Essay on The Industrial Benefits of Televised Sports

This does not mean, however, that viewers no longer watch sports on television. But they have ceased to watch the big marquee events in numbers as great as they once did.

Now cable channels and local independent stations have joined the networks as primary outlets for sports programming, and sports remains valuable and attractive to programmers for several distinct reasons.

Except for the big ticket events like the NCAA Basketball Championships, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the National Basketball Association (NBA) Championships and the major college football bowl games, televised sports generally produce smaller audiences than prime-time network programming.

Of course, for independents and cable channels sports contests may often draw their biggest viewership. But regardless of the size of the audience for a sports telecast, it is audience composition that is important this is the demographically attractive audience for advertisers who want to reach males, 18 to 49 years old.

Certain sports also bring with them even more narrowly defined audience segments. The products advertised during a bowling match, a game of golf or an auto race; make it immediately clear that a particular demographic group is being targeted.

And advertising rates for these events are usually well below those charged on more general-interest programming.

When the new technologies began to divide the television audience, huge rights fees to big sports leagues became a burden for the networks. But for cable channels, local broadcasters and even for certain events on the networks, sports are often cheaper to buy and air than much first-run programming.

This is why many regional sports networks such as the Boston Red Sox Baseball Network have developed. This is why team- and conference-centered ad hoc networks (groups of stations that come together in a network for specific programming like the Pac-10 Football Network or the Big East Game of the Week) have grown in number.

And this is why ballgames or boxing matches are programmed on cable channels such as HBO, WTBS, WGN, and TNT.

Sports are the only programming that has successfully attracted large audiences on a weekend day. This creation of regularized audience behavior enables the medium to maintain its role as a familiar aspect of “everyday life.”

Sports also link the medium into a system of cross-promotion. Newspapers, radio stations, even stations in competition with a channel airing the weekend’s big game all provide free advertising in the course of their usual sports coverage.

Ultimately, the reason sports are popular with broadcasters is that they are popular with viewers. Even the 1993 “low rated” World Series drew an average of fourteen and a half million households a game. The National Hockey League’s (NHL) tiny 0.8 rating per game translates into three quarters of a million homes.

And, as FOX Television’s 1994 acquisition of the pro football rights from CBS makes clear, the networks still see the ownership of the rights to major league sports as tantamount to being in the Big Time.

Owner Rupert Murdoch dismissed the $350 million loss for FOX Television in its first year of NFL broadcasts as “an investment” in altering audience perceptions of his low-rated fourth network.