As I say, technically there be no problem. But it'd be awful from a fan's perspective.
If you're watching a game live, then you really want it "live". Not at 30 seconds - 4 minutes' delay. How would that work with social media? It's one thing watching at event at 9pm in a "Today at the Olympics" highlights package. You know that if you want to avoid the ice skating result, you just should avoid the internet/text messages/electronic billboards with news etc. But if you're sitting on your sofa watching the game and someone listening to it on the radio, or in the ground Tweets a touchdown a couple of minutes before you see it, that might just get infuriating. Of course, if you stream your sports via the internet, something like that may be your reality today. But you know why. And you know that if you watched via an over-the-air broadcast, you'd only be looking at fractions of a second delay. There are delays built into different broadcast mechanisms anyway. Depending on the transmission stream, satellite delivered video tends to take longer to arrive than other forms. Then there are the various levels on encoding and decoding going on by cable boxes and at the local distributors' ends. I know from experience at the last World Cup that one office had TVs showing a game via two different feeds at either end of the room. It quickly got very annoying for one group of workers hear the other group cheer at events 10-15 seconds before they saw it! If I listen to a UK football match on the radio in my kitchen where there is no TV, I know that if I hear a goal described on the radio (a digital radio broadcast too), I have time to step into my living room to see the goal on my TV which gets its picture via satellite. Probably a 20 second delay altogether. The radio broadcast chain is faster in this instance. I'm not naive enough to not realise that sports bodies are part of a commercial industry who's biggest concern is the massive broadcasting contracts they sign with TV broadcasters. But the appeal of sport to viewers is built around the nature of the way the game is played. And if a broadcaster can't find a financial model to commercialise their coverage without impacting on the game's timing, then I'm not sure I want to watch. Adding breaks to games just to fit in TV spots can disrupt it from a fan's perspective. Football remains the most popular sport in the world, and TV companies across the globe have realised that they just have to build commercial opportunities around two uninterrupted 45 minute periods. You might sponsor the scorebox as I know MLS does. You might run a solid 15 minute commercial block at half-time as many European stations do. Or you might just use the scarcity of those premium spots just pre and post the game to massively drive up prices as tends to happen in the UK (Half-time spots in the England v Italy game in Brazil this summer are already at record levels. And this is for a game that won't kick off until 11pm local time in the UK - midnight in Italy). Force a break in play to accommodate a 30 second spot, and you'd disrupt the very nature of what makes the game as popular and as exciting as it is. Of course some sports are more start stop in nature - from tennis to baseball and cricket. There are natural breaks. And the same is true to an extent with NFL. Although I'd note that its near neighbour, rugby, is broadcast continuously, without - it's fair to say - whole teams of players being replaced when possession changes. But maybe someobody will try artificially squeezing extra adverts in, in this way. I won't be watching those broadcasts though. Adam On 21 Feb 2014 21:24, "Joe Hass" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote: > >> My father - who lived in NY in the 60s - claims that the first time US TV >> tried football (soccer), they had officials hold up throw ins and corners >> to squeeze a thirty second spot in. >> >> In answer to the original query, I'm certain that there ate no technical >> difficulties, but the broadcaster would be hammered for doing it. Are there >> really not enough spots already through the games for as much inventory as >> NBC can sell to be 'got away?' >> > > Fair question. You're not "adding" spots: rather, you'd move that time > into the game action. Given how intermissions are frequently filled on the > local level (and on the national level if it involves Mike Millbury), I'd > actually not mind having the intermission time "reduced" from a TV > perspective. I'd assume that advertisers would pay more for in-game spots > than intermission spots. > > To be clear, the idea is that the time that you're behind would be made up > at the intermission, not lagging throughout the game. So for football, if > you inserted two 150-second breaks every approximately 15 minutes, then > you'd join halftime five minutes in so the kickoff for the second half is > live (with the presumption that matches that go to extra time would not > have breaks in extra time, just like they do here for playoff OTs in > hockey.) > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... 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