Writing in @SINow 25 years ago, the late William Oscar Johnson predicted today’s sports media…
I love Research Fridays. It is my day to dig into projects and, occasionally, stumble on something unexpected. Such was the case today when…
I love Research Fridays. It is my day to dig into projects and, occasionally, stumble on something unexpected. Such was the case today when I re-read (I say “re” because I was loyal Sports Illustrated reader in 1991, and assume I read it then) the late William Oscar Johnson’s “Sports in the Year 2001” piece. Turns out, Johnson was spot on.
I encourage everyone to check out the full story on SI Vault, but here are some of the highlights (for me, anyway) regarding Johnson’s predictions for sports media consumption.
The networks dropped out in the mid-1990s, whining to the end about skyrocketing rights fees and every American’s God-given entitlement to free televised sport. After the networks backed out, each major sports league or organization — the NCAA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA — took over its own centralized television operations, creating what are known as master webs.
It works like this: When the networks dropped TV sports, millions of corporate advertising dollars were still available to sponsor NFL games. The league had been flirting with pay-per-view programming in the early ’90s, but in 1995 an angry Congress passed legislation declaring that the NFL, baseball and college football and basketball were all “American birthrights,” and were thus prohibited from charging the public to view their product on TV. The old commercial sponsorship system continued until 1996 when, abruptly, the Supreme Court overturned the anti-PPV law, ruling that it was a clear obstruction of interstate commerce.
Pretty much true, except networks still fall all over themselves for rights. It is true the major sports leagues have all created their own operations, and the NCAA (de-centralized to conferences) has done the same. The idea of American entitlement to watch sports is not so far-fetched. Last March at the Communication & Sport Summit in Charlotte, I presented (see page 5, 1:45 time slot) on the idea of a “must-carry” provision for U.S. sports, similar to what Australia and much of Europe has.
In a sense, we may not be far from this. The NBA offers a PPV package at $6.99 per game and the NHL/MLB have begun breaking up league-wide packages for team-specific packages (largely because they were sued).
I am going to watch all of the 24 scheduled bowl games. Like most serious American sports fans, I have Home Control Truck (HCT) installed in my living room.
Except there were 40 bowls in 2015 (some with teams sporting losing records), but the man cave thing is accurate.
Tele-Pay is going to bill me the usual $5 to deliver the standard 16-game Sunday programming plus two Monday night and two Thursday night games.
Unfortunately, we pay a lot more than $5 to get Sunday Ticket, but the proliferation of Monday and Thursday night games exists.
And, I found one prediction unrelated to sports media which is pretty close to truth…
The big money crunch for the NCAA came after the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that colleges were guilty of participating in a form of discrimination bordering on slavery as long as they pretended to require varsity athletes to attend class and did not pay them openly for their participation in sports. Thus, all college players are now given their paychecks in a public ceremony after each game.
This may be a reality in 2017, 20 years later than Johnson predicted.
Anyway, I enjoy Research Fridays.