The Netflix-ication of sports broadcasting
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EDITORIAL
The Netflix‑ication of sports broadcasting Johan Lindholm1
© T.M.C. Asser Instituut 2019
Sports and television have been involved in a close relationship for as long as anyone alive can remember. In August 1936, 150,000 individuals visited public viewing rooms in Berlin to watch live broadcasts of the 1936 Summer Olympics.1 Who would have predicted that this seemingly minor event would be the first in a chain of events that would radically affect both sports and television? The relationship between sports and television has for the most part been mutually beneficial and has, for the most part, only grown deeper over time. Television allowed sports to reach audiences that are too far away to attend sporting competitions live. Broadcasting brought sports audiences of previously unattainable, even unimaginable sizes, far greater than what could fit in any stadium. For example, last summer, approximately 3.6 billion individuals, more than half of the world’s population, watched the FIFA World Cup.2 The medium of television has contributed to making sports mega events, like the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, part of a globally shared cultural sphere.3 Broadcasting has changed sports, for good and for bad, turning it into one of the main forms of entertainment and turning athletes into global celebrities. As one author describes it, “the world of sports in the age of mass media has been transformed from nineteenth-century amateur 1 It was a stroke of tremendous irony that this broadcast, which the Nazi regime had organized for propaganda purposes, featured African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning the 100-m final. 2
FIFA, “More than half the world watched record-breaking 2018 World Cup,” December 21, 2018. https://www.fifa.com/worldcup/ news/more-than-half-the-world-watched-record-breaking-2018-world -cup. Accessed January 19, 2019. 3
See, e.g., Roche 2006.
recreational participation to late twentieth-century spectatorcentered technology and business.”4 Sports has also changed television as sports has expanded into an evermore central position in television programming, at least in financial terms. For example, worldwide broadcasters paid the Olympic movement 88 million USD for the rights to televise the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. By comparison, the broadcasting rights to the 2016 Rio Games sold for almost thirtythree times more: 2868 million USD.5 The steep increase in price of sport broadcasting rights is a testament to sports’ ability to capture audiences’ attention to an extent and in a way with which very few other activities can compete. One should not, however, interpret television networks’ willingness to pay repeatedly record-breaking amounts for sports broadcasting rights as a testament to the long-term strength and health of the sports–television relationship. For a long time, the competition-driven price increases for exclusive sports broadcasting rights were primarily motivated by television networks competing with each other for consumers’ attention. There is a low leve
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