Circus Maximus: Sports scavenger hunt

One of the toughest parts about being a sports fan now is watching the game live.

I just recently got off work and chatted with a friend on a late Thursday night. I wanted to come back and turn on the Thursday Night Football game between the Washington Commanders and the Green Bay Packers.

Only one problem: I couldn’t find where to watch it.

Later on, it clicked that it was on Amazon Prime because of the 2023 Amazon deal.

If you have an Amazon Prime account, great! Just log in to your account; it only takes five minutes or so to get into the action.

If you don’t? Sucks to suck.

Gone are the days of sports being just a click away. Now it is gatekept by passwords, elaborate schedules of programs, streaming services, and paywalls. This keeps the mass consumer away from the teams they love and decreases league viewership.

The viewer count was consistently higher on platforms that weren’t behind a pay wall, as Thursday Night Football suffers a 7 million viewer gap from Sunday Night Football on NBC.

It is evident that the landscape of media has shifted, and leagues such as the NBA are no exception.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently said in a press conference that the NBA is “a highlights-based sport.” This is something that, unfortunately, I have conceded to. More and more people are getting their NBA news via social media such as TikTok and Instagram. And newsflash: It’s not going to stop.

You will see more views on the highlights of Ja Morant than a full Washington Wizards basketball game.

What about trying to watch the whole game regardless? Those fans haven’t faded away. How do they access their favorite teams?

Thanks to the new deals by various leagues, you can find your favorite team on a variety of platforms, all differing in time, date, and location of play.

Dennis Dodd, a football writer for CBS, posted on X that you would need to have 24 different platforms to watch all the FBS games in Week 3, citing the NCAA itself as the source.

That is an absurd amount of providers you would need to not only pay for, but also manage accounts for, creating a massive hassle for fans who once had on-demand games.

There are some positives, undoubtedly, to the pivot to more easily accessible clips, garnering more attention to the league in the short term, but that omits the fanbase who watches the games full-time, leading to a massive drop in viewership.

Sure, league executives could argue that their massive deals they signed cover the lost costs from the decline in viewership, but it reveals a bigger problem.

Do sports leagues genuinely care about their fans?

Another point to this argument is that if the fans can’t watch their games due to streaming service costs, they will resort to internet piracy, which has surged since the pandemic.

Piracy is a dual blow to league profits as both the streaming platforms don’t get the money from subscriptions, and viewership is omitted from audience size for leagues such as the NFL.

The ease of piracy allows fans to access their games without needing to pay; it’s just one search away on their mobile device.

There is little chance that most people in America have access to all of these platforms if they want to watch NBA games in full.

Unfortunately, the league has seemingly put this upon themselves, but maybe it’s the zeitgeist of streaming services and quick-form media that they are victims too. Regardless, there is a problem that must be addressed within the professional sports league media.

Each side of the argument has valid points to make. However, given the recent business decisions that have been skewed, it seems that even sports leagues, America’s No.1 form of entertainment, have prioritized profits over fans.