The future of sports streaming didn’t happen
Venu Sports Is Not All You Need: Future Book Reading Using Digital Vergecast (The Future of Sports Streaming Isn’t)
Venu Sports seemed like such an obvious idea. What if you could watch sports on all of your platforms in the same place? It makes sense until you get to the bigger issues. It isn’t everything. It is going to be expensive. Some will argue that it is anticompetitive. Maybe this is not a good idea at all.
Source: How the future of sports streaming died
What is the best time to watch TV? When you can watch on TV, but you don’t have to watch it on a mobile device
The show has one more person join it before the first part of the New Year’s Resolution series. If you’re hoping to read more books this year, or just want to replace some of your aimless scrolling with more focused reading, Kevin has some tips on how to make it work on all your devices, at all times of day. You can curl up with a good book, but sometimes there is a line at the coffee shop. If you do it right, they’re both great reading times.
Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11, or email [email protected]) about why your phone won’t let you play multiple audio sources at a time. We have some ideas about how it should be done and how to fix it.
It seems that broadcast TV is messed up. Over the last 20 years, viewership has declined. More and more people get their news and entertainment online. The biggest shows are coming to streaming first and show hosts are leaving. Naturally ad revenue is on a steady decline as well. Even Trump and his choice for Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, are rattling their sabers and threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of networks that run programs or news stories the White House doesn’t like.
That’s what’s so crucial about broadcast TV. It still requires a television and a digital blocker to watch, but no company collecting huge amounts of data for advertisers is doing so. It is a completely passive experience. You can watch sports, news, and entertainment on the stations. And people are not tuning in.
Take sports as an example. The Olympics and the Super Bowl used to be reliable audience drivers, but in the 21st century they’re no longer. The experience was buggy and stuttering, but Paramount Plus still garnered 3.4 million more subscribers than it had before the game. The Olympics, which were simulcast on Peacock, experienced even more online success. The people liked the fact that they could only watch things they wanted to see.
Then at Christmas, sports streaming got a big boost when Netflix successfully streamed two NFL games and a half-time show. A complaint of stuttering can be seen. Afterward, Netflix claimed they were the most streamed games in NFL history.
Live games on TV will still be on in the future, despite Streaming’s big sports win. Yet as those contracts come up for renewal, leagues may opt to take their games elsewhere, particularly as broadcast becomes less profitable and viewers switch to streaming. Although the networks spend billions to air NFL games, companies such asNetflix andAmazon have deeper pockets and can pay more money to wrest rights from legacy media networks. The rights to the Thursday Night Football game was bought by Amazon for $1 billion a year. Fox was previously paying about $660 million annually for those games.
