You’d think the United States Congress would have bigger things to worry about right now than figuring out where and when football games are airing.
And yet, earlier this month, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing with the (admittedly charming) title, “Field of Streams: The New Channel Guide for Sports Fans,” during which they asked representatives from the MLB, NBA and NHL to testify about how each league is tackling the current sports programming ecosystem.
For the record, the NFL was also invited but did not participate. (Perhaps Commissioner Roger Goodell was too busy prepping for his back-to-back upfront appearances for Netflix and Disney the following week.)
In his opening remarks, Republican Senator and Committee Chairman Ted Cruz noted that it’s not just a question of it becoming harder for Americans to find the games they want to watch; he also cited rising subscription costs, streaming paywalls and regional team blackouts as having a negative impact on sports broadcasting, which just so happens to benefit from publicly funded stadiums and industry-specific antitrust legislation.
(Speaking of ole Ted, his strong POV here makes more sense when you consider the “Cruz Curse,” an ongoing superstition that Texas sports teams always lose when he’s in attendance. If my political rivals were drafting legal resolutions to ban me from college playoff games, I’d be invested in streaming sports, too.)
But congressional priorities aside, sports viewing fragmentation is a legitimate problem for fans. Although I don’t count myself among their number, even I remember how much easier it was to watch the Yankees before Amazon Prime and the YES Network took over – both of which still aren’t enough if you want to tune into every game this season, according to Consumer Reports Senior Editor James Wilcox.
And yes, obviously this content chaos poses a clearer threat to publishers, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt advertisers in the long run, too. The more expensive and frustrating it becomes to watch something, the more likely it is that consumers will eventually stop showing up, like they’re already doing with movie theaters and linear TV. Given that sports is the No. 1 most reliable way to reach live audiences right now, it behooves publishers and advertisers to make sure that doesn’t change.
So – and please stop me if you’ve heard this one before – how do we cut down on all the fragmentation?
The fix is in(?)
Far be it from me to point out that we already had a pretty reliable way to learn the times, dates and channels of TV broadcasts. Remember the TV Guide?
Except the current Fandom-owned iteration of that formerly storied institution only shows live TV listings from some streaming providers, like Fubo and Sling, and only one provider at a time – which makes it just barely more useful than built-in platform program guides. When I tested the app myself, I already had to know exactly which channel to search for (in this case, YES) to find what ended up being a generic “MLB Baseball” listing, somehow making the process too specific and too broad at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, most sports leagues also have their own more robust scheduling apps and pages, which you can still use without a logged-in account. Many offer direct links to all available video and audio streams for both national and local games.
These options “are only possible because every national game telecast is available on a digital platform,” said Bill Koenig, the NBA’s president of global content and media distribution, during his congressional testimony.
Per Awful Announcing, Koenig also shared that the NBA is testing out non-endemic partnerships with social media platforms and delivery apps. “You’ll have an opportunity to click from [a] food delivery app directly to a game telecast,” he told the senators.
Granted, most people want to watch sports on their TVs, not on a browser or their mobile phone. And because each league operates their schedule independently, fans of multiple sports teams will still have to do their own schedule juggling.
Unless, of course, every single league strikes the same type of in-app partnership with, say, DoorDash, which could then post all of their combined broadcast schedules in one go.
Which leads me to my pitch: Why don’t all the sports leagues just do that? As in, combine their resources to create a multi-sport, multi-platform TV listing guide that actually works?
Sure, it would technically be a glorified, sports-specific version of the “TV Guide,” but the tech industry loves to reinvent things that already exist. (At least this idea makes more sense than Uber’s route share service, aka buses for rich people.)
And, hey, if a company like DoorDash wants to provide the bulk of the infrastructure in exchange for a major sponsorship, why not let them? It’s not as if TV sports fans aren’t used to seeing brand names everywhere. Just look at how many stadiums sold their naming rights away to corporate entities over the past 30 years.
As someone who doesn’t have much of an interest in sports, I admit that I’m coming to this conversation as a complete outsider. But maybe it takes an outsider to point out the obvious sometimes. (I hope!)
Questions? Concerns? Any sports-specific corrections you want to make? Drop me a line at victoria@adexchanger.com.
