Silly Little Country

Sports on Time Delay

When I was young I was an enormous fan of a number of sports, and this was not easy. For example, even during Wimbledon in the 1960s one could not be sure that local newspapers would provide full results of the previous day's play. The information drought could be profound. The idea that one of the local radio or TV stations would keep you up to date was laughable.
And now I am utterly spoiled. I can get Wimbledon scores live as the sport happens, and this is true for all sports I know that I care about watching. The Internet drains tape-delay of any suspense there might once have been. (And yes I know I can try to hide from information but that is not me.)
Back then if a TV station had said it would show the key matches several hours, or even a day, later, that could have seemed a great bargain - after all, I was likely to have had no idea how the match came out.
As communication technology has improved, different broadcasters make different choices about the value of immediacy in sports. For example, in the last couple of World Cups of football, in the cable TV universe in Canada, viewers have had, for a modest price, been able to tune into any match they wanted live. This has not been so true in the US, where major networks sometimes have exclusive rights and do not expect their audience to care about live coverage. Worse, they often don't seem to care about sports coverage itself, but rather some human interest nonsense around the sport.
So this weekend what is happening on television in Canada for the Ryder Cup? The Ryder Cupis a team golf event, pitting a US team against a European team, and it produces a fair bit of intensity and is entertaining, as the balance between the groups is pretty good. Canada may not be directly involved but we fans spend the year able to watch both tours.
And so what do we get this weekend? It is utterly uninteresting for the first couple of days - what is showing on Candian TV is the US coverage, which is tape-delayed, hours behind reality, where any real fan already knows via the Internet what has happened. It seems amazing to me advertisers can believe they can get value in a situation like this.
It seems from the scheduling that Sunday's competition may be shown live, but it is not clear to me yet.
But I do know with certainty that if it is also tape-delayed, I won't really be watching. I will have had all the results on the Internet and it hardly seem worth the trouble when there is surely something else with more suspense.
These are some issues here of sports economics and I would love to hear from those who have thought about these issues more than I have. But I know what I think and my eyes will not be glued to any tape delays ever again in my life.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:22 PM