Major League Baseball’s playoffs is in full swing, with the nine Wild Card games seeing a 25% increase in viewership from 2023.
Fans of America’s pastime have more options than ever to watch the game, from conventional broadcasts on ESPN, FS1, and TBS to streaming services such as MLB TV, Fubo, and YouTube.
These and other direct-to-consumer alternatives are displacing linear TV viewership in major US sports, sometimes at the cost of regional sports networks. PWC predicts that by 2025, 90 million consumers will be streaming at least one game each month. However, for those with large appetites, purchasing the all-you-can-eat buffet à la carte might cost more than $1,000 each year.
Even diehards have their own pricing thresholds, and streaming services may be reaching their limit. To justify charging more, media businesses must consider upgrading the customer experience–not just because it is the ethical thing to do, but also because it opens up new options.
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For more than a decade, live sports were the last barrier preventing Americans from cutting the cable TV cord. However, with streaming providers ranging from Amazon to Peacock outbidding conventional broadcasters, sports fans, especially older ones, are being compelled to subscribe to apps and subscriptions that result in poor watching experiences while continuing to pay exorbitant cable rates.
Viewers commonly cite log-in weariness, the immersion-killing habit of switching between sites that need various usernames and passwords, and two-step verifications, which all take longer to traverse than genuine commercial breaks. The situation is not only harmful to users, but it also serves as a reminder of the bait and switch tactics used by streaming providers.
Remember that the initial value proposition of subscription models such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video was that viewers could escape advertisements for a charge. While younger, more budget-conscious customers may endure advertisements, Gen X and older millennials are used to being able to dodge them during conventional sports broadcasts by changing channels.
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Streaming systems such as Apple TV+ and YouTube trap consumers into an environment from which they cannot easily navigate. This is especially frustrating when numerous games are running at the same time, causing fans to miss action while they switch between platforms. Many just remain put—the taught helplessness of “platform captivity.” Such captive audiences offer value to marketers and raise income for streamers at the cost of consumers, who are becoming aware that they must pay ever-increasing fees for a subpar sports experience. While platform imprisonment fosters ad antagonism, it also creates an opportunity.
Research indicates that when advertisements are immersive and additive, audience animosity reduces. Individualized advertisements related to athletic events that include users’ social media, location, and hobbies may convert captive audiences into fascinated watchers.
The power of sports lies in their liveliness and mutual absorption. Latency lag degrades both. Thankfully, whirling pinwheels and frozen displays are becoming less common, but the variation of streaming platform speeds introduces a new challenge for viewers wanting to remotely share the watching experience—the social spoiler.
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Consider yourself in a group conversation, as I was last weekend, watching the Phillies-Mets NLDS with pals. With two on and one out, your team needs a double play to get out of the inning. As the pitcher is set, your phone begins to blow up, and you know the good news before it appears on your screen. The remedy, as one buddy pointed out, is to silence communications during plays, although this involves more effort and destroys the immersion of a shared watching experience.
While social spoilers may seem to be the cost of doing business for streaming platforms in direct competition with one another, there is a more real benefit for media businesses who find out how to get everyone on the same page. According to Andrew Billings, director of the University of Alabama’s Sports Communication Program, “the drive for zero latency [is] much more of a mandate than a desire, particularly in the sports and gaming spaces in which people seek to react to the same content in the same manner with the same equality of success, whatever the demand might be.”
Streaming sports systems with zero latency will be able to incorporate fantasy and betting apps into user interfaces, possibly resulting in a better and more profitable user experience.
Are we becoming too personal?
These streaming developments open up possibilities for creating a more immersive, specifically tailored sports environment. However, it is not without existential peril.
In an era of atomized media and ever-fragmented interests, sports remain one of the few community activities that consistently draws large crowds. While the nichification of streaming, social media, betting, and fantasy sports has immense promise, hyper-individualization may jeopardize the shared comradery of viewing the same game with others in the imagined community of fans.
Sure, fantasy sports allows anyone to be a championship general manager, betting allows anyone to be a sharp prognosticator, and artificial intelligence allows anyone to be an expert analyst, but we should consider whether such advancements are leading us to a Bowling Alone 3.0 scenario: will we still be fans of teams or just fans of ourselves?
The future of sports viewership will need streaming systems that can strike a balance between user interaction and real-time immersion, while retaining the communal experience that has made sports such a prized cultural asset.
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