How much sport is too much?

Posted 19 January 2010 Sport, Thoughts

This summer has been going on forever… It seems like a lifetime since the AFL season ended last year. A week ago I was suffering horribly from football withdrawal syndrome and was looking for a winter sport to watch, any winter sport. Now I don’t have any type of pay TV and I feel a little dirty at the A-League for selling the rights straight to pay TV or else I would be an A-League fan over the summer. If it was televised on free to air I would more likely go to a game, I’d be emotionally attached. But as it stood A-League was off the list, Melbourne Victory was playing away anyway.

What was on the list though were possibilities from around the world that are available due to streaming on your computer. At this time of year my best winter sport options were:

Premier League football from the UK
NFL from the USA
NBA from the USA
NHL from the USA

In the end the NBA came out a clear winner. The Premier League and the NHL don’t have league wide options to watch every game. You can subscribe to a individual team and watch any game your chosen team plays in. I could subscribe to Liverpoolfc.tv and watch them play badly every week. The NFL and NBA both have subscription services where you get to watch every game from every team. The NBA restricts your watching to games in the last 36 hours (which in the NBA gives you many options everyday) and a list of what they choose as the best games of the season.

The NFL gives you games from the past week. I ended up with a NBA subscription purely because the NFL season is nearly over and I am a lapsed Utah Jazz fan.

Clearly it’s convenient to be able to watch what games I want when I want but NBA.tv has some social media extras that I also like. They have ‘widgets’ that you can use whilst watching a game which pop up on the screen that connect to Twitter and Facebook so you can follow and participate in the #hashtag conversations about the game live. The games also have the American ads scattered throughout which I think adds to the whole NBA experience. The service is really easy to use and it builds the NBA worldwide by enabling fans to watch games and feel like they are active participants. I’ve gone from watching 3 games per season maximum if I was lucky enough to be in a bar that had the sports channel on to watching 7 games in the last week and thinking about buying merchandising.

All in all I think the NBA online streaming is amazing and I can’t wait for more sports and leagues to get similar broadcasting options available to fans. If the AFL is really looking at renegotiating broadcasting rights next year to be able to stream games live onto mobile phones I hope they look into getting a similar online streaming option available too. There are ways around interfering with TV broadcast rights, the NBA has games blacked out based on the users geographic location if a television station has the rights to the game live and will then make the game available once the game has finished. With the AFL looking to expand into near areas this is the way to get new fans hooked and coming back for more.

Oh and Go Jazz!