I guess ESPN has experience of this because sport is the one area where it's necessary, and the wealth of rights that they own mean that they've regularly got more sport than they can show., I know NBC Sport has the English Premier League, including the 5-6 Saturday 3pm GMT (10am EST) games, and I thought that you could choose which game to watch. But perhaps that's only via an app.
I've noticed that the first time a network has something really popular that people want to stream, the stream goes down, or the quality is not very good. There are apologies etc. Then someone else buys another property and they get the same thing. ESPN bought the former MLB streaming tech subsidiary BAMTech just because they were doing a good job. Streaming at scale is hard, but it'll get better. I admit that I just can't see another post-2032 NBC-type deal happening unless it makes some kind of sense for a broadcaster like NBC to take a loss. For better or worse, I can see sports more and more retailing their own content direct to consumer and offering streams in place of broadcast channels. That won't be right for all sports, but at some point the declining audiences plus increasing rights costs equation just won't make sense. I'm not sure that the tech companies will be the ones to step in either. Recently the domestic English Premier League rights for the three seasons 2019-2022 were auctioned off, and the rights fees went down (2 packages are still in play, but there's no way they'll make up the shortfall). The EPL really hoped an Amazon or Facebook would move in to bid. Facebook did look at the Indian Premier League cricket rights and made a $500m offer which was outbid by Murdoch's Star TV in Asia. And Amazon has bought ATP tennis rights in the UK from next season, as well as US Open rights for this season. But there are big issues with what it really gives the tech companies that they don't have already. Plus they really want global rights and for most sports it has hitherto made better sense selling them on a territory by territory basis. Whatever the future platforms, this is how I would expect to navigate, say, the 2024 Olympics on my TV. I'd see a main network feed, and on a button press, would get an overlayed graphic showing me another set of options. Do I want to watch judo, athletics, archery, mountain biking, or whatever. I just navigate graphically around the screen with little picture in picture video previews showing me what was happening. I don't expect to have to channel surf to CNBC to watch the diving or whatever... Adam On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 4:25 PM, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was wondering about this, since this is what ESPN seems to do (or at > least I noticed them doing it when I had DirectTV) - creating new channels, > mostly to deal with blackout situations. And yet, NBC seems to prefer to > preempt programming on regular cable channels to crating new ones (for the > most part, with exceptions noted in last Summer Games). That makes me think > that either there are some limitations, or it is not as profitable, or > maybe they find viewership is higher on familiar channels (which I guess is > a variation on the profitability explanation). > > As noted this is not an immediate issue. But it seems clear that offering > multiple Olympic channels, in addition to real-time and on demand online > acccess to every event, is now the state of the art in televising the > Olympics, and anyone thinking about bidding for the rights in the future is > going to have to figure out a way to do this. > > Also - as noted elsewhere by me and others, CBS All Access SUCKS. Partly I > just think that should be repeated at least once a week someplace on the > internet, but also worth noting that would have to be significantly > improved if it was a primary way for CBS to offer Olympic content. > > On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 7:26 AM 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV < > tvornottv@googlegroups.com> wrote: > >> >> Adam Bowie, to David Bruggeman: >> >>> In an age where distribution is digital, is it not possible to just >>> "pop-up" temporary channels for the duration of the Games? I realise that >>> the broadcaster would need to organise carriage agreements with just about >>> every major cable and satellite platform, but there really shouldn't be >>> capacity issues in this day and age. And for something like the Olympics, >>> would you want to be the carrier that doesn't offer viewers everything? >>> >>> >>> Like I noted elsewhere, NBC did just that in the Rio de Janeiro Games >> with basketball and soccer (football) channels, so it's doable. >> >> The only question would be whether and which channels would be available >> to all customers of a provider, or require a higher-than-basic level of >> service, which was what turned out widely with the Rio additions. >> >> >> B >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "TVorNotTV" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > -- > Sent from Gmail Mobile > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. 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