Streaming live sports making presence felt in a big way
AppleTV+ has a streaming MLB package on Friday nights for the 2022 season. Credit: AppleTV+
Everything changes, and nothing changes.
Have you listened to a baseball game this season on an over-the-air radio station? Many of your fellow baseball fans did the same . . . in 1922.
“No media ever disappears,” said Noah Garden, chief revenue officer for Major League Baseball. “Radio didn’t die when TV came, and TV’s not going to die when streaming comes.”
That was Garden’s way of cautioning against getting too carried away with the “streaming revolution” narrative, at least for now.
At the same time, he acknowledged the obvious, and MLB’s place in it: We are in a rapidly evolving transition from the cable television bundle that has carried the sports business for decades into a new world of live streaming.
"Peyton’s Places," an original series streaming on ESPN+, did a screening at Canton Palace Theater in Ohio on Aug. 2, 2019. Credit: ESPN Images/David Dermer
Everyone is involved, from early adopters such as UFC to the NHL’s new ESPN+-centric regular-season deal and, coming to a screen near you this fall: Prime Video’s newly exclusive “Thursday Night Football” schedule.
But for many New York-area sports fans – especially those of a certain age – the reality hit home with the 2022 baseball season.
It has brought Mets and Yankees games that are national exclusives for Apple TV+ and Peacock, and Yankees games that are local exclusives for Amazon’s Prime Video.
An Apple TV+ logo during a player interview after a game between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Angels at Angel Stadium on April 8, 2022. Credit: Getty Images/Ronald Martinez
This has led to a variety of complaints, notably about having to figure out where to find a given game and having to subscribe to multiple services in addition to cable TV to see every game.
There are more mundane annoyances, too, such as non-traditional announcers (aimed at appealing to younger viewers) and the clunky logistics of channel flipping between a game on a streaming service and a game on YES or SNY. (Technical folks are working on that.)
For leagues and teams, some of this is about added revenue, of course. But much of it is about finding potential customers where they are – and that increasingly is not on pay TV as we have known it.
“This is all about reach,” Garden said. “It's important for us to go where our fans are and make it the easiest possible way for them to find and consume games. We still think there will be a tremendous amount of people, the vast majority, that are going to consume it the way they've always consumed it: in a linear fashion.
“Then you've got a younger generation of fans, of cord-cutters or most importantly, probably cord-nevers, that want to consume content generally in a different way. You have to service both of those types of fans to be successful in the future.”
Said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, “We do feel that streaming is the most viable alternative we have to improve our reach . . . People always say, ‘Oh, it's about money. It's about money. It's about money.’ The fact of the matter is, our single biggest priority right now is reach to our fans from a broad perspective.”
NHL executive vice president David Proper said, “We see digital as one of the major futures in the way sports is consumed, as does everybody, really, in this business. So we felt like keeping our distance, a hard line, and saying we’re not willing to go into that space in a meaningful way was simply putting off the inevitable.
“So rather than do that, we thought it would be better to embrace it early, and then when it’s in its full force, our fan base will be very, very accustomed to consuming in that manner.”
UFC WAS A TRAILBLAZER
UFC Fight Pass launched in 2013 as a streaming service for live fights and archived content. Credit: UFC
The history of sports streaming is long and complicated, but UFC was one of the first to try it and has been ahead of the curve all along – partly out of necessity.
“In our evolution, there was a period of time where it was very difficult for us to get on broadcast television,” UFC senior vice president David Shaw said. “It was very difficult even for us to get on pay-per-view.
“So very early on, it was part of our ethos to always find a new connection point with fans.”
With a young-skewing, tech-savvy, passionate, international audience, the digital realm made good sense.
UFC launched its pioneering “Fight Pass” site in 2013, and in 2018 signed a deal with ESPN that put its top events on ESPN+, eliminating much of the confusion that fans of other sports encounter.
“Our destination for UFC is ESPN in the United States, and that's a pretty easy thing to talk about,” Shaw said.
Like UFC, MLS has the advantage of a fan base more comfortable with live streaming than those of many others.
“Our fans typically skew younger than other leagues and are digital native, digital-connected,” MLS president Mark Abbott said. “So regardless of what the media partner is, our fans find a way to connect with that media in whatever way they can.”
No company wants to confuse or frustrate its customers, so the current situation is a challenge. Space limitations prevent us from listing every channel the Yankees will play on this season. And even when one knows the channel, accessing it can be challenging for some fans.
Executives say they are doing everything possible to ease the process, including extensive cross-promotion.
Peacock’s first national MLB exclusive last Sunday also was shown on NBC, and the network used the Kentucky Derby and other assets to spread the word.
Rick Cordella, Peacock’s executive vice president, called it “screaming from the rooftops that this is here.”
“I read social media like everyone else, so I understand what the fans are saying, but it’s happening everywhere,” Cordella said. “The pay TV bundle used to have everything . . . [Now] there is a litany of other content that’s spread across four or five of the biggest streamers, and sports really is no different.”
MLB coverage on NBC's Peacock. Credit: Peacock
Jared Stacy, head of global live sports production for Amazon, said the company’s experience elsewhere, including with European soccer, suggests people do tend to figure things out.
“Obviously, it’s an adjustment period,” he said, “but the reach that the Prime membership program has, I think, is a very powerful thing, and fans have found it.”
Stacy acknowledged the streamers’ responsibility in helping with that process.
“That's one of the basic tenets of Amazon, right? We're a customer-obsessed company," Stacy said. "We want convenience to be at the front of everything we do - whether that is that it's convenient for fans to find these games, then once they find them, it's convenient for them to use all the functionality that comes on Prime Video.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CHALLENGING
Confusion is one thing. Money is another. Fans are beginning to wonder how many different bills they must pay to watch their favorite team.
For now, Apple TV+ is not requiring a paid subscription to access games, but the assumption is it will eventually. Peacock’s games require a paid subscription, as do Prime Video’s.
Over time, there presumably will be an aggregating of streaming services that replicates a cable bundle of sorts, but we are not there yet.
“I have every subscription under the sun, and at some point, I just want one subscription that gives me everything I want,” Garden said. “A lot of the ideas that people had going into streaming and this transition I think are now starting to evolve in a more traditional way, which I think is going to be helpful to our fans.
“I think ultimately we're going to have a huge audience, both on the linear side and the streaming side.”
In the short term, though, the transition will be bumpy. Traditional cable outlets, including regional sports networks such as YES, SNY and MSG, might be in decline, but they remain pillars of the sports business system.
Leagues, teams and media companies are trying to have it both ways, because for now, they must. That leaves fans in an awkward spot.
NASCAR president Steve Phelps noted that on one hand, the “massive decline” seen in cable subscriptions has leveled off. On the other, he acknowledged those numbers “fell off a cliff” over the past few years.
“It won't ever look like it did before, in my opinion,” he said.
SNY has followed recent tradition and subcontracted some of its games to WPIX-TV this season, an over-the-air station that is 14 years older than the Mets themselves.
The Yankees used to appear there, too. No longer. Remember that MLB buzzword: “reach.”
“Hopefully, we're able to reach the core fans that watch every night on YES,” Stacy said, “and then also expand the tent to reach people that might not have a cable subscription.”
Garden said MLB is pleased so far with viewership on the new outlets, and with how fans have navigated the changing landscape.
“Anything that's new causes disruption in some way, shape or form,” Garden said. “I can tell you that at least from my perspective, it seems like we've mitigated most of it.
“It's hard to mitigate all of it. But with every week that goes by, I think consumers get more and more comfortable with those games.”
If not, there always is radio.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
