You didn’t have to be in Ohio Stadium or in front of a television on Saturday to see Michael Thomas make an acrobatic touchdown catch for the Ohio State Buckeyes.
You could have been looking at your phone, your tablet or your computer and witnessed the catch in near real-time.
Within moments of Thomas’ reception in OSU’s 20-13 win over Northern Illinois, video of the play from the ABC broadcast exploded on Twitter and Facebook because of streamed uploads from fans and websites.
Such an online flurry brings a question to mind for Tom Odjakjian, who negotiated deals for broadcast rights to sporting events as a programmer at ESPN from 1981 until 1994.
“If you’re watching all the highlights on your phone or computer, do you need to tune into SportsCenter?” Odjakjian said.
Many questions are swirling in a sports-saturated world increasingly populated by a millennial generation raised by technology to expect their desired content how and when they want it.
Do you even need to go to the game? Or pay for cable TV?
“It’s all about choices,” said Ted Shaker, a retired executive producer at CBS Sports, where he won 13 Emmy awards and two Peabody awards. “If you’re a football fan, an Ohio State fan, there are so many different ways you can learn more about them and who they’re playing. It’s just beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
“And it can be consumed when they want to consume it. It can be consumed on a variety of platforms. It allows me to either read about it on my cellphone or watch video of it or listen to a podcast about it. It’s a wonderful time to be a sports fan.”
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Increased choices of how to consume sports has changed the communal experience of enjoying a game. Even if not in attendance, fans increasingly are double-screening during events. For example, 28.4 million tweets were sent during the Super Bowl in February.
Meanwhile, all sports are dealing with attendance drops in recent years, and ESPN reportedly has lost more than 7 million subscribers in the past four years, including 3 million since July 2014.
More choices of how to watch and follow sports have empowered the consumer, as evident by the highlights of Thomas’ catch immediately going viral.
“All the technology creates new issues,” Odjakjian said. “While a lot of the new technology is wonderful, it creates a question: What are the rules going to be?
“The policymakers can’t keep up with the technology. The lawyers can’t keep up either. That’s why I call it the wild, wild West. You have this new product or this new ability to do something. OK, what are the parameters around it? That takes awhile to figure out.”
Consider what happened in May. Traditional fans paid $100 each — generating about $400 million in pay-per-view revenue — to see Floyd Mayweather box Manny Pacquiao on HBO, while hundreds of thousands of other viewers watched the fight for free via pirated broadband streams on the apps Periscope and Meerkat.
“How do you possibly stop everybody with a phone camera?” said Odjakjian, 61, now senior associate commissioner for broadcasting and digital content at the American Athletic Conference.
The overriding question stemming from the many ways fans now consume games regards how those options will alter or fit into sports’ economic model, which for four decades has been inflated by broadcast rights paid by networks.
“How do you keep that going and keep it growing? That’s the challenge everybody faces,” said Greg Shaheen, a former NCAA employee who was involved in the TV negotiations for the Division I men’s basketball tournament and oversaw the event for 12 years until 2012.
Ohio State’s conference is confronting the challenge now. The Big Ten’s 10-year, $1 billion football and basketball deal with ESPN/ABC and its six-year, $72 million deal with CBS for basketball both end after the 2016-17 academic year.
“I’m quite optimistic about our position in the marketplace even with the dynamic change which is occurring,” Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said. “We’ve prepared for it. Economy is good. I think sports content is valuable. There may be a transition period over the next decade as to how people consume in terms of
direct to consumer or through the cable package or through a thinner package.”
Already, the Big Ten Network, available in 60 million homes, and its app, BTN2Go, which is approaching 2 million downloads, are being added to streaming devices such as Roku and Google Chromecast this year.
“In today’s world, as more and more people are watching their content on various devices out of home, you need to be everywhere you can,” said Mark Silverman, Big Ten Network president.
Industry analysts are watching how the Big Ten’s next media rights negotiations play out because all other leagues in college and professional sports already are locked into lucrative long-term deals.
“I have every belief that the Big Ten will get a herculean jump in its (revenue) numbers with its next contract,” Shaheen said.
Shaheen and other analysts don’t see an imminent threat to sports’ traditional TV economics because of the limitations on streaming quality and availability, as well as the fervent popularity of the games and their nature being different than, say, a popular series on Netflix.
“One of the few things that demands attention and high, high dollars is live sports, particularly popular live sports,” said Shaker, now an adjunct professor in the sports and society program at New York University. “That’s because if you don’t watch while it’s happening, it’s not the same. Almost everything else available on television can sit on the shelf for a while.”
The increased popularity of broadband streaming, especially among younger viewers, has caused speculation about the future of cable TV, which predominantly through ESPN has grown and nurtured sport’s revenue since the early 1980s.
Dan Rayburn, a TV analyst at Frost & Sullivan and executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com, said the amount of cord-cutting by cable consumers has been overblown considering that there are still 100 million cable subscribers.
“Most people don’t understand that one technology typically never replaces another,” Rayburn said. “It’s a complement to another technology.”
That shows in how leagues and traditional networks are increasingly offering content on multiple platforms. ESPN has partnered with Sling TV. Even the NFL, the revenue king, is streaming its games now.
For now, networks are maintaining control of their sports content by requiring subscription authentication to receive streaming, and then limiting the devices it is available on while blacking out local games.
Don’t expect that to change, but everything else is in flux. Hey sports fans, you now can watch the Indian Premier League cricket games streamed on YouTube.
“The thing that’s going to be most interesting to me, going forward, is virtual reality,” Shaker said. “There will be a time before too long when you’ll be able to feel like you’re down on the floor of the stadium watching the Buckeyes play. That’s going to be the next frontier.”
