Tempus may fugit but, in the sports world, there is increasing concern that time is dragging for younger audiences; they aren’t having enough fun and a tedium over the length of games is highlighting a preference for…highlights. Only highlights.
That’s a problem for leagues paying enormous television rights fees to broadcast live events.
At a recent two-day New York City conference for professional sports league CEOs, billionaire team owners and high-profile media moguls, NBA commissioner Adam Silver echoed some worried executives working with the National Football League by noting an estimated 70-percent drop in game viewership among the 18-to-34-year-old demographic.
“People,” Silver lamented, “are living on their phones.” And that leads to what Daniel Cohen, a vice president for the Octagon sports and entertainment agency, called the “double-edged sword” of leagues’ social-media deals.
“At what point,” Cohen asked at the conference, “does putting up all these highlights on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and your own websites cannibalize your audience? There has to be a shift back toward capping the abundance of highlights that are accessible there if you want to maintain exclusivity and a premium price on your rights.”
For years, sports leagues’ control-tower responsibilities have included struggling with spectators’ shorter attention spans. Baseball, especially, has brain-stormed rule changes in attempts to pick up the pace and generate excitement, to somehow present something closer to exploding car-chase scenes than Masterpiece Theatre. Given the trends, though, the prognosis is not particularly bright.
Consider a Penn State University course study that cited social medial and technology for reducing teenagers’ ability to stay focused on anything for more than eight seconds. A report by the National Center for Biotechnology Information came up with the same statistic, concluding that the average human’s attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to those eight seconds in 2013. One second less than that of a goldfish!
That kind of wandering concentration has been exacerbated in sports by the onset of legalized betting and the whole fantasy landscape. The result is making outlets such as the NFL’s Red Zone cable channel, which flits around the league to zero in exclusively on scoring chances, ideal for goldfish.
But by sticking to just game highlights, the Red Zone and similar fare are unmoored from the big picture, lacking context. Highlights are Cliff Notes to novels, Twitter posts to robust storytelling. Is that a smart way to cultivate the next generation of fans?
As long ago as 2013, Forbes magazine reported that the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars had considered displaying the Red Zone on their stadium video board during games, and ultimately created a “Fan Cave”—a 7,000-square-foot lounge atop one end zone with WiFi and 18 flat-screen televisions providing Red Zone access. That assured that paying customers could turn their attention away from the game in front of them to seek more stimulating action around the league. (Cheaper to just stay home and turn on the tube, no?)
Highlights—though spectacular and climactic—exist in a vacuum, robbing viewers of plot development, a setting, themes, subplots, dilemmas and other details that flesh out the larger tale. As such, highlights can’t help contributing to the proliferation of restless, inattentive souls.
And possibly goldfish.