Posted on 12/07/2015 5:59:19 AM PST by C19fan
Your favorite sports team is massively overvalued right now. It’s not that you ought to be losing sleep over Jerry Jones’s or Mark Cuban’s finances—they were rich before and will be rich after. But the popping and cracking noises emanating from the key support beam in our Temple of Athletics—the TV sports business—foreshadow wild disruptions ahead for the world of sports.
Like the barking dogs that sense an earth tremor before we do, ESPN’s annus horribilis is a harbinger of the Internet’s coming disintermediation of America’s half-trillion dollar sports industry. Just since mid-summer, the Disney-owned 800-pound linebacker of sports TV announced falling subscriber counts and weak ad revenues that led to a devastating media stock price rout. The network has elected to let some of its highest-profile talent go, has announced a round of significant rank-and-file layoffs, and then last month shuttered its prestigious Grantland.com sports journalism site.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
According to Obama, our sports heroes are Muslims. Whatever sport he is talking about, people apparently don’t want to pay to see it.
Rush has often made the point that sports broadcasters are the most radically left wing of all 'journalists'. With the added bonus in most cases of not being bright enough to be 'real' journalists. Talk about failing to meet a low bar!
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
And that will finish them off completely.
You do have the option.
Jihad?
No I don’t. Not with Cox. It’s part of my basic package and it’s an all or nothing deal. In February my 12 month obligation is up and I’ll go to Verizon and I won’t be getting any ESPN channels.
Too many thugs on the teams now for me to enjoy watching much any more. I now stick with golf, mainly.
Amazing....best economics article I’ve seen in a while...and it’s in THE BEAST.
Agreed
Are ESPN’s troubles simply due to increased competition? Fox Sports 1 shows actual sports programming, not just idiot loudmouths screaming about sports.
Boxing.....Cassius Clay.
The Sports Bubble isn’t popping (yet). The ESPN bubble is popping.
The NFL largely relies on “free” network television, and now has its own network and the popular “Sunday Ticket” options available outside of ESPN, which is a small piece of teh NFL pie.
Now, over the last four decades sports interests have goneup and down. Baseball attendance is up over the ‘70s, but viewership is WAY down except in a few baseball markets (Boston, NY, St. Louis, Chicago). Hockey is down. Basketball is down.
Football is up. Soccer has become a fifth major niche sport in the U.S. In past generations we watched a LOT more boxing, more wrestling. Heck, my local affiliate even bumped scheduled prime time programming on ABC for a local bowling match called “Ten Pin Pickup” (WTNH-TV, New Haven, 1970s). In the ‘70s there was even a professional tennis league that received coverage in the local papers (Los Angeles Aztec, New York Sets, etc.)
In those days, ESPN was struggling to fill scheduling time with Australian Rules Football and Crew.
These days, instead of two NFL games on Sunday and one on Monday Night during most of the regular season, we have the Sunday games, plus games on Sunday, Thursday AND Monday nights.
The NFL has successfully marketed itself in a way that transcends local markets.Their can be a minimally important Thursday night game between Jacksonville and Indianapolis. It WILL get #1 in its time slot. Some of it is gambling, more has to do with fantasy sports, some has to do with a mild interest in how the game affects other teams’ playoff/division chances. Most is they like watching a decent football game.
Now that any NFL fan can pretty much watch any game (and he mostly doesn’t need ESPN to do it), more NFL football gets consumed than all of theother sports. ESPN has made its money largely by getting people to watch programs ABOUT the NFL (draft previews, etc.), but most of that can be done by Fox Sports or any other network that cares to run with it (outside of special events like the actual draft, which is still easily covwered by other channels and web sites, anyway).
Sports bubble? No. Sports consolidation. Cable TV channel bubble? Yes.
That wasn’t the Muslim sport I was referring to.
I’ve noticed that a lot of younger people aren’t that interested in the NFL. Their average viewer age has got to be climbing. Add in all the ‘white noise’ over head injuries and redskins, and things could get ugly for the NFL.
What is this “ESPN” thing about which this article refers? I know it not.
Oldplayer
With very few exceptions, professional sports teams/leagues have become just as politically correct, multi-cultural and bass-ackwards as much of the rest of society and continue to distract average Americans from things that do, or will have, a much more profound effect on their lives than whether or not the Panthers still have a perfect won/lost record.
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