ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: But It Might Be Time to See Other People
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“People of Earth, this is Bartron, commander of the Martian invasion force. Your planet is in our hands; resistance is useless.” – Bart Simpson
Communicating a live sporting event through a television broadcast has always been an imperfect science. Television people have experimented with different broadcast techniques and new technologies over the years to make events more realistic, or give a better feel for the game, or reproduce the atmosphere at the stadium. But your house is never going to be like the stadium (no matter how much of an over-the-top-super-fan-do-it-yourself home improvement nut you are); you’ll still have upholstered furniture, easy access to the bathroom and a refrigerator that does not charge eight dollars for beer. There is an inherent difference between attending a game and watching one on television, no way around it.
Television is the way most fans watch their teams in action though. Even season ticket holders, unless they are incredibly gung-ho about road trips and have very little else going on in their lives, end up watching a lot of games on the screen. You can skip the tedious pregame shows and ignore any idiotic local columnists, but you cannot avoid watching the games live on television. Everything that happens beyond the field, from talking about the game with your friends all the way up the food chain to SportsCenter, is optional; but the live broadcasts are inescapable.
Television channels, ESPN and all the rest, aim at the widest possible audience, and that means that some people will inevitably be unhappy with all the ancillary stuff that comes with the action. However, we live in an age where more and more of the information we receive can be filtered and customized. That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on context, but as far as sports are concerned, I think it’s to our benefit. What’s more, we are living in the infancy of this age of information, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
If the internet has taught us one thing about sports it is that people who truly understand the games being played are not limited to the payrolls of television networks and newspapers, quite the opposite. There are smart people on-line who are passionate about sports, from large websites like www.footballoutsiders.com to humble blogs following the travails of individual teams. The barriers to entry are already low, and likely to fall even lower as bandwidth grows and internet users proliferate. The ways that we can enjoy sports will increase apace.
So far this has mostly been limited to time spent before and after the game, rather than during. As that changes, and it has already begun, we’ll eventually see the big money (sports leagues, broadcasters and cable/satellite companies) follow suit. We’ve already taken the first primitive steps by blogging events live. When you get right down to it, isn’t live blogging a game (quick analysis, a few insights and some jokes) basically what a color commentator does? There are obviously limitations on how quickly you can type something while an event is occurring, but what about talking? Skype and the like have certainly shown us that free instantaneous live audio over the internet is a reality. So what’s to prevent a couple of friendly bloggers from simulcasting an audio stream during the game?
What if J.E. Skeets and Tas Melas from The Basketball Jones decided to watch the Thursday night NBA games with a live mic connected to an audio feed? What if a couple of the guys from Kissing Suzy Kolber watched and commented on Monday Night Football live? I’d be willing to bet that every pro franchise and major college in the country has at least a few fans that would like the idea of doing that and know how to set it up. Local, amateur announcing teams could build up quite a following for doing nothing more than watching and talking about the games, (which they are going to do anyway). I have no idea what something like this would look or sound like, but the internet is great place to try out new ideas. Most of them fade instantly, but some become hugely popular.
There are obvious technical restrictions to this, first and foremost the need to have a computer up and running in the same room as your television, but we know from live blogging and comments sections that lots of people have that already. I don’t think there are any real legal obstacles; though I wouldn’t put it past any of the above mentioned big money parties to make some noise about it. There is also the issue of lag, anyone who has ever been in a sports bar knows that some feeds can be ahead or behind others by a few seconds, but we’re not trying to do play by play - at least not yet.
All I know for sure is that there is an audience out there for something like this, it’s not for everyone, it’s not even for everyone who reads sports blogs, but the audience does exist and somebody is going to find a way to speak to it. I realize that this is a crude idea at this point, but I think it’s roughly the direction we’re headed. Journalists no longer have a monopoly on analysis and inside information about teams, why on Earth should the live announcers have a monopoly on commentary during the event? The internet has tremendously increased our options in everything from shoe purchase to dating, why not sports announcing?
The example I’d like to follow here are the local radio announcers. Every pro sports team has a local radio broadcasting team. It’s usually some sports broadcaster paired with an ex-jock and between the two of them they know the name of every single employee of the franchise and their kids. No vagabond network announcing crew could or should be expected to understand the franchise that well. For football it would be nice to have the same local announcers each week. (This would eliminate the generic network announcers saying things like, “I remember we did a game here back in Week 3…”). For baseball, basketball and hockey it would mean that the local guys who carry the load most of the season would keep going through the playoffs. I would certainly be interested in that, the question is, would I be willing to pay for it?
On-line amateurs are a good start, but serious money is going have to get involved sooner or later for something to really change the way we watch sports. So…how much would you pay for more customizable sports broadcasts? The increased bandwidth needs for cable and satellite would be minimal. It’s the HD picture broadcast that sucks bandwidth, but you could have multiple audio streams with only a fractional increase. (I have no idea if the current generation of cable/satellite boxes could do this, but the underlying concept is simple enough, building a circuit board and writing some firmware to make it work seems like a small hurdle.) At first it would likely be limited to simple things like local announcers, on field microphones that would let you hear what’s really going on at the line of scrimmage (with all the colorful words included), a pair of newspaper columnists (one from each team’s hometown), etc. The possibilities are limitless though, and with a little experience the networks would be able to find formats and personnel that are knowledgeable, entertaining, and worth a few extra bucks per season to the discerning fan.
The expansion of HD in the last few years has proven that millions of people are willing to pay more for an enhanced home experience. The HD equipment (television set, DVR, etc.) is more expensive than regular equipment, and the cable and satellite companies charge a premium for programming on top of that, yet HD grows faster every year. Using some of that technology to personalize the broadcast (and target the ads a little more precisely) seems like a natural next step. Personalized access inevitably means tiered access, but so what? Tickets to an event are not created equal; people that can afford to pay for better seats get a better view. People willing to pay a little more ought to have a better time at home, nothing wrong with that.
What we want to do is widen the gap between simply watching the game and the network presentation of the game. The two are not one in the same. After all, where is it written that if I’m watching the game at home I must do so exactly according to how ESPN or Fox want me to? Internet and television technology improve all the time, that goes almost without saying, and it’s up to us, people on-line who have an interest in sports and the technical savvy to make new things work, to gently nudge things in a better direction. This isn’t some call to arms or anything like that. We just need to keep doing what we’re doing.
I’m leery of starry eyed predictions about how blogs and the internet are an up-with-people style revolution in the making. However, what we know already is that a lot of people are willing to follow their sports teams on-line in ways that no one thought possible just a few years ago; that’s a fact, not speculation. And it makes me wonder just what else this dedicated (and growing) subset of sports fans can do.
This is the final post in a series of three from www.tetheredswimming.com about television and sports. At the kind invitation of Dan Lewis I’ve posted them here as well. Comments are always appreciated.
