TV Sports Score Low

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 12, 2000 | by Eric Fisher

Sports on network TV compete against entertainment options unheard of not long ago -- the Internet, VCRs and video games all siphon off viewers.

Ratings for televised sports steadily bare declining, eroded by everything from the rise of satellite TV, the advent of the Internet and the increase in high-profile crime among professional athletes. Major professional sports leagues, which believed their ratings impervious to decay, are searching furiously for new ways to attract viewers and protect their most lucrative source of revenue. The fiscal stakes are huge. Most of the leagues are just months removed from signing multibillion-dollar TV contracts, and the flat or falling ratings numbers are forcing an unprecedented review of how sports are presented on television.

"In this era of extreme media fragmentation, the need for us to give hardcore fans what they want when they want it, and still attract the more casual fans is extremely important," says National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman. "Television is the best advertising for our game, short of being there in person, and it remains a key goal for us to find new ways any way we can to better re-create that live experience on TV."

The ratings tell a grim story. The National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball title game in April drew an audience of 14.2 million, an 18 percent drop from a year ago and the game's worst rating ever. National Basketball Association regular-season ratings fell 21 percent this year, and last year's Finals drew an audience 39 percent smaller than the one that watched Michael Jordan's 1998 swan song.

Last year's World Series clash between the big-market New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves drew an average TV audience 34 percent smaller than the 1991 Series between the Braves and small-market Minnesota Twins. The NHL made inroads this season on cable, but its flat network ratings show it is far from generating the mass audience it craves. Only the Super Bowl has held its TV audience during the last two decades. The National Football League's regular season is a far different story: The once-venerated Monday Night Football has posted record-low ratings the last two years.

The leagues have countered with some gimmicks -- HDTV, glowing pucks, miked coaches, new camera angles, prime-time slots with better matchups and stats galore -- but it hasn't halted the decline. "We're dealing with a set amount of discretionary time," says Allen Sanderson, a sports economist with the University of Chicago. "There are only so many hours in the day, and faced with each of these many new choices, something has to give. It doesn't help that in this 20-second sound-bite world, games require three consecutive hours of someone's time. But sports, like a lot of other things, run in cycles, and we may very well just be hitting a down mark."

Other network shows suffering a similar ratings decline almost certainly would be canceled. But televised sports remain a cherished entity worthy of huge investments, the networks say, for two key reasons: their ability to draw young male viewers, the key demographic for advertisers, and their ability to bring viewers into other, more profitable programming.

"We have 13 more years in this relationship with the NCAA, and there are going to be years in which things unfold perfectly and years in which they don't," says CBS spokeswoman Leslie-Anne Wade of the network's $6 billion, 11-year contract extension that begins in 2003. "This is still an incredibly important property to CBS."

Network and industry executives point to some promising signs, however. Both the NHL and baseball slowly are finding new and younger fans in nontraditional markets. Meanwhile, once the Internet and TV fully merge into one appliance, as is expected within several years, sports viewers will have immense control over camera angles, instant-replay options and statistical displays.

"There are numerous sports out there that can and will still take hold with the public" says Larry Novenstern, executive vice president with Sportvision Inc., the New York company behind the yellow first-down line now ubiquitous on football broadcasts. "The key now is to build on that interest and find all the technical enhancements that help bring the viewer further into the game without cluttering up your broadcast."