In less than a decade, the way people watch television has evolved more rapidly than during the past fifty years. With newly formed social media habits of viewing 2nd screen apps, catch-up TV and Netflix streamed movies, the rise in time-shift viewing has dramatically altered viewing trends forever. However, there was one noticeable exception to this - sports, where live viewing remained the norm.
Yet now even televised sport, and the way we view it, is undergoing a mammoth revolution, with traditional TV sports broadcasting becoming increasingly under threat. With the recent announcement that social media platform Twitter have agreed a groundbreaking deal to stream Thursday night live NFL games online, is this the beginning of the end of TV sports broadcasting as we know and love it?
The History of TV Sports
The first broadcasting of sports began with an ice hockey game in 1890, with descriptions of play sent via a telegraph line of the Stanley Cup challenge series between Montreal and Winnipeg. There is debate what followed next, whether it was the first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game in the early 1920's, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasting a live radio boxing match between Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray, or was it Professor F.W. Springer, who had a crude set up rigged to transmit University of Minnesota football games to a very small audience as early as 1912.
In the UK, the first sport event broadcast was a Rugby Union international game at Twickenham between England and Wales, in January 1927. Two weeks later the first broadcast of a football match took place, with BBC covering Arsenal against Sheffield United at Highbury. Listeners to the broadcast could use numbered grids published in the Radio Times (below) to figure out which area of the pitch the action was taking place, due to a second commentator reading out grid references during the match.
The first live TV coverage of a sports event was in the 1936 Summer Olympics at Berlin, televised by two German firms, Telefunken and Fernseh, and broadcast at 180 lines and 25 frames per second. Four different areas were telecast using three cameras (below). In total, 72 hours of live transmission went over the airwaves to special viewing booths, called "Public Television Offices" in Berlin and Potsdam.
It would be one year later when the UK saw its first live televised broadcast of a football match on 16th September 1937, with the BBC showing a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and the Arsenal Reserves (sounds riveting!) It was only available to handful of homes in close proximity to Alexandra Palace.
In 1938, international football and the FA Cup final were shown live for the first time, with the BBC providing live coverage of England v Scotland, and Huddersfield Town v Preston North End.
The first sporting event televised in the US took place in 1939, showing a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities, broadcast by NBC, with the first NFL game also broadcast that same year, when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Philadelphia Eagles. However, the necessary technology was not yet available for live, coast-to-coast broadcasts across the US, and it wasn't until September 29th, 1951, when a game between the University of Pittsburgh and Duke was broadcast across the entire country.
The 1950 World Cup in Brazil was responsible for a series of ‘firsts’. It was the first tournament since 1938 (due to World War II), it was the first time the World Cup was referred to as the Jules Rimet Trophy, it was the first in which England participated, and it was the first to have television cameras. However, given that the format was in its infancy, no one back in England was actually able to watch any of the games on television.
In 1954 the World Cup was broadcast live in the UK for the first time, and a year later ITV began broadcasting live matches from the newly-formed European Cup. The BBC also began broadcasting Soccer Special, which showcased matches from the old Division One, but it wouldn't be until 1964 when the BBC broadcast its flagship Match of the Day for the first time. The first match shown was Liverpool v Arsenal. In 1969 Match of the Day broadcast its first game in colour, between Liverpool v West Ham.
TV Sports Today
The World Cup Italia 90 is credited with changing not just football in England, but also the country itself, after a decade of dark times for English football during the 80's. Fans were dying in stadiums, hooliganism and racism were rife, clubs were banned from playing in European competitions and attendances had fallen. Yet after 1990 football would soon become a sport enjoyed again, and now also by many middle-class people.
As England unexpectedly progressed through the 1990 tournament in Italy, an increasingly gripped nation was glued to the TV, accompanied by Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma (the BBC's choice of theme music.) Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker became household names, and women started taking an interest. Stadiums became much safer and overnight the whole culture of football changed.
In 1992 Sky bought up the rights to Premier League games in a deal worth £304 million, and satellite dishes began appearing on houses up and down the country. In 1999 ITV acquired exclusive live rights to broadcast the Champions League in a deal worth £299 million. By 2009 BBC had acquired shared rights to broadcast live matches from the Championship and the Carling Cup. The UEFA Europa League was introduced and was broadcast by Five, ITV and ESPN. Setanta Sports defaulted on a payment for their 2009/2010 Premier League TV rights and lost their rights to ESPN (Setanta Sports would later go into administration).
In 2010 Sky Sports were the first to broadcast a live Premier League game in 3D. FIFA announced that 25 live games from the 2010 World Cup on TV would be made available for broadcast in 3D. In August 2015, BT Sport launched Europe's first Ultra HD/4K TV channel, and its first live broadcast was Arsenal v Chelsea in the Community Shield.
From next season, we enter the staggeringly ludicrous £5.136bn contract, after Sky Sports broke the bank to retain the lion’s share of UK television rights, sending shockwaves through the football world when it was first announced back in February last year. To put all that into some kind of perspective, Sky paid a mere £304m for the exclusive live rights to their first five seasons of the Premier League between 1992 and 1997.
Social Media Broadcasts
The Google-owned YouTube was once the only major online video service, so it made perfect sense that the company was also one of the first to experiment with live-streamed sports, in a deal with Major League Baseball in 2013, to livestream two games per day outside the US. The video site also hosted a monthly subscription service for the Ultimate Fighting Championship that same year. And last year, the Canadian Football League live streamed its playoff games on the site outside North America.
Overall, though, Google’s commitment to live sports has remained sporadic. The reason, of course, is money. “That is completely a business issue,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said at a media conference in 2013. “I can assure you that if you wrote a large enough check for any sports event you wished, you can livestream it globally to everyone.”
The first NFL game to be globally streamed live for free over the internet was on 25th October 2015, via Yahoo.
The Buffalo Bills v Jacksonville Jaguars game in London was available to anyone with a device and an internet connection on Yahoo. It boasted an audience of 15.2 million unique viewers, who watched a cumulative 460 million minutes of the match. It reportedly cost Yahoo a cool $20 million to air, but only attracted average viewership of about 2.4 million people globally. That’s more people than typically livestream the Super Bowl, but far off the television broadcast audience for a typical Sunday game.
More recently, Yahoo announced plans to stream an MLB game every day this season and up to four NHL games each week.
The world’s largest social network hasn’t signed a major deal with a sports league yet, but it’s only a matter of time. The company recently launched a sports-centric section of its site called Sports Stadium, and has increased its focus on live events. This new hub for sports scores, chat and livestreaming has become an obsession for the company. When the NFL said it would sell the streaming rights to Thursday night games, many thought Facebook would be a good fit, but Facebook reportedly withdrew a bid to carry the Thursday NFL games. This was apparently down to the way it would have had to handle commercials, and this didn’t work for the social media network.
After months of haggling, a winner was finally announced of this historic deal to broadcast Thursday night NFL games live across the web - Twitter, graduating from the second screen, to live-stream ten NFL Thursday Night Football games for free. This NFL deal could help Twitter measure a “total audience,” estimated to include 800 million people, and for the NFL, the agreement represents an attempt to reach fans who have cut their cable subscriptions and are more likely to stream online video.
“Twitter is where live events unfold and is the right partner for the NFL as we take the latest step in serving fans around the world live NFL football,” explained NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. “There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday night football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season. This agreement also provides additional reach for those brands advertising with our broadcast partners.”
The Future
In football, it’s a given that all the action and drama that takes place off the pitch makes each of those 90 minutes on the pitch even more vital. Therefore, social media and messaging platforms are perfectly positioned to capture the hearts and minds of the football-loving audience, whose passion for the game doesn’t fade at the final whistle. They need to be able to continue the conversation long after the match is over. The behaviour of a team or player on social media can directly influence a fan's perception of their team. It has become essential for sports organisations to engage fans and consumers on social media before, during and after the games, to own that moment.
The reach on social media is in many cases far exceeding the TV audience figures, which means rights holders can vastly improve the fan engagement by continually engaging and stimulating the hungry appetite of their audience, and that can be measured and valued as new commercial opportunities with sponsors. Brands involved through sponsorships and social media promotions benefit from increased brand affinity and loyalty.
Fans want to eat, sleep and drink their passion in lots of different ways, brought directly to them via their preferred screens. Watching the match in a pub on the big screen no longer provides enough satisfaction. A modern fan needs to have the immediacy of the experience delivered to them on the platform of their choice through Facebook Live, or react with fellow fans through messenger apps, or get the feeling of actually being there with Snapchat.
When properly addressed, the strength and direct revenue opportunities opening from social media platforms is limitless for the sports world. Baby steps are occurring. Sure, they have been occurring rather slowly, but this recent news with Twitter and NFL could now start to accelerate and gain the momentum of change.
Technology is advancing at an unstoppable speed, quickly enforcing the decades-old broadcast industry into oblivion. I haven't quite cut the cord yet. I tend to buy more HD movies on Sky, watch catch-up TV rather than when it is scheduled, and own an IPTV box for watching English channels on my TV in Spain. This clever little black box, hooked up via an ethernet cable to the router, and a HDMI cable to the TV, offers just about every channel you can think of, in near HD (let down only by the occasional internet dropout).
Live sports has always been the one area that essentially still relies on good old fashioned live broadcasting. I am a football fan myself (Hull City), and enjoy watching live sports at home and in Spain. But this final, best-reason-to-exist, for broadcasters may soon be over.
Throughout my lifetime, live sports content has always been delivered to viewers through a live central channel. But with increasing high-bandwidth data networks, mobile devices, smart TV's, etc. anything can now be a network. The traditional broadcast TV paradigm has been on vulnerable ground for some time, and the shockwave warning signals sent out from this Twitter deal is that the traditional broadcasters are nearing their end. The NFL probably knows it, even if the rest of the world doesn't quite yet. When that end will finally be, no one yet knows...
