Field of streams: sports viewing changes

This episode explores the evolving landscape of sports broadcasting, focusing on the shift from traditional cable to streaming platforms and its implications for both viewers and media companies.

1. Streaming Shift: A significant shift from cable to streaming platforms is reshaping how people watch sports, affecting traditional broadcasting models.
2. Economic Impact: The reliance of media companies on live sports for revenue is challenged by the migration to streaming, affecting cable subscriptions and advertising models.
3. Global Reach: Streaming has the potential to significantly expand the global audience for local sports leagues, altering traditional media rights revenue structures.
4. Fan Dynamics: Changes in fan engagement, with younger demographics showing different viewing habits, could impact long-term sports fandom.
5. Technological Evolution: The evolution of broadcasting technology from limited early broadcasts to widespread digital streaming illustrates the rapid change in media consumption.

1: Introduction to Sports Broadcasting

The episode begins with a historical overview of sports broadcasting, tracing its evolution from the 1936 Olympics to today's extensive digital streaming. The hosts set the stage for a discussion on the current trends and transformations. Jason Palmer: "Tonight's opening ceremony is the official start of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games."

2: The Shift to Streaming

This section delves into the details of how sports broadcasting is transitioning to streaming platforms, discussing the economic and audience engagement implications for traditional broadcasters. Tom Wainwright: "Sport is still the thing propping up a lot of their cable subscriptions."

3: Global Impact and Fan Engagement

Discussion focuses on the global impact of streaming and how it enables sports leagues to reach international audiences, changing the dynamics of fandom from teams to individual athletes. Tom Wainwright: "It's really striking how little watched some of these very successful leagues are outside of their home market."

• Explore New Platforms: Consider using various streaming services to access a broader range of sports content.
• Engage with Sports Digitally: Follow athletes and teams on social media to enhance your viewing experience with background stories and updates.
• Consider Economic Impacts: Be aware of potential price increases in streaming services as they acquire more sports content.
• Adapt Viewing Habits: Embrace the flexibility that streaming offers to watch sports at your convenience, possibly reducing dependence on live viewing.
• Support Diverse Sports: Streaming can offer exposure to less popular sports; supporting them can help increase their visibility and viability.

As the Olympics begin, more people than ever will be watching via streaming services. We examine the changing viewing habits transforming sport’s role in the broadcast business. The sentencing of Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, reveals the empty, performative nature of justice in Russia today (11:10). And the internet has dubbed Kamala Harris “brat”—and that is a kind of compliment (18:34).

People

Jason Palmer, Tom Wainwright

Companies

ESPN, Netflix

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Nickayla
Hey, it's Nickayla from side Hustle Pro. From a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankyforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world in Russia. Evan Gurshkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison on bogus spying charges. Our correspondent, a longtime friend of Evans, gives us a glimpse into the empty performance of justice in todays Russia and a little vocabulary lesson arising from Americas presidential race.

Kamala Harris has been dubbed brat, which is something of a compliment these days, one that comes with a color. Dont worry. Well explain.

First up, though, tonight's opening ceremony in Paris is the official start of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, appointment viewing for fans of sport and of pageantry, the world overdose. It wasnt always so. The 1936 Games in Berlin, which Adolf Hitler used as a global showcase for his repugnant politics, also showed off the newfangled technology of television. There comes Lovelace, running like a train. World record.

Back then, just one camera was capturing live footage, and only when the sun was out, the audience, 160,000 people within the limited range of the transmitter at the stadium. Compare that with today. Over the next two weeks, some 3 billion people will tune into the games, and not just on television. About a third of all the people watching the Paris Olympics this year are going to be watching it via streaming platforms. Tom Wainwright is the Economist's media editor.

Tom Wainwright
This is gonna have huge consequences for broadcasters. And it's not just changing the way we watch sport, it's changing the kinds of sport that we watch as well. And the conventional broadcasters really depend on that sport coverage, don't they? Yeah, they really do. It's extraordinary the extent to which the media really lives off sport.

In America. For example, the biggest media companies there spend between a fifth and a quarter of their annual content budgets on live sports rights. Last year, of the 100 most watched broadcasts in America, 93 of them were NFL games. Sport plays an interesting role in the media ecosystem as well, because in recent years, a lot of tv has moved over to streaming, and sport is more or less the one really big category of programming that hasn't done that yet. And for media companies, it's tricky, because sport is still the thing propping up a lot of their cable subscriptions, and cable still is responsible for a big chunk of their profits.

Nearly ten years ago, John Malone, who's a big media mogul, said that sport was the glue that holds the cable bundle together. And now, as that sport is starting to move to streaming, that glue is coming unstuck. But those broadcasters are chasing the streamers in their own way, right? They want to move sports over to streaming because that's where the new audiences are. It's where young people are.

Young people have more or less abandoned linear tv that's broadcasting cable, and they've gone to streaming. But at the same time, these companies still rely on cable for a lot of their day to day profits. And so if they move the sport off there too quickly, they risk losing that source of profits. And so they're trying, on the one hand, to entice people to sign up for streaming, but on the other hand, they don't yet want to take all the good stuff off of cable. It seems as though this year and next is going to be the time when really the biggest part of all that sports content moves over to streaming.

So ESPN, for example, which is the biggest sports cable network in the US, is launching a streaming platform next year. So the incentives for remaining on cable are diminishing and the amount of support moving over to streaming is increasing. We're seeing this also on some of the dedicated streaming platforms, like Netflix. Until pretty recently, it was fairly clear that sports rights, live sports rights, at least, weren't something that it was very interested in. But it seems to have changed its mind.

And I think the key thing here is that a couple of years ago, it introduced an advertising tier on its platform, and what advertisers really want is a big audience and ideally, a simultaneous audience. And the easiest way to get a big audience over to your ad tier in one go is sports. And so Netflix has, for the first time, been buying live sports rights. It's doing a few kind of slightly silly ones. Initially, it's doing a live hot dog eating contest in September, for example.

But in December, it's going to show its first live NFL game. And this is a big moment. Most people think that this will not be the last time that Netflix buys the rights to big live sports. And having an, an NFL game broadcast to 270 million subscribers in 190 plus countries is a big change for the sports business. Does this not point to a dynamic where instead of having some sort of cable bundle, where you get all your sports, you just have a streaming bundle where you get your sports.

Jason Palmer
Why isn't that the model here? Well, that could be the way that we're heading. And it's interesting, I think all this sport moving to streaming, in some ways it's good for sports fans, but for people who aren't that interested in sport, this is possibly a bit of a worrying development, because for a long time, non sports fans had a bad deal in America because they had to buy a lot of very expensive sports content through their cable package. Often there wasn't really very much choice about that, and streaming in recent years have offered them a way out of that. You can pay $15 or whatever it is for a basic Netflix account, which is cheap, partly because it has no sport.

Tom Wainwright
As more sport moves over to those services, though, what's likely is that we'll see those services increase their prices in order to pay for all that stuff. And if you're someone who's into movies and not into the NFL, that's probably not music to your ears. And I suppose from the perspective of the sports leagues, this is good news in a general sense, because it's not just domestic cable audiences, it's the whole world. That's exactly right. It's really striking how little watched some of these very successful leagues are outside of their home market.

So if you look at the NFL, for example, probably the best example of this hugely successful at home. But 98% of the media rights revenue that the NFL made last year was in its domestic market. Only 2% in the whole world outside the United States. And the same is true of most of the big american leaders. Baseball is similar, NHL is similar, basketball is a little bit more international, but still very, very domestic based.

And it's not just an american thing. I mean, the indian premier league makes something like 96% of its revenue at home.

Most european football leagues are very domestically focused. And so to them, the idea of having a streaming service, which is distributed in 200 odd countries, is extremely appealing. And I suppose makes sense in the context of something we've talked about on the show before, which is that young people in particular seem to be falling out of love with sport. They do and they don't. It's a funny one.

Young people are falling out of love with sport by some measures. So the key one is that they watch less live sport than older people do and less than older people did at that age. But by other measures, they're at least as interested, if not more interested. So they watch highlights, they follow sports stars on social media, they read about sport, they listen to sports podcasts, they place lots of bets on sport, which in the states recently has become legal. I spoke to more than one person who said that the issue at the moment in sports is that a lot of people are following sports.

Just not that many people are watching sports from the point of view of companies that have long made most of their money by selling the rights to these live games or selling advertising against them. It's a bit of a conundrum. But is there strong evidence that if everything becomes available to everyone, that, for instance, Indians will be interested in NFL and Americans will be interested in indian cricket? Well, it remains to be seen, and I think it's going to take time for these things to take off. But one reason for thinking that that kind of transmission of sports from one country to another might go more quickly than in the past is that another thing that is different about young fans is that they follow, not teams so much as individuals.

And a big reason why sport hasn't really travelled very well in the past is this team based followership. If you're someone who follows sport through your local team, then by definition you're not likely to take an interest in a sport from another country because you don't have a local team there. But the more that young fans follow individuals, the easier it is for them to get into teams that they don't follow and whole sports that they haven't watched before. So we see examples of this, like, say, Lionel Messi attracting people to watching into Miami and Major League Soccer, even if they're not from Miami. I would like to introduce to you.

Jason Palmer
Your number ten inter Miami's number ten, America's number ten, the best number ten in the world. Lionel Messi. We see people watching women's basketball not because they played basketball before, but because they're interested in Caitlin Clark, who's a big star of the moment. And so this kind of followership of individuals rather than teams is helping to decouple fandom from geography. And I think that will help sports to spread further around the world than they have in the past.

And taking all of this together, it stands to reason then that at the next Olympics, whether it's teams, nations, individuals, a majority of people are going to be streaming it, not sitting down to watch it on the tv. Yeah, absolutely. But I think the worry for some of these sports broadcasters and sports organizers is that fewer people will be watching the actual live games themselves. If current trends are anything to go by, we'll probably see lots of following of these events on social media, lots of people keeping up with what their favourite stars are doing. But the number of people actually sitting down to watch hours of live Olympics coverage, or whatever it might be, that's the thing that people have got their eyes on.

Tom Wainwright
And so the puzzle facing sports broadcasters and sports organizations is how to turn those young sports followers into real sports fans. Tom, thanks very much for your time. Thank you.

Jason Palmer
Over the summer, the Economist is launching a new series of its schools briefs, simple guides to some of the most important stories of the day. This time around were focusing on artificial intelligence, from its origin story through to its existing and future capabilities. Here on the intelligence we want to hear your questions about AI. Do you have particular worries or hopes for its use? Will it steal your job or allow you to retire early?

Maybe you want to know what it means for journalism, including ours? Ask and you shall receive. As our correspondents field your questions, just send them to podcastseconomist.com dot.

Nickayla
Hey, it's Nikala from side Hustle Pro. From a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankyforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Jason Palmer
After more than a year in pretrial detention in Russia, Evan Gurshkovich was convicted of espionage last week and sentenced to 16 years in prison. The Wall Street Journal reporter is the first american journalist to be arrested on such charges since the Cold War. It would now seem that Mister Gurshevichs fate is entwined with that of others. A prisoner swap is in the offing Vladimir Putin said in February that a dialogue was already underway, something that America's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, hinted at on the day of the sentencing. Any effort to bring any american home is going to be part of a process of back and forth discussion, potentially of negotiation.

But that is not to say that Mister Gurshkovich's ordeal will necessarily be over anytime soon. Evan's a friend of mine. He's a damn fine journalist, and I've known him ever since he came to Moscow. The Economist's Ukraine and Russia correspondent Oliver Carroll has been following the case closely. And I remember how chuffed he was when he got a role as staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and there he was producing some of the best coverage of the war.

Oliver Carroll
So you can imagine sort of my own personal feelings when I got a phone call from a contact early in the morning, asking if I knew where Evan was. And as we know now, on the 29 March, 2023, the day before I got that phone call, Evan had been snatched from a restaurant in Ykaterinburg, where he'd been reporting with a sweater pulled over his head by unknown people. And over the next day, when we were trying to find out what had happened to him, we realized it was very serious. And then finally, the Kremlin admitted it was one of them who'd snatched him from the restaurant. And since that, we've had a year of pretrial detention, culminating in this Alice in Wonderland sham trial, which has been held behind closed doors, where there was only ever going to be one verdict.

Jason Palmer
And what is it that Mister Gurshkovich was doing, and what is it he's accused of doing? I think the word accusation in a russian trial is perhaps charitable. There's very little in the way of process or any kind of thing resembling justice. 99.85% of cases which reach a judge end up in a guilty verdict. And this, the shammiest of all sham trials, a trial which was supposedly focused on espionage and national security.

Oliver Carroll
There was only ever going to be one verdict. So the Kremlin's men say that he was collecting some kind of secret information. They don't say what it was from the Ural wagon Sawod, which is a huge tank factory near Yichaterimburg, where he was arrested. Now, it's an absurd accusation for a number of reasons, but let me just give you a couple. First, he was accredited by the Ministry of Foreign affairs to work as a journalist in Russia.

He'd been vetted and cleared by the russian security services. And the second thing is that Evan knew he was being followed in his work. We all knew we were being followed. So, sure Evan was doing journalistic work. He was reporting on the war.

He was reporting on the war economy, which I suppose, by its very nature is dangerous. But he was absolutely sure he was doing nothing illegal. The overarching nature of laws in Russia, certainly those which were passed a year before the war and those which were passed in the first few months of war, do make almost any reasonable journalistic activity potentially fall into the realms of being interpreted as illegal. They argued that he was a secret CIA operative. Again, I can't state enough that that's just absurd, but from my sense, from the conversations I had with him before he went to Yucata Rinburg, he seemed to be being set up by dodgy local contacts.

But again, you know, the allegations of espionage really are absurd. And there is this suggestion now he's been sentenced, that he may be involved in some way in some kind of prisoner swap. What's your take on that? The Russians have made little secret of the fact theyre far less interested in Evan, as they are a range of spies, saboteurs, and scoundrels being held in western prisons almost from the get go. Theyve talked about a man called Vadim Krasykov, you might remember, as an assassin who killed a chechen rebel commander in central Berlin in 2019.

And there have been schemes reported before the death in February of this year of Alexey Navalny, the russian opposition leader, which would have seen Mister Krasikov returned in a wider swap involving presumably Evan Navalin and Paul Whelan, who was an american marine arrested and jailed in 2018. There's been a few things which have got in the way of that potential exchange, not least the seriousness of the crime and the fact Mister Krasikov is being held not by the US, but Germany. But it might be that the Russia and the US are returning to a deal. The good news is that Evans verdict was reportedly brought forward on the assistance of his own lawyers. And this might emphasize, might fear, the previous pattern.

Russia has rushed through verdicts just before similar exchanges in the past. This is to sort of present this image of justice being played out, however absurd it is. So the Russians know the Americans are ready to do exchanges, even such a lopsided one as this, because the Americans have public opinion they need to take into account. It's really interesting, the back channels that this represents. How does that work when America and Russia are making these kinds of negotiations behind the scenes, given the geopolitical situation that surrounds it all?

Well, I suppose in some way the fact that the hostage taking continue is probably an indication that the back channels are still very much there, at least in some working order. There are certainly still links. These are mostly on the military and security levels. The political links are still very, very limited. But we do know that Bill Burns, for example, the CIA chief and a former ambassador in Moscow, has traveled to Russia at key moments in the last two and a half years of war.

Sergei Naryshkin, his counterpart as the head of Russia's foreign intelligence, has also been in the US. And we also know from the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who's actually confirmed the level of security contact that these particular talks about exchanges are being conducted. So what to look out for? What do you expect? And over what kind of timescale.

There are certainly hints that an exchange might be in the offing, and I think the major evidence of that is the defense request to bring the sentencing forward and also the conviction of another American being held in Russia. There are some reasons why it might make political sense for the Democrats in election season to show that they can bring their people home, but I think that's also perhaps a reason why I fear it might well be delayed till after the elections. Moscow does have its guys in these forthcoming Us elections, and they aren't running on team blue. Obviously, from my point of view. I'm hoping that Evan will come back very soon.

It couldn't be a day too soon. Oliver, thanks very much for your time. Thank you.

Nickayla
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. This is the beginning of a viral clash clip of Kamala Harris Holly Berman. Is a news editor at the economist and is so brat I can't even. It first started circulating after she spoke at a White House event last year, but resurfaced in the days after Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance. This video, though, has a twist.

Unidentified
You start to hear the song Von Dutch by a british pop star called Charlie XCX Rev in the background. I'm just living that love a lime greenhouse filter with the word brat, which is the COVID art, and the name of her new album starts to flash across the screen. Cute clips of Harris dancing, giving her signature belly laugh, talking about Venn diagrams, all of that kind of stuff.

The video was uploaded to x by Ryan Long, who's a college student in Delaware. 4 million views, but that's not counting millions more from reshares and copycat remixes that have since spawned all across social media. On the day that Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Charlie Xex actually gave Kamala Harris her endorsement on X in a post that simply read, Kamala is brat. The post has hundreds of thousands of likes and over 50 million views, and that is high praise. That's because Charlie Aksiex's songs, like the one you're hearing now, 365, and the color line green, have decorated the summer of the world's coolest it girls for weeks.

But what does it actually mean to be brat? Charlie Axie X has defined the essence of Bratt on her social media. You're just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and like, does like dumb things. But like, it's brat. You're brat that's brat.

So none of this screams White House. Exactly, but Harris team is leaning into it. Her campaign has reshared Charlie xx's post and Kamala versions of the brat branding on the campaign's social media that has puzzled some pundits in the process. A panel on CNN recently gathered to discuss brat and what it means. So it's the idea that we're all.

Oliver Carroll
Kind of brat and Vice President Harris is brat. I don't, well, I don't know if. Two of us, right, but this moment did not just fall out of a coconut tree. The ironic organic collision of these two Internet cultures is exactly why it works. So brat album spoofs were across social media long before they reigned over Kamala HQ, and Harris predisposition to becoming a meme is a trait that Ryan Long, who I spoke to, thinks captures something actually quite similar to Donald Trump.

Unidentified
Online. You see him making riffs, making jokes, getting crowds excited, and I think Kamala Harris does the same type of thing. That is also an opportunity that Biden's team of meme manufacturers could have only dreamed of. Well, what we really need is a feminome. A what?

Jason Palmer
A femininity. Over on TikTok, the excitement is palpable. There's lots more edits of Kamala Harris all over there. Another one that is soundtracked to a song called feminom no. Which you're hearing now by a pop star called Chapel Roan has around 7 million views.

Oliver Carroll
Did you hear me play the fucking piece? And if you take a look at the comments, you can actually get a bit of a sense of how people are reacting to this moment. One commenter hopes to meme her into the presidency. Another one is calling for a kamala nominon. A similar edit was shared to Harris campaign TikTok, and it has over 40 million views so far.

Unidentified
Whether she can turn vibes into votes is one thing, but another is certain. The TikTok election just became a lot more interesting.

Jason Palmer
A look at the economists poll tracker shows Kamala Harris swiftly catching up with Donald Trump. But voters actually know precious little about her. Who is she? What does she actually believe? And how persuasive will voters find her pitch as the election, a smidgen over a hundred days from now, draws closer?

Of course, were on it. My colleagues over on checks and balance, our subscriber only show on american politics, have dug into her past and her past run at the presidency to make some informed guesses about what lies ahead. Checks and balance is out later today and every Friday.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin, and our sound engineer is will rowe. With support this week from Johnny Allen. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Lamyuk, and our senior creative producer is William Warren.

Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane. With extra production help this week from Elna Schutz. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence.

Nickayla
Hey, it's Nickayla from side hustle Pro from a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America NA Copyright 2024.