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Media Death Watch: The Sports Edition
There have been several threads in these parts noting the threat to traditional media from technology. The conventional wisdom is that live sports is the only thing going for cable and broadcast. Mostly, that’s true. Forbes had a story that 25 of 29 domestic local telecasts of MLB games led their markets in cable viewing this summer. A third of those also led when broadcast stations were included.
But that doesn’t mean anyone is breathing easier tonight. Your sports watching experience is about to get, well, different. In order to compensate for smaller fractionalized audiences and escalating rights fees, both ESPN and Fox Sports are changing the way they cover games.
This winter, chances are you may be physically closer to the action than the production teams covering the college sports telecast you’re watching. These media behemoths have gotten in bed — literally and figuratively — with the conferences and schools they cover and, as a result, they’ve invested heavily in infrastructure.
Instead of the producing the game on site, individual camera feeds and audio are fed to studios in Bristol, Charlotte, Chicago, and Los Angeles via fiber lines. With only cameramen, video operators, and two audio guys on site, a single production team can do a game almost every night of the week without a speck of travel.
That, of course, will put hundreds of remote techs, producers, and directors on the sidelines with diminished incomes (including yours truly). And because the schools are business partners, they’re also supplying some of the camera people as unpaid interns. Unfortunately, these kids are training for jobs that won’t exist if this experiment turns into a permanent feature of the TV landscape.
Where you will see the difference is with the announcers, because they won’t be there, either. Instead of sitting in the booth or at the table on the sidelines, they will watch the game from a sound booth, calling the action as it unfolds on their monitors. They will have to rely on gathering information from the web and talking to coaches by telephone. They will no longer be able to attend practices and talk to players. They won’t be able to observe who seems to be playing hurt. And if something happens off camera during the game they will be as clueless as you.
Of the 2,700 NCAA basketball games covered by ESPN last season, less than 50 were produced this way. But this fall, they have begun experimenting with football as well. Network executives promise that big events will still be produced the traditional way.
Unless this works out better than even the bean counters dream it will, and suddenly the idea of “big” becomes a matter up for debate.
Published in Culture, Entertainment, Sports
Doesn’t this become a problem for the announcers? As an example, you can see more when at a football game than is shown on TV. Most of the action downfield between receivers and defensive backs is off-camera unless the ball is thrown their way. That would make me think the quality of live announcing would suffer.
Smoking Monkey – That’s why I said the announcing is where you, the viewer, will see the difference. I know they hate it.
Does this mean no sideline reporters? That changes the equation a little. What will that do to the gender warriors since most of those jobs are filled by women? Wasn’t it NBC years ago that broadcast a game with no announcers that ended up with ridiculous shots of a flag with text under it stating, “There’s a flag on the field”?
It’s possible to still have sideline reporters. Sorry.
Colleges making big money off unpaid students!? I’m blown away.
Oh good. Otherwise they would have to pre-record coaches saying, “We’re going to make some adjustments and come out strong in the second half.”
This was my first thought. Unless you are going to give the announcers an all-22 shot during the game, the quality of commentary is going to get far worse.
Frank – They can give them a feed of every available camera. But it’s not the same as being there.
College Gameday live from Bristol this week! And next week..
Remember the NFL films Dream Season? I’m sure we have plenty of footage to skip live sports altogether.
Is it possible that the networks might decide to send the announcers to the stadium after all, but still keep most of the production team at the home office? It seems like this would be a way for them to save almost as much money with much less impact to the viewing experience.
Last year when I watched the Giants claw their way through the playoffs and then win the World Series I was amazed that some of the playoff games were only available on the MLB Network. As I understand it the MLB Network has miniscule availability compared to ESPN or the major networks.
Here’s where we reach our technical limits.
Even with fiber optic transmission there is a delay. If you went from stadium to production facility back to stadium you would get a pretty hefty delay. Imagine a color commentator being two to three seconds out of sync with the replay.
Try watching a sporting event on TV and listening to it on the radio and you’ll get my drift.
I noticed this a little with the difference in regular vs HD channels but it became really obvious when I got alerts on my phone. I get the scoring alert during football several seconds before the ball is snapped on a FG.
I sense a money making opportunity on last minute bets on the points spread.
why not route the transmission to central through the monitors used by the announcers so that it passes through?
that way it doesn’t have to round trip.
Because it doesn’t work that way. Let’s say 5 cameras are doing a basketball game in Morgantown, WV. There are 5 transmission paths back to the network. There the game is being cut by the director, adding replays and graphics. The only way for the announcers to see the game being cut is that they must be on the same site as production.
If they were at the stadium, the cut game has to be sent back and what the announcers would be looking would be delayed. It’s just physics.
Considering all the advances in computerized animation, how long do you think they’ll need actual players? Sure, the players don’t get paid for their work, but there are a lot of other expenses in providing them with fake education, food, special facilities to separate them from mere students, etc. The people who actually go to the games wouldn’t notice if the players are replaced with animation characters, because they’re watching the big screens, anyway.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t present at the games when he used to announce them on the radio.
Technology marches on. Here’s a thought. Can the whole broadcast be put on a 5 or ten second delay and that time used to sync up on-site broadcasters with feed from back at home base? The viewers at home, unless they are listening to a radio broadcast wouldn’t have any idea that the game is on a delay, or wouldn’t really care even if told, as it would all unfold as if it is live.
I say we dispense with the announcers and just go with closed captioning. Seems to serve people well at the airport bar.
College sports coverage took a page from college sports. Hire interns (collegiate athletes) for an unpaid job in television they have a remarkably low chance of actually entering (professional sports).
I think this is a case of expecting the technology to do too much. Perhaps the media guys are banking on nobody caring about the announcers or commentators that much in the first place. That might be true for the 80% portion of their audience which tunes in for big events, but for the die-hard 20%, they love their commentary and this will offend.
So I imagine that this system would work just fine for the audience which doesn’t watch the smaller games in the first place. So it won’t work at all, because the hardcore motivated portion of sports-viewers will care.
But I can see why they’d want to run the experiment. I just have a feeling that the “tests” weren’t really tests, but just preludes to the inevitable end of useful sports commentary and expert coverage.
This is more technological regression than development.
I’m just an outsider so it’s easy for me to imagine that hard things are easy.
Unless I am missing something, you just explained that it isn’t done the way I proposed.
Is there a reason why it couldn’t be done that way?
Makes sense.
Also explains why it would be difficult to have announcers at the stadium even with the whole thing on a 10-sec delay: they would have to time their comments to the video feed while witnessing the action in “real time”.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out, seeing as how listening to off-site announcers call a game has all the realism of taking a shower with your clothes on.
Will this new plan of routing the feed back to ESPN HQ make the delay even greater, or was it already getting sent back to Bristol first?
As someone pointed out above, it’s already detrimental to the networks when viewers can find out about the action on Twitter before it happens on the screen, and I imagine they would want to avoid exacerbating this problem.
Better yet – contract the live text commentary out to Ricochet, where members would do their Mystery Science Theater thing, typing comments as fast as we could.
I couldn’t handle the Cubs fans.
Don’t forget satellite.
My wife and I stopped watching TV ages ago. We have movies and TV series on DVD, and we have Netflix and Amazon Prime. However, we still have satellite, because sports are the main reason (for me, mostly football and the Masters). A secondary reason is that my wife and my mother (yes, I live with my mom) like things such as Turner Classic Movies.
Nonetheless, even current TV shows, we wait until the season is over, then buy a DVD set – after the prices have dropped dramatically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIQKSykxiMc
Would I be correct in assuming that the savings will not be passed on to subscribers or ticketholders?