Winter isn’t really my favorite time of the year. It’s cold, dark, and generally less hospitable than the looks I would regularly get from the gentleman playing cards in front of the Society Of The Citizens of Pozzallo when walking my dog. Apparently, they now have their own block, and I’m just a figment of y’alls imagination, so who really won the war here? Anyway, winter sucks.
What doesn’t happen to suck is how much sports content is becoming available via streaming to fill those cold and dark days and nights with a fuckton of live sports and, of course, advertising.
TSM spent much of January watching the early to final rounds of the Australian Open on ESPN+ and imagining being in a place that was so warm that a ballboy passed out from heat exhaustion. At any given point of the day, I could switch between live Men’s singles to pre-recorded mixed doubles and then back to live Women’s singles play. It was like having my own master control with so many options to choose from, and I was the director of my own experience.
This degree of optionality and control is likely the future for all programming, with some improvements that need to be made to truly raise the consumer experience to that wonderful middle ground between leaning in and learning back. I don’t want to lean at all to tell you the truth. If I’m leaning, it’s either because I’m drunk or I’m trying not to tip over in a sailboat.
Streaming is ideal for sporting events where there is simultaneous action coming from multiple locations at different times. Professional golf, for example, would do well to really look at how it can experiment with allowing viewers to either follow a single player or to remain at a particularly difficult hole like a water or sand trap where the tension is likely greater. The catch-up highlights functionality of VOD is also critical to make it useful here, allowing viewers the luxury of, you know, not having to watch that much golf.
With March Madness coming up, it would be wonderful if the good folks at WBD who have the early matches on their TNT/TBS/TruTV made it simple for us regular folk to be able to navigate between live games across their properties and to see cut-down recaps on VOD so we can really feel like we’ve got a shot this year to win that office March Madness pool which that doofus in accounts receivable keeps winning even though he’s clearly cheating. Paramount+, which will have the Elite Eight, Final Four, and the National Championship Game, will have the opportunity to take it to the next level, given the focused attention that each of the successive bracket games will have as the tournament culminates. And I’m not talking about 1980s picture-in-picture, I’m talking about multiscreen viewing with event updates that prompt viewers to switch between games based on real-time inputs like lead changes or when a game is in its final minutes of the half.
Yes, I managed to get to this point in the missive without mentioning…..THE BIG GAME. It’s big, and it’s a game, and it’s so big it’s fucking SUPER, and if you can find a vessel big enough, you can put it into a really, really, really big BOWL. It’s going to be on Tubi this year and that is how TSM and his hostages (family) will be watching it, provided they really did provision enough streaming infrastructure to handle this puppy. This is a different challenge however, since everyone wants to have the shared experience of watching the game and the ads, as it happens. But it’s going to be interesting to see just how many cord-cutters were able to avoid having to travel to their cable-clinging friends’ or relatives’ houses late on a weeknight (can we please discuss having this national event on a day that doesn’t precede a Monday? Please?) to watch around 20 minutes of live gameplay over the course of 4-5 hours. Yes, that’s a real number, you can look it up or just trust me, but it’s been like that for a long time. Your average actual gameplay during an NFL broadcast is about 22 minutes. The rest is replays, filler, highlights, ex-jocks in sportscoats talking to each other, and of course, really good TV ads.
And those ads cost upwards of $7M for 30 seconds of air time this year, meaning the more eyeballs on the ad the better of an investment it is for the brand. So those Tubi-watching households are going to be additive to the overall reach of the campaign and potentially more lucrative since these are younger, more affluent households than the geriatric cable audience.
Yeah, I said it. Pay TV today stands on the shoulders of pharmaceutical advertising and consumer paralysis. It’s why the smart money is getting out, putting a mess of these cable networks into a magical “SpinCo” (and can we just all brace ourselves for the “spin” this collection of decaying assets from NBC, Disney, and WBD, is going to get from the PR folks sent on this career suicide mission to present this steaming pile of programming as immensely valuable?) so they won’t have to deal with the financial carnage of what happens when these cable subscribers eventually succumb to whatever these drugs were supposed to remedy anyway.
So this Sunday, I ask you all to think about how wonderful it is that we live in a country where, despite our rather pronounced differences, we can all agree that sports on a TV is pretty much the great equalizer. And given that, y’all should watch more Curling. Try it with the sound off and be your own commentator, it’s more fun than watching golf, I promise you.
This Week’s Music: The Steeldrivers – Midnight Train To Memphis
If you’re a fan of Chris Stapleton, you’ll want to hear how this song was first recorded.
The views and opinions expressed by The Streaming Madman are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Streaming Wars or its affiliates.
