Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
To coin a phrase, "He who pays the gold makes the rules".
Fans don't seem to realize, or at least most remain in denial, about the reality that sports have been sold to the networks and that butts in seats are increasingly irrelevant. It's a TV product first and foremost, in-person product is well down the list.
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I don't think that's true with major college football. You can spitball with the numbers from 100,000 Michigan fans 7-8 times a year, plus luxury boxes, plus seat licenses, plus what that experience does to generate donations from the major boosters.
But that's not necessarily affected by longer commercial breaks. For younger people, it was a push to have increased cell-tower coverage within the stadium. That was a big deal for a while. They're used to constant interruptions and have the attention spans of small woodland creatures, so they're OK if they're even inclined to go anyway.
It's really whether the football cart can continue to push the entire broadcast television paradigm. You hear speculation these days that if football leaves the broadcast networks, the entire television advertising market collapses. Already, you have these ubiquitous rerun networks going 24/7 on a handful of old products, the same 5-10 commercials running in almost every commercial break. It can't cost much to run those ads. But even those channels are disappearing in favor of the QVC model - real-time broadcast is rapidly shrinking as a viable commodity. The Decades channel tried higher quality and producing an independent content show on its own - they just failed and rebranded after losing a few more stations (it's now Catchy Comedy, no more drama shows).
At what point does the model simply break because rights cost too much to make up for with increased ads? The NFL realized they had passed the advertising saturation barrier more than a decade ago, but college keeps on going with lower ratings because there are several products to buy. Now, though, they're faced with consolidation because the Big Ten and the SEC have broken through, captured more of the market. There's talk of the Pac-12 going streaming-only. It feels like there's about to be major change and it's going to be difficult to work that out without having people who want a product pay for that product. In that case, the entire commercial interruption model will need adjustment.