasy football.
I'm that mythical fan who watches full games for teams I don't root for—especially in basketball—but I don't watch ESPN unless they show a good game that I want to see.
They show endless hours of Sports Center—how much can you meaningfully talk about sports? Even most of the commentary in the games is stupid.
Granted, I listen to sports podcasts (and I really like ESPNs NBA Lockdown) but they have one hour, once or twice a week, and they stick to a fairly focused script. In an hour podcast they may have 3 minutes of 'commercials' and 5 minutes of filler. On a lot of ESPNs shows they just don't have enough to talk and end up filling the time talking busting each other's balls because I guess that's what a lot of sports guys do when they hang out
It pays too much for content and costs too much for consumers.
It paid too much because it could even more for it on resale. Bigger fool. They'll realign as contracts start to expire. Meanwhile they had a great run, until people awoke up to the scam.
I wonder if the prominence of esports is cutting into ESPN as well. Hell just yesterday there were over a million viewers on Twitch[1], in large due to a major esports tournament for dota. League of Legends regularly hits those numbers and beyond for their tournaments.
In the past esports were kinda sideshow attractions, but now the production quality and audience numbers are quickly catching up to traditional sports. On top of that their distribution models are more consumer friendly. I'm sure there's overlap of people who watch both, but I wonder if the next generation of kids will defer to esports over traditional ones.
Probably not like you're thinking. ESPN already has picked up esports and typically the esports tourneys don't overlap with major sports events. This is likely a conscious decision on the part of Riot, Valve, and so on, to ensure they're not competing with audiences.
ESPN has tried to adapt to esports, but it met resistance from its audience and its own commentators not really accepting it. There was this famous career ending rants [1] that is just one of many from the ESPN commentators - viewer comments usually don't stray too far from such thoughts.
esports fans seem pretty distinct from the core fans of ESPN, and ESPN deciding to cover it on their sub-channels (ESPN2, etc) is their attempt to reach out to those numbers and to get eyes on the channel. The internal rejection of esports doesn't help at all for ESPN who I'm sure is dying for the kinds of numbers that the Twitch and Youtube events get, especially since there is so much down-time between matches with virtually no advertisements, which likely makes the business side of ESPN wince quite a bit.
But no, I don't think esports is causing problems for ESPN in the sense that it's cutting in; ESPN would be HAPPY to get on the esports train if they could.
If there is any overlap between people who are interested in traditional sports leagues, and competitive Starcraft/League of Legends fans, it has to be very small.
To be honest, I think that the more big-tent ESPN tries to go, the more likely they are to fail. There are periods of the year when nothing is happening in the big four US sports leagues, and Sportscenter becomes unwatchable - I'm just not going to tune in to watch highlights of the XYZ Open tennis tournament, or some golf tournament, or whatever other extra-niche sporting event is occurring in those months of the year.
At one point, ESPN was farming that kind of stuff out to ESPN2, along with trick billiards competitions, professional bowling, and what have you, but has instead decided to triple-down on hot takes and outrage.
I'm seeing strong parallels between bundled channels that people don't necessarily want and Monty Python's Spam Sketch,
Cable Companies: "Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes, with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam."
Consumers: "Have you got anything without spam in it?"
Cable Companies: "Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got MUCH spam in it."
I read on some forums that guys were canceling ESPN due to too many female presenters commenting on sports they weren't passionate/knowledgeable about, and pushing political agenda. Could that be a compounding factor for a major loss of subscribers where many viewers decided it's no longer worth watching and found more active outlets in their spare time?
Generally speaking, the only forums I'm on that has mentioned the decline of ESPN have said nothing about politics or talking heads. I'm surprised they are such a huge talking point in this thread.
Instead, it's the huge decline of coverage and quality. These forums are devoted to a more niche form of sports (open wheel auto racing). In the 1980s and 1990s ESPN coverage of these sports was actually very extensive. No longer.
There was a time when one of ESPN's strengths was a huge coverage of a wide array of sports, including many niche sports. From my perspective, a lot of the niche (or even not so niche) sports has effectively moved off of the network for one reason or another. On the main channels, cheap programming where talking heads yell at each other have taken its place.
Factor in this, and then factor in the people who got ESPN even though they weren't sports people to begin with, and now add in the cord-cutting movement. It's easy to see why ESPN's in trouble.
There is also bundling of other sports. As a fan of, say, NBA , I really don't care about all the NFL broadcast. Still those prices paid by me.
Future to me seems, where there will be option to subscribe or buy ticket to individual events like, say only this weekend's match between team A and team B. And it seems it is more and more possible.
Probably not anymore... It does point to Netflix eventually making a lot of money and being worth a lot more than it currently is. Netflix doesn't have ad revenue (in addition to such huge consumer fees, ESPN had nearly $4 billion a year in ad revenue in 2014 at least) but its subscription fees are comparable to ESPN. Better for Netflix is its aggressive move into its own content generation. If it was "merely" a way to watch other companies content, it would be at the mercy of those content owners the way ESPN pays a king's ransom for NFL, NBA, etc. games. ESPN's strategy to focus on opinion (original content) makes a lot of sense in terms of retaining fans and having a business that could survive losing broadcasting rights for a lot of sports.
While sports team/network owners could go direct to fans fairly easily these days with 1000 tv channels and everyone having "Smart" TVs, they're probably better off under the ESPN umbrella both as a bundle of many sports and through aggregated ad sales.
The problem with sports broadcasting nowadays is twofold
1. Viewing games costs too much
2. The commentary for said games sucks
I'd happily watch a random MLB game on a Tuesday, but sorry I am not going to spend $113/season to watch on MLB TV. The NFL is the worst. If you're out of the US you can purchase and stream games for $200/season or so, but for in the US you have to have directTV to get all the games which isn't even offered for many possible subscribers or spend $30 in beer/food for lunch at a sportsbar with no audio for your game. If I'm at home I have the choice of the local game and maybe one other random national game and if both of these games are blowouts I'm tuning out.
People want to watch their team play. They don't even mind commercials as long as there's not TOO many of them. The NFL is reaching their limit. NFL viewership has peaked. 2016 ratings declined 8%. Watching a touchdown followed by a commercial followed by a kickoff touchback followed by a commercial is too much. The only way to grow a sport is to grow viewership and fans and the only way to do that is make content cheap, easy to access and enjoyable to watch which brings us to the commentary.
The future of sports and money in sports is in the live aspect and in the commentary. I want to watch a football game commented by Conan O'Brian or Snoop Dogg or even some entertaining twitch or youtuber not Al Michaels and Phil Simms. Why not collect royalties on commentary streams? Let 1000s of people pay for the rights to comment on an NFL game and let the viewers decide who they want to listen to commentary from. Its absurd that in 2017 people still resort to reddit.com/NFLstreams or NHLstreams to watch some low res game with pop up ads everywhere with commentary from two old white guys.
Once viewership increases, ad money will increase which would offset the streaming fees the leagues would be missing out on by providing their content for free. If ESPN would simply show sports and provide interesting commentary from interesting individuals I would watch around the clock.
> The future of sports and money in sports is in the live aspect and in the commentary. I want to watch a football game commented by Conan O'Brian or Snoop Dogg or even some entertaining twitch or youtuber not Al Michaels and Phil Simms. Why not collect royalties on commentary streams? Let 1000s of people pay for the rights to comment on an NFL game and let the viewers decide who they want to listen to commentary from. Its absurd that in 2017 people still resort to reddit.com/NFLstreams or NHLstreams to watch some low res game with pop up ads everywhere with commentary from two old white guys.
Over a decade ago, I was channel surfing and stumbled upon an English Premier League (edit: may have been a lower tier matchup) match cast by 2 shit-talking fans, one from each team. I thought it was absolutely genius and while having no interest in either team or even the sport, I was thoroughly entertained.
Sports is one of the very few things people can totally devote themselves to without being threatened. You can talk about sports at work without worrying about getting fired. You can talk about sports at a party and not lose friends.
At least you used to be able to.
The more sports wanders from just sports into social, political, or even partisan issues, the less it is actually about sports.
Associating these other things with sports destroys the value. It makes it so sport is no longer an escape, but instead becomes yet another politicized venue.
Here's some other interesting theories as to why ESPN is having trouble.
> there are only a few things you can't and shouldn't talk about at work
Just the most important things in life: family structure, pregnancy, race, God, health issues, etc. List all the things that are inappropriate to talk about in an interview. Then realize they come up again when you are a candidate for a new promotion or transfer.
Plus, increasingly employers are taking positions on things. We don't exactly call them out on that.
American sports commentary focusing on politics may be relatively new, but sports and politics have always been friends.
I think in terms of pro sports in America everything's a bit artificial (maybe because of being regional entities) and less political, but at the collegiate level the politics fly.
Who you support says a lot about your family and background, especially if you all aren't direct grads. Compare fans of Georgia Tech vs Georgia, or Texas vs Texas A&M. California vs Fresno st, etc.
See also - Celtic vs Rangers, which is for historical reasons a proxy for a variety of political disagreements (Protestant vs Catholic, Loyalist vs Republican, etc) for some fans.
Oh man absolutely! That's why I used college sports, I think they're our closest equivalent to club culture like that.
Figured they were American and tried to make it relatable
Sports has always been political. I'm not sure why you think it isn't or hasn't been. Jackie Robinson's career is the most famous historical example of this. There are many others.
I don't actually watch the "channel", but The Expanse is produced by SyFy and is excellent.
And, yeah, Duck Dynasty and Cake Boss are nowhere near where A&E and TLC were when they launched, but they are family-centered sitcoms, more or less, in a time with a lack of those.
I won't defend Honey Boo Boo or that sort of thing, though.
Anyway, Disney is now the company of Star Wars and Marvel, not just Mickey and princesses. If companies want to take a risk and change their brand, I guess it's their right. There's tons of content out there if we don't like it.
Technically, The Expanse is financed and produced by Alcon Television Group, which is a division of Alcon Entertainment.
Certainly having SyFy on board for US broadcast distribution is a big boon for the series, but I suspect a lot of the series' excellence is due to Alcon and not SyFy
Kind of buried near the end of the article, but as ESPN moves away from sports reporting in favor of opinion there might be some great opportunity for alternative reporting. Deadspin comes to mind.
I think the criticisms of ESPN and the advent of cord-cutting is severely missing a larger issue at hand. Sports are just another form of entertainment for people. I can probably safely say that the decline of ESPN first started with the rise of well-produced TV shows on HBO, AMC, Netflix, etc. I believe it's more than just correlation.
Just like a captivating TV series, sports demands your attention to the details and personal stories for you to become a fan. However, sporting events take hours to ingest at a time and the outcome leave many disappointed. People who have money to spend are typically people with fewer hours to allocate for entertainment. With the rise of quality TV shows that take one hour to consume, how do sports like baseball stand a chance at gaining new viewers?
The best thing ESPN has going for it are its 30 for 30 documentaries. A well produced documentary series. However, documentaries generally don't bring in huge sums of cash. If they can pivot to a create must-see dramatic show with a sports theme, they may have a chance.
I remember watching it. It had an 'Any Given Sunday' feel to it which missed the mark of it being generally captivating. Currently, the HBO series 'Ballers' does a much better job of toe-ing (sp?) the line between sports and drama.
> I can probably safely say that the decline of ESPN first started with the rise of well-produced TV shows on HBO, AMC, Netflix, etc.
You are remarkably wrong here. In fact, live sports has come to completely dominate TV over the last 20 years. 9 of the top 10 most watched TV shows in 2016 was a sporting event:
The 10 most watched TV shows doesn't give as much info as the top 10 primetime tv programs. 7 out of the 10 shows that are aired regularly are NOT sports. These one off events are big for the networks that have the rights to air them but they exist for one day and do not obtain ownership of the content afterwards. On the other hand regular programs last for approximately a dozen episodes or more and can still maintain viewership with reruns. Other than the NFL, there is nothing that has a comparable draw.
But that diverges from my main assertion that with less time available to working people, people prefer to follow a story with familiar characters in a 1-hr window rather than have to watch a 3-hour affair between two random teams.
The major key is ESPN was the ONLY source for sports, highlights, discussion, etc. SportsCenter was a staple of most young males in the 80s and 90s growing up.
Now they compete with the internet. Highlights? Go to r/nba, r/soccer, r/nfl, r/hockey, boom, done, quick gif, lots of good discussion. Why spend an hour watching sportscenter? Especially now that they talk about music, twitter, and lebron james 24/7, endless commercials, always before what you spent the last 20 minutes waiting for, for something.
Not only that, youtube channels, podcasts, fans making their own content, blogs, and other forums...there's just way more content out there now than in the 90s, where all you had was the newspaper/magazine instead of the TV.
On top of that, all the major leagues have their own networks now-NHL net, NBA net, NFL net. In addition to FS1, and competing with the major networks for top events.
It's not just people watching game of thrones (those shows don't air all year around and only take up an hour a week anyway.) Although I'm sure it reduces those numbers a bit.
216 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadMIT Technology Review is not an institution of higher learning. It's a magazine supposedly focused on reporting about science and technology.
> When the president says that climate change is a hoax
The tweet I mentioned had nothing to do with climate change...not sure where you got that from.
https://twitter.com/techreview/status/858577857110528000
"The mission of MIT Technology Review is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology." I don't think ignoring any story that happens to involve a politician would help serve that mission.
But that's exactly the problem.
Anything can be used politically.
First, it's an investment; it's not taking away money; it's not robbery. It has a return, a benefit that generally exceeds the cost (I'm not sure how much I paid to fly Cassini to Saturn, but wow was it worth it). People make investments all the time and are happy to do it, in everything from houses to the local homeless shelter to a new computer.
Second, people normally and frequently participate in group decisions, even though they rarely get exactly what they want. To suggest that anything besides an individual choosing alone is extraordinary - that isn't how people really operate.
People clearly seem to justify funding to their favorite cause as progress to humanity. However a progressive or otherwise agenda is itself purely politics.
Answering a question is research, deliberately avoiding a question is politics.
I don't know. There's a "sportsmanship" mythos out there, but I'm not sure it's the dominant one.
I see a lot more of the love-my-team-hate-your-team culture in sports that looks a lot like modern "my team" politics. I'm just struggling with the implication of that. Do we encourage rabid sports fandom to give a relatively harmless space for the tribal impulse? Or does it just train people to support their parties and politicians the same way they support their favorite jerseyed heroes?
They're losing viewers because we're turning away from television. That much is obvious to all. There are many ways to view, every event has countless streams, we get our sports news in granular form on our mobile, etc.
However in the wake of that, some very sad people have decided to get on their soapbox and claim that they're really declining because they don't parrot whatever their personal position is. I've seen these people claim that ESPN is faltering because they have a problem with players who rape or beat women. Others -- the same ones who say that they don't want it to be "preachy" -- get up in arms if ESPN isn't preachily attacking the Colin Kaepernick's of the world. Etc.
So as is often the case, the most partisan of all are the ones claiming that everything is some crazy partisan slant.
You might as well say that if a politician commits crimes, political coverage shouldn't mention it -- after all, that's not "actual political content", right?
I doubt the same inferences should be made so strongly regarding sports players.
Which means they do end up being role models, because "work hard and you can succeed" is something we desperately want to teach children, even when it doesn't seem to be true. So athletes' stories get told as a means to inspire people to better themselves, and that makes their character extremely relevant.
the same is true for Fox Sports 1. it's simply not true that consumers are watching sports programming that isn't politicized more than that which is
In otherwords, perhaps their best watched shows are the ones in the worst decline / their best watched (i.e. tent pole shows) are bleeding the most viewers. I can't speak to the cause.
espn's problems are overpaying for content (live sports), paying a huge number of employees who barely move the needle in the twitter age (all of their reporters, basically) and the rise of alternatives to cable like netflix, amazon prime, hulu and bamtech
Add in rumors that the NFL influences its schedule to give ESPN less-desirable games for Monday Night Football, and the NBA strongly favoring TNT/TBS, and what's left? They can't run Sportscenter 24 hours a day.
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5627cd349dd7cc10008...
Basically ESPN's executives shit the bed over and over for a number of years and the rank and file workers are the ones that end up paying for their mistakes.
[1] From http://www.businessinsider.com/espn-mistakes-led-to-layoffs-...
I agree that ESPN's decline has more to do with over-extending themselves on rights deals while cord-cutting has become "a thing" than politics. However, I don't think you can discount the politics angle as a reason that a sizable number of people have finally decided "you know, I can do without ESPN." The amount of people who I've seen, online and in person, citing the absolutely insufferable, constant politicization of ESPN (and the media in general), regardless of which side of the aisle these people sit on, leads me to believe that a lot of people are simply exhausted and just want "sports". Barring that, they're quite willing to just drop ESPN. I think it really is a legitimate factor here.
I don't. In fact I agree entirely with the notion that ESPN is shooting itself in the foot by constantly pushing politics that play well in NYC & LA, but actively turn off viewers in the rest of the country. I'm just saying it would still be failing; albeit more slowly if it "just stuck to sports".
How many?
I see ESPN addressing social issues, such as abuse of women, but I don't call that political. Of course, any person can say: X is against my politics; but on that basis everything is politics.
The reality is that there's a segment of the public that's part of an ideological political movement. Consistent with such movements, everything and everyone that doesn't share the political ideology are viewed as political enemies; the goal is to wipe out all apostates and non-believers. If ESPN doesn't share their ideology, they are portrayed as political enemies. In the end, that group is a small minority (per surveys, not per online volume or representation on cable news); we can't be intimidated into silence on important social issues.
> I've seen anecdotes online
As a basis of knowledge, that has been so misleading for so long, especially regarding politicized issues like this one, that IMHO repeating it mostly magnifies misinformation.
It isn't.
A simpler way to explain what you're getting at is: if reporting is about someone the viewer identifies with, or an issue the viewer sees as relevant to/personally affecting them, then they see it as fine. But if it's about someone the viewer doesn't identify with, or an issue the viewer doesn't see as relevant to/personally affecting them, well, that's "politics".
Thus: male viewers see it as "political" to cover women or issues affecting women. White viewers see it as "political" to cover people of color or issues affecting people of color. And there is some research to show that even small amounts of representation get perceived as a much higher percentage, by an audience used to zero as the baseline representation of people unlike themselves.
Oddly, they never seem to realize just how much "politics" had to happen to create and maintain the situation in which those other people and issues weren't considered fit to cover or even mention.
Like you, there's plenty of people who aren't interested in sports and aren't interested in paying extra for a sports-bundled cable package.
Then there's people like me who like sports and don't like the programming on ESPN. Two decades ago, ESPN reporting used to be legitimately great. They'd talk about strategy, roster moves, interviews with players/coaches, etc. These days it's TMZ with a sports focus. Even something as mundane as Tom Brady's new haircut became a talking point on ESPN. The most recent example I have of ESPN's decline was the recent NFL draft. It was nothing but baseless conjecture on who's getting whom. It's a lot of random guesswork and hot takes portrayed as journalism. The talking heads would just shout about the most outrageous conjecture with no rationale.
ESPN has gotten complacent and they're paying for it now. In my opinion they were relying on cable subscriptions when that's going away, and they haven't invested in quality programming to keep the sports fans in the longest time.
What I was thinking when I saw the lay-offs is that this is exactly the wrong move for them. I understand why ESPN did it, to cut costs, but they're cutting them in the wrong area.
ESPN needs more reporters and more people doing direct content production.
ESPN needs to go back to content producers (sports leagues) and tell them that they're no longer able to force effectively 100% of the population to subsidize subscription costs for the percentage of the population that watches their sport and that their license payments need to be renegotiated to compensate.
For football, this past season they were only showing the MNF games. In the Bay Area, NBC Sports Bay Area has broadcast rights to all the Giants and Warriors games. IIRC, NBC broadcast holds the rights to the Sharks. In San Diego, Fox Sports San Diego has the rights to the Padres. I can't remember the last time I tuned into ESPN to watch a game I wanted to see beyond "Oh that's on, I guess I'll watch."
Even ignoring the broadcasting rights, sports talk on other channels have become vastly superior to ESPN. My two favorite segments on sports this year (ARod + Pete Rose discuss batting, Isiah Thomas discusses dribbling) came out of Fox Sports and TNT. I'd pay good money to hear more detailed analysis from former players, rather than talk endlessly about how Tom Brady looks like he's from NSync with his haircut.
In my opinion ESPN just got too complacent with their status and is digging themselves into the grave. I swear I can go on for hours over all the things ESPN is doing wrong in the sports media today.
[1] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10984370/portrai... [2] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12728744/how-gol...
A number of people here complain about ESPN swapping to talking heads and opinions. The reason for doing this is because it's significantly cheaper to have people give opinions (everyone has an opinion) than the costs of doing journalism. ESPN isn't swapping to these shows because they have worse ratings, comparatively they get higher ratings.
Everyone talking about he glory days of the 90s and ESPN. That time is in the past. People turn to the internet for sports updates and scores, as well as highlight reels.
Ultimately, it's a failure in the "advertising model" of paying for content. As long as content creators are paid a roughly flat fee per viewer, their only incentives are to get more viewers and cut costs. Previously the market was inefficient enough to sustain it, but now that there are alternatives the inevitable is happening in all areas of content creation. Moving to cheap to produce, easy to digest low substance, high viewership content.
Imaging you were running a restaurant, and you couldn't charge a customer per meal. You only received a small flat rate for the number of customers who ate there. You're not going to run a top end steak house where your payment doesn't even cover the materials. You're gonna run a mcdonalds. Get as many people in there for as cheap as possible. You have no choice, the money doesn't support an intimate fine dining experience.
The that the same thing happening in all aspects of content creation. The market is becoming efficient, and the only way to survive is low cost production. Fast-food of content.
This is shifting to them receiving fees from those interested in their programming, which seems much more reasonable in concept.
It is the fault of cord-cutters, because they aren't subsidizing the cost of ESPN for people who want to watch ESPN. Then ESPN could not pivot quickly enough to stop the bleeding. So yeah, ESPN is getting money from people who are interested in sports, but it is because cord-cutters had enough.
Another factor is that the Internet is a better source for sports news. Highlights are on YouTube. Twitter feeds post links to analysis from all over the web. Nobody needs to watch sports center for news anymore.
> But the bottom is dropping out of the model because of cord cutters
As I wrote, the market across the board is becoming efficient. This is restating my point. Previously the only option was for cable, now there are other options for consumption. This is increased market efficiency.
> so now they have change and adapt to not getting flat fees for much longer.
Yes they have to change from their previous fee structure, but there are many things they could've changed to that would've supported quality programming. Instead ESPN changed to an advertising model, which doesn't support it. (Ex. Why does HBO get showered with awards year after year? And how do they monetize viewers?).
To understand the difference, imagine a directed graph with a transition between two nodes. You're too focused on the node it's leaving - instead I'd recommend focusing on the node it's arriving at (efficient market advertising model). Regardless of where you come from, if that's where you end up you will quickly produce fast-food content or you'll go under.
ESPNs problem from before is not that they had a subscription model. It's that they had a bundled subscription model. It was bundeled with Cable, and they were making money from people who never watched them. Their revenue was inflated. Rather than trim and find the true medium, they're throwing it all away and going advertising.
Sports can absolutely be supported via expensive subscription (see NFL Game Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Packages, ...). Up to $400 / year for it. But ESPN is going a different route. One that will unfortunately turn them into the MTV of sports. But they won't be the only one.
Ripple-effect can be a bitch.
Do you watch PTI ?
I think PTI is the best show on TV.
EDIT: PTI = Pardon the Interruption
I'm mostly like you. Sportscenter is largely useless with highlight available on-demand, and the only time I've watched it over the past few years was when major events happened around a team I like. I think that was twice -- Lebron James coming back to the Cavs and the Cavs winning the championship.
There is so much garbage content and I can't imagine spending an entire Sunday morning watching their NFL pregame shows. They are so bad and rehash the same things over and over again. None of their content is any better. PTI set the standard for what a lot of their programming has morphed into, but PTI worked because the guys on it were smart, took interesting angles, and the show was novel. Now that there are 50 other programs just like it, the novelty has worn off and the hosts are largely "hot take" machines.
Really, besides their national NBA game broadcasts or college football, I can't think of any reason why I'd watch ESPN on a routine basis any more. There are sports podcasts that are far better and don't require my full attention than the studio shows ESPN produces.
Slightly off-topic. I didn't watch a lot of ESPN when I had cable. When I did, it was mostly SportsCenter and PTI. Are you saying that PTI marking the beginning of ESPN's programming declination or that other opinion shows failed to capture what made PTI good. It really doesn't matter, but I'm genuinely interested in your opinion here.
Can't believe they are letting Jayson Stark go as well.
ESPN is partially a victim of it's own success as well. They do such a great job with online content that where you used to have to tune into Sportscenter, glued to the TV waiting to catch YOUR teams highlights now you can just hop online and catch all of them...immediately.
I remember in college having a roommate who was such a big UNC fan that he bought a VCR just so that he could tape record Sportscenter and rewatch Vince Young highlights.
Stream one feed to the ISP and then let the ISP split it to all the interested subscribers from there?
So as opposed to ESPN needing an individual stream for every single (for example) Comcast subscriber who was watching, they send one stream to Comcast, who would then replicate it within their network to each subscriber.
I'm not a networking expert though, so maybe it's not that simple.
schnable then suggested that cable companies are switching to IP-based streaming which will have the same issue. I pointed out that it doesn't have the same issue, because multicast can be done internally to the ISP's network - though it can't be done on the wider Internet, so Twitch, Youtube, etc, still can't compete.
It's not exactly "replicating it within their network" - i.e. there's not individual connections to every single endpoint. That would quickly overload the networking equipment for no reason - you'd be sending thousands of duplicate packets, just to different endpoints. This would have no benefit over streaming from Twitch, Youtube, etc.
Instead, you have one source (which might receive its stream over satellite, unicast IP over the internet, whatever else) within the ISP's network which sends a multicast packet to its router, which then automatically duplicates it and send it to all the routers it's connected to, which does the same, and so on and so forth. This is similar behaviour to existing cable infrastructure - each packet only hits each router once.
Some small cable ISPs, and apparently maybe AT&T, do this today quite happily.
Basically, we're agreeing, but you don't seem to think we are because of the details?
I'm not aware of anyone planning a large IPTV rollout; it's been dead for years.
I'd beg to differ. The League of Legends eSports 2016 World Championship had 43 million unique viewers, 14.7 million concurrent. It is possible some viewers were from a cable TV in Korea, but it is unlikely to be a significant chunk of those figures.
The broadcast on Twitch.tv was also of much higher quality (1080p60) than what you receive from any cable company.
There are lots of delays today between different broadcasts. Just try to follow a sporting event on twitter or a forum and you will see.
Depending on the significance of the game in question, a delay of even a few seconds can be noticeable and annoying, because one of my friends on GroupMe is going to make a comment about an important goal the instant it happens.
I don't converse with anyone about the games. It's just me and my cats. I also greatly despise push notifications to my phone, with the exception of email.
But, I have a feeling I'm an edge case scenario.
There's a 65 pixel bar at the top with scores, and a 300 x 260 pixel block with headlines. The entire rest of the page on a 1920x1080 monitor is filled with garbage, auto-playing videos, embedded tweets, or wasted space.
You also have to consider that some owners treat their franchises like fancy sports cars, not businesses, and they are extremely rare cars at that!
Every cordcutter is a loss for ESPN. This is affecting not only ESPN, but The Walt Disney Company's profits substantially. ESPN makes up ~30% of their gross revenue. They've seen losses most of the last several quarters, in large part due to bad numbers from ESPN.
For football, the valuations also already take into account that players get about 50% of revenues.
A TDG study showed nearly 101 million U.S. households subscribed to television at the industry's peak in 2011, but the number would fall below 95 million in 2017.
I'd expect a wave of mergers/consolidations and player/staff contract re-negotiations around that time. For teams, though, TV broadcast rights are just one of many revenue streams. Ticket sales, attire and souvenirs, concessions, various online subscriptions, endorsements, etc. are all refenue generators.
While valuation of sports franchises may be only loosely coupled to reason the salary of players is connected to cash flow into the company. That is even more true if the company will have struggle to get more loans (lenders tend also to be more rationale).
If right now they rely on people paying for the channel but not watching it. Wouldn't switching to a streaming model mean that advertisers would be more interested because more people were actually watching the channel and saw ads?
That's a lot of streamers to get to commit to 12 months of subscription.
Most people (>50% iirc) don't watch sports, but because of the arrangement described above most cable subscribers end up subsidizing it.
As a result: Selling sports directly to people who watch it dramatically undercuts their business model.
In Major League Baseball's case, they reserve that right for themselves. Of course, every baseball team also has its own local contract or network.
I get the feeling that ESPN is a middleman that is increasingly being seen as not adding enough value for the price by its subscribers.
ESPN probably expected that as well. In the US, you would expect almost any sports channel to have enough fans to make a profit. If people are going to drop channels they don't want, you would expect sports channels to be immune.
Apparently it hasn't turned out that way.
I can say that the last three times I went shopping for cable TV, the sports bundle was extra. Personally, I like hockey, but not much else. I would be happy to pay $7 a month for hockey games, but I wasn't given that option. I needed to pay much more, for a much larger bundle, and I chose to live without it.
Cable/satellite isn't really as big in Australia as it is in the States and Canada, but the last time I looked it was still $30+ a month if you wanted sport in HD (you know, so you can actually see where the ball is)
1: http://www.afl.com.au/news/2016-12-06/foxtel-decides-against...
1a: https://www.reddit.com/r/AFL/wiki/streams
I suspect Foxtel will be in a similar position to ESPN come the next rights deal, where they can't afford to pay as highly due to people cancelling cable. Hopefully though that just results in a better streaming deal.
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-espn-layoffs-are-s...
IME, the premise that such a thing exists (with any meaningful impact at any meaningful scale) almost defines the white nationalists (alt-right). The racists with some intelligence rarely will outright say something socially unpopular; they try to make themselves palatable - 'we don't hate people based on their skin color, we just want to protect people like you with white skin from the victimization we are facing'. It's an old tactic: Adolph invaded other countries to protect Germans; Russia recently invaded Ukraine to protect Russians; everyone is a victim.
"We need to protect minorities and women from the white male oppressors" is basically the slogan of the identity politics wing of the left.
No, that's something white nationalists say to each other; I don't see it elsewhere (in any significant quantity). There is overwhelming evidence of discrimination against people who are in minorities and against women, and as these people are largely excluded from power due to that same discrimination, they have little ability to protect themselves. If we believe in liberty, opportunity and meritocracy, and basic morality for everyone, then everyone should do something about it.
For the most part, only white nationalists say white-skinned people are discriminated against (with any significant scale or impact). There is no evidence of it that I've seen and a look around SV and the IT industry, corporate offices, governments and legislatures of every Western nation, college campuses, and any other locale of wealth, power and privilege shows how absurd the idea is. But the argument is not about discrimination, it's propaganda that is about creating hatred, trying to get people to see everyone as friends or enemies based on skin color (which is perhaps why white nationalists think there's some sort of bizarre us vs. them team competition), and providing a (transparent) excuse for racial hatred. Few people are fooled.
I'd say there's more "overwhelming evidence" of confusion of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, but this is an unpopular opinion to even suggest, because people like yourself immediately throw around accusations of fascism and white nationalism for asking the wrong questions.
Then you proceed to say that minorities and women are discriminated against, and we need to do something about that. Who is doing this discrimination, then? You point out that white-skinned people tend to hold power in (traditionally white) Western nations. I would say that my description is accurate.
It's the usual conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.
The fact that is that this is racist behavior, but people these days ignore it because it's en vogue.
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And for the record, this arguably is genuinely new content, because the "alt-right" is a recent epithet due jour with other connotations. This is a contemporary social issue which is currently evolving and should not be censored.
Calling the National Review alt-right is an affront to the English language.
The National Review is a vociferous opponent of the alt-right, and has been since the beginning of that movement. The National Review is American conservative small government. The alt-right is European-style nationalist big government.
The National Review has opposed President Trump from the beginning for this reason. Its editors, perhaps most notably Bill Kristol [0], has been a leading voice for the Never Trump conservative movement.
[0]: http://www.nationalreview.com/author/william-kristol
[1]: http://www.sportingnews.com/other-sports/news/linda-cohn-spo...
Agreed, they have a clear bias.
> I know a lot of moderate people that stopped watching ESPN
How many? 10? A statistically significant number?
Isn't that falling into the trap of repetition = truth? People repeat falsehood and rumors as much as the truth, and they rarely check the facts. Humans are hardwired to follow social norms not verify facts - e.g., the scientific method didn't arise for thousands of years, and takes great discipline - if everyone is repeating something, that becomes the norm. Propaganda campaigns, some that lead people to far more awful things than criticizing ESPN, rely on it.
I can find a ton of articles and far more online posts saying that the science of climate change is inconclusive, but that's not true. (And a related point: For thousands of years humanity had misconceptions about nature; everyone repeated them; but they weren't true.)
That's why I'm interested in a factual basis, but not in what people repeat. If they are repeating something factual, then there will be a basis for it.
> I think there are poll numbers to support that people tend to shy away from sports broadcasts that are more political
That would be valuable. But I'd like to see it (and it depends on the definition of political).
ESPN stated they're becoming more political. That they're going to focus more on how culture and politics intersects with sports.
i guess the other thing is the inflation set by all these pseudo celebreties or ex-players, they must have demanded a lot. some of these guys are worth it, but probably not most of them.
for the record, i used to watch sportscenter everyday before work, and i'd often times watch it twice in row just to see all the highlights and witty commentary. sure i sometimes had to flips channels through the hockey or golf highlights, but most if the other content was good. i enjoyed the shows like pardon the interruption and nfl countdown, so there was quality content. now when i take business trips back home, i still turn on and enjoy sportscenter, so i dont think it's the content, probably more so the packaging and over pricing of the package, look at the nba tv deal.
laying off should help reduce long term costs, but that doesnt solve their primary issue which is where the industry is going due to new tech innovations from netflix, hulu, etc. nba league pass is a great example, i just want to watch nba, i get access to all games, post game interviews, and commentary. i can imagine this being the future, more customized content, deeper, not a melting pot of sports news.
Most "sports" fans are generally not "sports" fans. They are STANFORD fans. Or Arkansas fans. Or Michigan fans. Or Packers fans. Or Golden State fans. Or what have you.
The pure football fan is rare. As is the pure baseball or hockey fan. Most fans are normally watching because they want to see their team. There certainly is a sub-demographic that are sports fans. These are people who watch every game of their chosen sport looking for tactics and strategy. Most, however, are watching because Manchester United is playing. Or because they like the Cleveland Cavaliers. Or they're fans of the Boston Red Wings. Or maybe PSG. You get the idea.
What I'm getting at is that sports coverage would need be more personalized than ESPN is capable of in its current form if it wants to be of value to consumers today.
It boils down to this...
Why should one have to pay for ESPN if one doesn't watch it?
Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway. So making any changes to appease non sports fans is a foolish endeavor. Those resources are best deployed producing content that non sports fans would like to consume. I don't pretend to know what that looks like, but I'm certain it doesn't look like ESPN.
Now let's say for the sake of argument that a person is a fan of some team or school or city. I'll take myself as an example. I might watch my alma mater play a few football games, and if they go to the basketball tournament then I watch that. Sometimes I watch the super bowl, maybe, but I have never watched a Halftime show.
Now... why would a "sports" fan like that, which is the majority of us, pay $15 to $20 a month (MANDATORY) for an entire year when they only want to watch MAYBE 6 to 12 games between football and basketball that are usually not on ESPN anyway??? Answer: They shouldn't pay. And I'd imagine most of them won't in the future.
ESPN will need to offer more customization. Be it through live streaming or time shifting or whatever. I'm not an expert, but I think the days of forcing a $20 fee on people every month for non personalized sports coverage are just not sustainable long term.
True, the average sportsfan only watches whole games of their favorite teams.
However, people love highlight reels. That's why Sportscenter is so huge.
Unfortunately, ESPN is moving more and more towards "personalities" and gossip and whatever. Just give me the highlights on loop. That way, bars, restaurants, people in their own homes will have it on in the background constantly.
EDIT: Sure, they need to do more content on the web and on-demand or whatever. But their core TV programming should be less TMZ-y. I don't care what athletes did on vacation.
Which is rapidly being replaced (to some degree) with things like twitter, instagram, snapchat, subreddits, streamable, and other social media/video streaming websites.
It takes next to no time or effort for somebody to roughly cut a highlight and post it to social media. Meanwhile ESPN sees diminishing returns polishing various replays and putting it in a half hour program that repeats 6+ times every morning. It's to the point every team/league even has their own social media accounts, and post the best highlights themselves. If I can see the major highlights directly from NFL's instagram account, why bother waiting halfway through sportcenter to (maybe) catch the right segment?
(FD: I do some work for BR, though not on this product.)
But Team Stream sucks. It's all just little tweets of 6 second video or just text. Hardly any of it is highlights from games. And worst of all...
they are all preceded by 30 seconds minimum of auto roll video ads.
Localized networks like the various Regional Sports Networks, Fox Sports (insert City or State Name Here), Big Ten Network and Pac12 Network are stealing the casual fans of specific teams. All of the major sports offer streaming of pretty much every game a fan of a specific sport could want.
It's telling that the first new program ESPN added following the layoffs was a simulcast of MLB's Intentional Talk. Yet another talking heads show with a TMZ bent. I don't see this ending well for them.
Only they don't. If you think about it...
whenever you want to stream from the web... you generally have to enter your TV provider credentials. So if you don't have cable, you can't stream a lot of those games.
MLB.tv is interesting because they generally don't have commercials. Oddly, I wish they did. When the broadcast pauses for commercials, my screen basically goes blank and the TV gets silent. I wish they would just switch to a whole stadium camera with crowd noise.
Now let's say I want to subscribe to only Manchester United content on NBC. Man United and the other top clubs are extremely popular globally. So this means the broadcast contract has to be tailored to each team and the more popular the team is, the higher the contract value for that team. Now this means clubs don't get equal money and if they don't, the smaller clubs will never be able to compete with the top clubs. This is the exact reason why TV money is now divided equally in England. So we're back to square one if we were to implement this.
> Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway.
You're missing something big here: Gambling.
boomers. And they're economically dying out as they retire and the medical industrial complex wrings out the last of their money. Plenty of things cost a multiple of ESPN's cost and are doing fine because they sell well to young people, think of the stereotypical $100+ cell phone service. The vast majority of ESPNs viewers remember when they heard JFK was shot, their viewers are not the Challenger explosion or 9/11 generations.
Baseball has died among youth and the average fan age is now going up more than a year per calendar year. NBA average fan is much younger, like middle aged gen-x. The majority of PGA viewers are nursing home age, golf is so dead, so cringy 90s/00s. The youngest sports are major league soccer and hockey about a third millennial or younger for both, the only pro sports of 2050 are going to be spanish speaking soccer and the few remaining northern state whites watching hockey, the other sports are dead when the boomers are gone.
There is also a compression effect not seen in the past such that the NFL superbowel now gets over 10x the viewers of the world series. The average baseball game has fewer viewers than my county has residents. The average NBA game is only slightly better. In the old days there was a "wide world of sports" concept which is already dead. There isn't a "sports" industry anymore, there's american pro football, soccer for the spanish speakers, hockey and nascar for the legacy being eliminated whites, basketball for the blacks, and the also-ran sports that statistically no one watches.
No one in England is going to stop watching Manchester United games to start watching Chicago Blackhawks games, or even to watch some sucky MLS game. That's not happening man. Get that out of your head.
No one in China, Europe, the MidEast or Brazil is gonna stop watching basketball and start watching some sucky hockey game. That ain't happening either.
Do you have any idea the YoY revenue growth global sports leagues like PL or the NBA enjoy at the moment?
What you are saying may happen, MIGHT happen in your small neighborhood... though I doubt even that... but it certainly isn't gonna happen on a scale large enough to actually make the money that PL makes in a year. In fact, I doubt that American soccer and American hockey will even make the money something like the NBA pulls out of just China. Let alone global basketball in general.
Basically, you need cheap, accessible sports to challenge the global soccer and basketball behemoths. Something that could be played barefoot in a field. Or you need to JOIN the global soccer and basketball behemoths.
But yeah... sports leagues like American football, American hockey, or American soccer stand little to no chance of challenging those more global leagues growth wise. Best outcome for them would be to somehow link into those behemoths. And I can only see American soccer being able to do that... MAYBE?
In the short to medium term I don't think the business entity known as ESPN or MLB can survive USA cutting the cable cord. You're probably correct that someone is going to buy most of the pieces at the bankruptcy auction and probably right for example that baseball will be popular in Japan and central america yet that won't matter for folks in the USA who will not be watching.
It forces you to care about the performance of players across multiple teams as well as whoever your opponents players are that week.
The football fans I know tend to fall into two demographics: College and Pro. Basically determines which day of your weekend will be committed to watching football all day; Saturday...or Sunday?
Personally, I've been a die hard Clemson fan since before I was born so it's definitely Saturday for me. I haven't watched but maybe 2 NFL games a year for the last 10 years or so but I still play fantasy football.
They show endless hours of Sports Center—how much can you meaningfully talk about sports? Even most of the commentary in the games is stupid.
Granted, I listen to sports podcasts (and I really like ESPNs NBA Lockdown) but they have one hour, once or twice a week, and they stick to a fairly focused script. In an hour podcast they may have 3 minutes of 'commercials' and 5 minutes of filler. On a lot of ESPNs shows they just don't have enough to talk and end up filling the time talking busting each other's balls because I guess that's what a lot of sports guys do when they hang out
It paid too much because it could even more for it on resale. Bigger fool. They'll realign as contracts start to expire. Meanwhile they had a great run, until people awoke up to the scam.
In the past esports were kinda sideshow attractions, but now the production quality and audience numbers are quickly catching up to traditional sports. On top of that their distribution models are more consumer friendly. I'm sure there's overlap of people who watch both, but I wonder if the next generation of kids will defer to esports over traditional ones.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/68heiu/600k_viewers_...
ESPN has tried to adapt to esports, but it met resistance from its audience and its own commentators not really accepting it. There was this famous career ending rants [1] that is just one of many from the ESPN commentators - viewer comments usually don't stray too far from such thoughts.
esports fans seem pretty distinct from the core fans of ESPN, and ESPN deciding to cover it on their sub-channels (ESPN2, etc) is their attempt to reach out to those numbers and to get eyes on the channel. The internal rejection of esports doesn't help at all for ESPN who I'm sure is dying for the kinds of numbers that the Twitch and Youtube events get, especially since there is so much down-time between matches with virtually no advertisements, which likely makes the business side of ESPN wince quite a bit.
But no, I don't think esports is causing problems for ESPN in the sense that it's cutting in; ESPN would be HAPPY to get on the esports train if they could.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzL21gHwt1I
To be honest, I think that the more big-tent ESPN tries to go, the more likely they are to fail. There are periods of the year when nothing is happening in the big four US sports leagues, and Sportscenter becomes unwatchable - I'm just not going to tune in to watch highlights of the XYZ Open tennis tournament, or some golf tournament, or whatever other extra-niche sporting event is occurring in those months of the year.
At one point, ESPN was farming that kind of stuff out to ESPN2, along with trick billiards competitions, professional bowling, and what have you, but has instead decided to triple-down on hot takes and outrage.
If you have cable, you are paying for that privilege.
Cable Companies: "Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes, with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam."
Consumers: "Have you got anything without spam in it?"
Cable Companies: "Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got MUCH spam in it."
Ad nauseam...
Instead, it's the huge decline of coverage and quality. These forums are devoted to a more niche form of sports (open wheel auto racing). In the 1980s and 1990s ESPN coverage of these sports was actually very extensive. No longer.
There was a time when one of ESPN's strengths was a huge coverage of a wide array of sports, including many niche sports. From my perspective, a lot of the niche (or even not so niche) sports has effectively moved off of the network for one reason or another. On the main channels, cheap programming where talking heads yell at each other have taken its place.
Factor in this, and then factor in the people who got ESPN even though they weren't sports people to begin with, and now add in the cord-cutting movement. It's easy to see why ESPN's in trouble.
Future to me seems, where there will be option to subscribe or buy ticket to individual events like, say only this weekend's match between team A and team B. And it seems it is more and more possible.
Probably not anymore... It does point to Netflix eventually making a lot of money and being worth a lot more than it currently is. Netflix doesn't have ad revenue (in addition to such huge consumer fees, ESPN had nearly $4 billion a year in ad revenue in 2014 at least) but its subscription fees are comparable to ESPN. Better for Netflix is its aggressive move into its own content generation. If it was "merely" a way to watch other companies content, it would be at the mercy of those content owners the way ESPN pays a king's ransom for NFL, NBA, etc. games. ESPN's strategy to focus on opinion (original content) makes a lot of sense in terms of retaining fans and having a business that could survive losing broadcasting rights for a lot of sports.
While sports team/network owners could go direct to fans fairly easily these days with 1000 tv channels and everyone having "Smart" TVs, they're probably better off under the ESPN umbrella both as a bundle of many sports and through aggregated ad sales.
1. Viewing games costs too much
2. The commentary for said games sucks
I'd happily watch a random MLB game on a Tuesday, but sorry I am not going to spend $113/season to watch on MLB TV. The NFL is the worst. If you're out of the US you can purchase and stream games for $200/season or so, but for in the US you have to have directTV to get all the games which isn't even offered for many possible subscribers or spend $30 in beer/food for lunch at a sportsbar with no audio for your game. If I'm at home I have the choice of the local game and maybe one other random national game and if both of these games are blowouts I'm tuning out.
People want to watch their team play. They don't even mind commercials as long as there's not TOO many of them. The NFL is reaching their limit. NFL viewership has peaked. 2016 ratings declined 8%. Watching a touchdown followed by a commercial followed by a kickoff touchback followed by a commercial is too much. The only way to grow a sport is to grow viewership and fans and the only way to do that is make content cheap, easy to access and enjoyable to watch which brings us to the commentary.
The future of sports and money in sports is in the live aspect and in the commentary. I want to watch a football game commented by Conan O'Brian or Snoop Dogg or even some entertaining twitch or youtuber not Al Michaels and Phil Simms. Why not collect royalties on commentary streams? Let 1000s of people pay for the rights to comment on an NFL game and let the viewers decide who they want to listen to commentary from. Its absurd that in 2017 people still resort to reddit.com/NFLstreams or NHLstreams to watch some low res game with pop up ads everywhere with commentary from two old white guys.
Once viewership increases, ad money will increase which would offset the streaming fees the leagues would be missing out on by providing their content for free. If ESPN would simply show sports and provide interesting commentary from interesting individuals I would watch around the clock.
Over a decade ago, I was channel surfing and stumbled upon an English Premier League (edit: may have been a lower tier matchup) match cast by 2 shit-talking fans, one from each team. I thought it was absolutely genius and while having no interest in either team or even the sport, I was thoroughly entertained.
I can't argue with the amount you're willing to pay, but I can offer that I think $113/season (or about $18/month) is an absolute steal.
They aren't squeezing all the pennies from me they could be.
At least you used to be able to.
The more sports wanders from just sports into social, political, or even partisan issues, the less it is actually about sports.
Associating these other things with sports destroys the value. It makes it so sport is no longer an escape, but instead becomes yet another politicized venue.
Here's some other interesting theories as to why ESPN is having trouble.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/26/the-real-story-behind-es...
I rarely talk sports with anyone...
In fact, there are only a few things you can't and shouldn't talk about at work.
Just the most important things in life: family structure, pregnancy, race, God, health issues, etc. List all the things that are inappropriate to talk about in an interview. Then realize they come up again when you are a candidate for a new promotion or transfer.
Plus, increasingly employers are taking positions on things. We don't exactly call them out on that.
No Interest in it at all...
I think in terms of pro sports in America everything's a bit artificial (maybe because of being regional entities) and less political, but at the collegiate level the politics fly.
Who you support says a lot about your family and background, especially if you all aren't direct grads. Compare fans of Georgia Tech vs Georgia, or Texas vs Texas A&M. California vs Fresno st, etc.
See also - Celtic vs Rangers, which is for historical reasons a proxy for a variety of political disagreements (Protestant vs Catholic, Loyalist vs Republican, etc) for some fans.
MTV - when was the last time you saw a music video?
History - Apparently "History" now includes bizarre religious crackpottery, ancient aliens, and idiots buying and selling things in Las Vegas.
A&E - "Arts and Entertainment" is apparently all about terrible people and Honey Boo-Boo.
Discovery - Remember science and wildlife documentaries? Neither does the Discovery Channel.
TLC - ugh. Dwarfs and tattoos and people with way too many children.
SyFy - We can't even spell anymore, and SHARKNADO!
And, yeah, Duck Dynasty and Cake Boss are nowhere near where A&E and TLC were when they launched, but they are family-centered sitcoms, more or less, in a time with a lack of those.
I won't defend Honey Boo Boo or that sort of thing, though.
Anyway, Disney is now the company of Star Wars and Marvel, not just Mickey and princesses. If companies want to take a risk and change their brand, I guess it's their right. There's tons of content out there if we don't like it.
History - A&E networks (subsidiary of Hearst and Disney)
A&E - take a guess
Discovery - Discovery Communications
TLC - Discovery Communications
SyFy - NBC
this is called "race to the bottom" and also "media collusion".
Just like a captivating TV series, sports demands your attention to the details and personal stories for you to become a fan. However, sporting events take hours to ingest at a time and the outcome leave many disappointed. People who have money to spend are typically people with fewer hours to allocate for entertainment. With the rise of quality TV shows that take one hour to consume, how do sports like baseball stand a chance at gaining new viewers?
The best thing ESPN has going for it are its 30 for 30 documentaries. A well produced documentary series. However, documentaries generally don't bring in huge sums of cash. If they can pivot to a create must-see dramatic show with a sports theme, they may have a chance.
You are remarkably wrong here. In fact, live sports has come to completely dominate TV over the last 20 years. 9 of the top 10 most watched TV shows in 2016 was a sporting event:
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2016/tops-of-2016...
I would argue the opposite: that "prestige" TV shows are a response to live sports by networks that don't have NFL or NBA rights.
But that diverges from my main assertion that with less time available to working people, people prefer to follow a story with familiar characters in a 1-hr window rather than have to watch a 3-hour affair between two random teams.
Now they compete with the internet. Highlights? Go to r/nba, r/soccer, r/nfl, r/hockey, boom, done, quick gif, lots of good discussion. Why spend an hour watching sportscenter? Especially now that they talk about music, twitter, and lebron james 24/7, endless commercials, always before what you spent the last 20 minutes waiting for, for something.
Not only that, youtube channels, podcasts, fans making their own content, blogs, and other forums...there's just way more content out there now than in the 90s, where all you had was the newspaper/magazine instead of the TV.
On top of that, all the major leagues have their own networks now-NHL net, NBA net, NFL net. In addition to FS1, and competing with the major networks for top events.
It's not just people watching game of thrones (those shows don't air all year around and only take up an hour a week anyway.) Although I'm sure it reduces those numbers a bit.
Anytime i see a Bloomberg article on hn i read it.