Purposely driving older viewers and fans away?
This year all the Thursday night games have been on some subscription service.
Yesterday, Christmas day, there were two games, neither of which was on TV other than very limited market. Oh, you could get them, IF you streamed them on Netflix or NFL+
But the problem for me, and I’m sure for other older folks, is that we don’t have the spare $$$ to subscribe, nor the desire to…
Granted they need the $ to pay all those huge contracts, but how many older fans are they willing to sacrifice to get them, and how much loss in viewership are they willing to accept?
I’ve watched this trend for a few years, as more and more ‘things’ go behind paywalls, channels disappear from cable packages, and access becomes ‘subscription’ only as print media disappears from the mainstream. Older folks tend to pull back from the pay sites, getting more and more information from the internet, and less from the media. Additionally, they tend to ‘drop’ things like sports and hobbies they once enjoyed.
Personally, I think this is a bad thing, as those folks become more isolated and withdrawn, which is not good for either their mental or physical health. Older folks tend to get out less as they lose friends and lose mobility. For many, sports is the ‘escape’ for their home life. I have friends my age who are still able to travel and can afford to go to events, so they drive over to Dallas to see football and baseball games a couple of times a year for each sport, but they are the ‘lucky’ ones.
If there is a bright spot, at least college sports haven’t gone that way (yet). And honestly, those games seem to be more ‘entertaining’ today than most professional sports.
What say you?
I don’t have skin in the game as I left NBA and NFL years ago. Can’t remember when I watched a game of either. I do see your point, however. Seems they figure to exist on the backs of young folks just out of college with jobs that allow for apartments that rent for thousands a month and expect me, a taxpayer, to pay for their past tuition. I suppose that is a growing market, but I’m not sure how long it can be sustained.
We used to watch the NFL all the time – even subscribing to DIRECTV’s Sunday Ticket. When the kneeling bullshit started years ago, that was over. I haven’t watched a game since and I don’t expect to ever resume watching. Those disrespectful cocksuckers burned that bridge.
I’ve noticed the same trend too. When extra $$$ is to be made, it will be exploited. I’m guessing the TV networks finding the advertisers willing to spend the money on ads is growing thinner and belt tightening happens. This is happening across the board on all sports I think.
WWE Professional wrestling brand RAW will be going to Netflix starting next month. It used to be free on USA Network. WWE has a couple of other brands, but as far as I know, they are still shown on various networks for free. At least so far.
right on!
Hey Old NFO;
Your prior posters were right on the $$$, I used to be a hardcore fan of the NFL, until that kneeling crap and having people living better than 99.9% of all Americans lecturing me on how bad the USA sucks and that we white Americans need to do this and this and this and the other….Please spare me the lectures fool when you clean up your own cultures then come at me and try to talk to me about my culture. Yeah still a sore spot, because the woke idiots have infected another American pastime. We watched sports to get away from politics and like a virus the modern left has to infect something else and suck the joy out of something else. Well back to your assertion about the paywall issues*Sorry about the rant*. it is becoming a thing where you are correct more and more is behind a paywall, it is like since people have gone to the internet, to get around the commercials, so the content providers are looking for alternate streams of revenue to bolster their ready cash to make the hefty payroll and expenses that modern sportsball requires.
When televised / paid sports became ubiquitous, I lost interest, as for me, partially of the excitement was the crowd participation.
When the money and audience share attracted the Left to demand money and political submission, I stopped watching the sports and the media which carried them.
I don’t miss the TV or the sports any more.
Friends, local social, Indy books, crafts, and music, and observer-recorded news hold my interests now.
John in Indy
My father, who is about your age, was grumbling about the games being on Netflix when I talked to him last night. I wonder about the advertiser dollars. Commercials during games used to be prime slots. But then, DVRs became a thing and you could skip the ads.
Streaming services can add up, if you have several running concurrently. We rotate through them, but that requires we pay attention to where and when we’re signed up.
Just like boxing.
Hooo boy, I’ll keep it short and stay off the soap box. My theory is private ownership as a whole is intentionally being pushed further and further away from the individual. Part of that is all media (tv, movies, sports, news, music, books) going to modern on-demand subscription-based digital delivery.
Cable TV has been on a downward trend for some time now (rise of Netflix, Netflix’s various competitors, changing generational trends, inability of legacy media to adapt). Cable has been able to hold on to sports thus far, but that’ll go away too. Netflix is still in the teething phase of live events but Netflix will figure it out. Money is at stake.
I find the older people praising the college teams demoralizing.
I have the impression that a lot of alumni don’t care what horror shows the academic programs are, so long as the sports programs are as expected.
A blogger defined a ‘professional managerial class’, that makes their money off university training and credentials. Where those common interests of economics are concerned, the biggest story is how they have screwed over public trust, especially the basis for trusting a number of professional collections to do things as agents of public or customers.
This is downstream of many academic fields being cruddy for academic generations, or outright generations, and of many students coming out of highschool or university insane.
Right now we have some problems with future of peace, that are precisely because so many are coming out of university convinced of an academic theory that amounts to ‘everyone is witching me’.
The law faculty do not seem to have protected the law programs from the influence of the bad fields. The medical faculty do not seem to have protected the medical programs. There’s a lot of reason to think that the engineering programs cannot be protected except by breaking up the universities into completely separate institutions that share nothing with the other fields, and do not even have the GE credits of the modern undergraduate degree.
I’m just continually appalled that other people are not seeing this stuff.
And yet, just about any business organization is going to, ahem, be very skeptical of anyone who is with another organization, and pays such close attention, and has such out of the box thinking, to come to the conclusions I have about American universities, and then to share those conclusions with internal leadership, or whistleblowing entities, or the public.
I tend to feel like maybe I am screaming blindly into the void. Just because I try to talk myself into speaking in a way that is a more restrained, more professional, more appropriate to a business environment, and so forth.
So I do not have any positive associations with university sports. The only thing I see is a lot of influence with university leadership that is used exclusively to give feedback to the management fo the sports teams. I may just be not seeing that these are also the donors that have university leadership scared enough to try not to get caught saying anything actionable in public. But even reading between the lines of the public statements, university management is still insane, and still up to no good.
I sometimes think that the obvious explanation is simply that I have gone insane myself, and that everyone else is behaving in the appropriate sane and deliberate way.
Careful Bob, you’re making sense again.
For me, sports-ball is a solid “Meh”. My wife has a lifetime affliction for a particular NFL team, 49ers. No hate please.
However, even with her paid NFL subscription, the NFL app is an unmitigated, appalling piece of money-sucking crap. She calls up the app, finds her team’s game for the day, then the app throws every possible roadblock to easy and comfortable viewing while trying to extract more money. Total interface piece of shite.
And as stated by yourself and others, no other convenient single point option to watch games. Must be subscribed to this or that service, more $$$ for no real value to the customer.
Peace out, merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy new year, etc!
All- Thanks for the comments and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one! Bob- Agree with you, but those college ‘sports’ bring in enough $$$ to support Title IX and other, smaller sports in the Unis. It is always a trade off.
Why would they need advertising or old people when there’s gambling money to be made?
Half the “regional sports networks” were owned by Bally’s Casinos last year, FanDuel Sports this year, and then there’s UnderDog, ESPNBet, DraftKings, Bet365 ad nauseum.
If you can get past the constant lines of betting odds you might be able to see the illeterate felon from the other side of the continent-wide strip-mall just got penalized for punching an opponent that dissed him by stopping his play.
Doesn’t matter nor does it bother me. I haven’t watched any NFL game since Kaepernick knelt down and the NFL encouraged it.
I’ll watch college football instead.
MN Steel- I didn’t even think about that, thanks!
Beau- Me, you, and a lot of other folks!
NF who???
Rat- LOL
The NFL did away with my team (Redskins) so I stopped watching.
Only time I see any NFL games is if it is on the screen at a bar/restaurant.
Of course, having moved to SEC territory the NFL is rather superfluous.
Due to various experiences I’ve NO love for sports and especially loathe football. I’ve long thought the destruction of the NFL would be a Good Thing. But I never took any action on the matter. And I don’t have to. They are doing it themselves.
Sports are a waste of time from T ball to the pro’s. In fact I believe that America’s obsession with collectivized sports was crucial to the victory of socialism/crony capitalism over traditional American culture. Hobbies for the elderly? Firearms, fishing, reading to name a few. Cooking exotic desserts, ministering to the less fortunate… Watching sports? A root canal or tax audit would be more productive.
One thing they don’t like to talk about is how NFL has lost about 1/3rd of its viewers in the last decade.
Many of the TV channels bowed out of negotiations when the yearly rights went into the billions – they know they can’t cover those costs.
I wonder if the streamers can, or if they are using it as a loss leader to get or keep people on their platforms?
The major streamers post few numbers, but they have lots of “churn” and cancellations they are trying to keep dow.
I caught the Houston/Baltimore game, and the half-time show was like something out of a dystopian nightmare of inner-city people doing Afro-Carribean dances wearing white semi-cowboy outfits. I’m sure that somebody paid a mint for that “entertainment.” If actual football fans enjoyed that – the NFL people need psychoanalysis. Deep analysis.
I’m more of a baseball fan these days.
It has been years since I watched a game all the way through. Not tempted since I don’t own a TV. As a lukewarm Seahawk fan I was amused by a Bears fan with a YouTube channel ranting about the Bears 6-3 loss. At the end he said, “You Seahawks fans; your team really sucks too. Just not as bad as the Bears”.