Sports + Money = Less Viewer Choice – Silicon Alley Insider

Sports + Money = Less Viewer Choice – Silicon Alley Insider:


On the road to ubiquitous sports coverage and super-serving the sports fan, there certainly seems to be a few fumbles, interceptions and technical fouls… the NFL has limited its “out of market” package exclusively to one channel (DirectTV) and it’s damn near impossible to watch a Thursday night game on the NFL Network. After years of having no problem watching my alma mater, Michigan, play football on television in NYC, I now have to scramble to find bars that carry the Big Ten Network. What happened to that “any place, any time, anyway…power to the consumer” chant that media executives used to throw around like it was the next verse of “Take Me Out To the Ballgame”?

Simple: saturation.

We need to remember: we aren’t really the customer here. Our eyeballs are what the networks are selling to their advertisers, and the programming is what they use to attach those eyeballs to the advertising. That in some cases they can convince us to PAY a fee to have our eyeballs sold to the advertisers is a bonus.

What the sports networks have found out, not surprisingly, is that it is posssible to saturate the market and we now have so much choice, so many options, that this is putting the squeeze on things. There’s only so much advertising inventory willing to be bought, and so many eyeballs willing to be attached to that programming to sell to the advertisers. Sports fans are only willing (or able) to watch so many games over a period of time, and there are now more options for those eyeballs than eyeballs. Ratings slip, and advertising rates go down (partly because ratings are down, partly because there are more advertising slots being sold than advertisers want to buy, so it’s a buyer’s market, unless it’s a special event of some sort)

So if you’re producing sports and selling advertising, how do you keep your income up? By doing what you can to make sure eyeballs are attached to your program instead of someone else’s program. And one way of doing that is by creating restrictions preventing people from seeing other programming.

Not good for the fans, who want maximum options and maximum flexibility, but then, these people aren’t interested in what you want, really. they are interested in what makes their advertisers happier and gets them more advertising revenue. And so restricting access to other programming to encourage you to watch their programming instead makes sense — to them.

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