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Do you remember where you were when you first heard newspapers were on the snide? I was in grad school working on a Newspaper Readership Institute Project with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Our task — figure out how to get 18-34 year olds to read the newspaper more often. Of course, now I can safely say that was the wrong way to look at the issue. In fact, that “we have to get people to read a newspaper” mentality is one of the reasons newspapers are in so much trouble today, IMO. The industry focused too much on the medium instead of how people wanted to receive its product — the news, not the paper.
Fast forward to today and I am beginning to wonder if the big TV networks aren’t having a similar conversation. If not, they should be. I’ve heard several friends like Arik Hanson mention giving up their cable for Internet TV recently. And I know many folks like Shelly Kramer and Lauren Fernandez have embraced Apple TV and Hulu.
This issue surfaced again yesterday in Kansas City, when the local CBS affiliate, KCTV-5, lost the feed for the Kansas/Missouri Border War game with three minutes left, setting of a rash of Facebook and Twitter tirades and phone calls berating the station for a mistake it blamed on sunspots and satellite dishes.
Hear is what struck me as interesting. KCTV-5 actually handled the whole situation as well as could be expected. They had an apology up on the station’s website quickly and shared it via its Facebook and Twitter channels. Station reps even worked with CBS to rebroadcast the second half in its entirety last night after the local news. But none of that changed the fact that thousands of fans missed the end of the game when it happened. And my first thought was, that wouldn’t have happened on the Internet.
Late last year, ESPN launched ESPN3.com, the best, free option I’ve seen to watch a variety of live-streaming sporting events. Major League Baseball has had an mlb.com package (mlb.tv) for a few years that you can purchase and watch games streamed online as well. And there may be other solutions out there I’m not aware of. It seems like these steps could be mirrors of the initial newspaper websites and non-affiliated blogs that began taking the news off of the paper and onto the Web more than 10 years ago.
The Topeka-area CBS affiliate was able to show its viewers the finish of the KU/MU game yesterday because one of the producers figured out the feed fiasco and switched it back. The Kansas City viewers weren’t so lucky. But even if the KCTV-5 producers had been able to get the game back on here, it doesn’t change the fact that as viewers, we have very little control over what games are shown on our local stations and when the national networks choose to cut away from them. And I don’t see a society of fans who are used to choosing our experience online being long for having it chosen for us on TV. Do you?
Until now, I haven’t given the idea of Internet TV much thought because I can’t fathom missing the live sporting events I watch each week. But after what I’ve seen with ESPN3.com this year, I’m pretty confident more options for watching live sports online will be coming soon. If I’m CBS, that scares me a bit, especially after yesterday’s Border War botch. And I’m definitely having a conversation in the near future about providing viewers access to all of the available feeds for a minimal or nonexistent fee so they have more control over their personal viewing experience.
Because if I’m CBS, I don’t want to end up like the newspaper industry is today — trying to play catch up since they didn’t ID the change in readers’ expectations until it was too late.
- Are you already watching Internet TV?
- Do you see a day coming where you cancel your cable and go 100 percent online?
- Would you watch live sporting events online versus on TV if you had more control over what you watch?
Unless your Internet connection goes down; of course, in the old days, if your cable went out you could always switch to the antenna, but nowadays you can't even do that.
So you're screwed both ways.
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Likejspepper Good point, Jeremy. Guess that is like if your sattellite feed goes out or a bird lands on your dish :). There could definitely be issues with your Internet connection. I have had problems with espn3.com when our wireless doesn't stream fast enough.
That said, I think people want to choose what they watch more than ever now and feel they should be able to based on tools the cable companies have created (e.g. DVR). If cable Internet continues to become faster and more reliable, then major network channels better figure out a way to provide viewers with the choices they expect or risk losing them, IMO. I'm guessing at some point in the late 1990s, early 2000s some people said news websites and blogs would only have a minimal impact on newspapers. Whoops.
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LikeJGoldsborough It's the time-shift plus place-shift equation. I'm just playing devil's advocate and I think the networks semi-acknowledge the issue (although a bit of the head-in-sand issue).
But as your Border War game shows, sports is only place (or space) shifted, not time shifted. It's why the Super Bowl is still must-see TV and a hot ad buy. Sports is one of the few things that people watch when it's live. That and a few hot shows.
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