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Sports Television

The history of sports on U.S. television is the history of sports on network television. Indeed, that history is closely related to the development and success of the major television networks. "Television got off the ground because of sports," reminisced pioneering television sports director Harry Coyle. He coninued, "Today, maybe, sports need television to survive, but it was just the opposite when it first started. When we (NBC) put on the World Series in 1947, heavyweight fights, the Army-Navy football game, the sales of television sets just spurted."

With only 190,000 sets in use in 1948, the attraction of sports to the networks in its early period was not advertising dollars. Instead, broadcasters were looking toward the future of the medium, and aired sports as a means of boosting demand for television as a medium. They believed their strategy would eventually pay off in advertising revenues. But because NBC, CBS and DuMont manufactured and sold receiver sets, their more immediate goal was to sell more of them. Sports did indeed draw viewers, and although the stunning acceptance and diffusion of television cannot be attributed solely to sports, the number of sets in use in the U.S. reached ten and a half million by 1950.

Technical and economic factors made sports attractive to the fledging medium. Early television cameras were heavy and cumbersome and needed bright light to produce even a passable picture. Boxing and wrestling, contested in confined, very well-lit arenas and baseball and football, well-lit by the sun and played out in a familiar, well-defined spaces, were perfect subjects for the lens. Equally important, because sporting events already existed there were no sets to build, no writers and actors to hire. This made sports inexpensive to produce, a primary concern when the audience was small and not yet generating large advertising revenues.

The first televised sporting event was a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton in 1939, covered by one camera providing a point of view along the third base line. But the first network sports broadcast was NBC's Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which premiered in 1944 with the Willie Pep vs. Chalky White Featherweight Championship bout. Sports soon became a fixture on prime-time network programming, often accounting for one third of the networks' total evening fare. But in the 1950s, as television's other genres matured and developed their own large and loyal (and approximately 50% female) followings, sports began to disappear from network prime-time, settling into a very profitable and successful niche on weekends. This, too, would change, like so much else in television, with alterations in the technology and economics of the medium.

Gillette Cavalcade of Sports stayed on the network air for 20 years, a prime example of sporting events presented by a single sponsor. By the mid-1960s, however, televised sports had become so expensive that individual advertisers found it increasingly difficult to pay for sponsorship of major events by themselves. Still, the number of hours of sports on network television exploded as the audience grew and the multiplying ranks of spot-buying advertisers coveted these valuable minutes. This mutually beneficial situation persisted until well into the 1980s when the historically increasing amounts of advertising dollars began to decline, and networks experienced diminishing profit margins on sports.

But the economics of televised sports had begun to unravel earlier. In 1970, for example, the networks paid $50 million to broadcast the National Football League (NFL), $2 million for the National Basketball Association (NBA) and $18 million for major league baseball. In 1985 those figures had risen to $450 million, $45 million and $160 million respectively. These large increases were fueled by growing public interest in professional sports, in part as a result of more and better television coverage. But equally important, the networks saw the broadcasting of big time sports as the hallmark of institutional supremacy in broadcasting. Major league sports meant major league broadcasting - not an unimportant issue for the networks now challenged by VCR, the newly empowered independent stations, and cable. Many of these cable channels were themselves carrying sports (WGN, WTBS, and HBO, for example), and one, ESPN, offered nothing but sports. Seemingly unconcerned, the CBS, NBC, and ABC attitude could be described as "Who cares about Australian Rules Football?" (a high point of early ESPN programming).

But rising fees for rights to major sporting events were not, in themselves, bad for the networks. They could afford them, and the cable and independent channels could not. But increasing rights fees, accompanied by falling ratings, proved to be disastrous. From 1980 to 1984, broadcasts of professional football lost 7% of their viewership (12% among men 18 to 34 years old) and baseball lost 26% of its viewers, showing a 63% decline among young males. Non-sports programming on cable, home video use, and the independents took many of these viewers. In addition, sports on the competing channels further diluted the remaining sports audience. To make up for falling revenues on all its programming as they began to lose audience, the networks began to raise the price of advertising time on sports shows to cover the huge rights fees contractually owed to the sports leagues.

Advertisers balked. Not only were they unwilling to pay higher prices for smaller audiences, but the once attractive male audience was becoming less desirable as working women came to control even larger amounts of consumer capital. Rather than pay what they saw as inflated rates for a smaller and now less prized set of viewers, many advertisers bought commercial time away from sports altogether, feeling they could reach their target audiences more efficiently through other types of shows. Car manufacturers turned to prime-time drama to reach women, who were increasingly making car-buying decisions; beer makers were turning to MTV to get young women and young men.

Finally, in order to make the most of their expensive contracts with the major sports leagues, the networks began broadcasting more sports. But spots on sports shows would have been easier to sell had there been fewer of them on the market. The three networks together showed 1,500 hours of sports in 1985, double what they programmed in 1960. With about 8 minutes of commercials an hour, the addition of even relatively few hours of programming had a noticeable effect on the supply-and-demand balance of the commercial spot market.

It was during this same period that superstations WTBS and WGN, and premium channel HBO began national, cable-fed sports programming. ESPN was launched in 1979 and by mid-1980 reached 4 million homes. By 1986, 37 million households subscribed. The glut of sports on television was abetted even more by crucial courts decisions affecting intercollegiat competition. Universities, desirous of their own access to broadcast riches, successfully challenged the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and, at times their own regional athletic conferences, to be free of what they considered restrictive television contracts and broadcast revenue-sharing agreements. College basketball and football, once local or regional in appeal, began appearing on the television dial in a complex array of syndication packages and school-centered or conference-centered television networks.

While the history of televised sports may have been directly related to network television, the current and future states of the genre certainly are not. There are more televised sports today than ever before and they continue to draw a large total audience, but it is an audience fragmented among many available choices. Sports on television, then, is decreasingly likely to originate on a national network. Despite the Super Bowl's annually growing audience and increases in the price of a 30 second spot ($1.3 million for some aired during the 1995 San Francisco/San Diego mismatch), it remains a television anomaly, unique as a television and cultural event. Ratings for individual television sports programs generally continue to decline in the 1990s. The 1993 World Series, for example, had a cumulative rating for all its games of slightly more than 16, surpassing only the 1989 Series interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake. Game 1 of the 1993 contest between Toronto and Atlanta was the lowest rated World Series game ever recorded by Nielsen. When CBS's four year, $1.06 billion deal with major league baseball ended with that Series, the best network deal that the leagues could make was an arrangement with both ABC and NBC tying baseball's income to the amount of advertising sold. Baseball was forced into the business of selling advertising time for the networks (and therefore, for itself). Hockey's ratings on its ABC and ESPN/ESPN2 telecasts, never big, also declined, from 0.9 in 1992 to 0.8 in 1993. The pattern is the same for football, basketball and the Olympics.

This does not mean, however, that viewers no longer watch sports on television. But they have ceased to watch the big marquee events in numbers as great as they once did. Now cable channels and local independent stations have joined the networks as primary outlets for sports programming, and sports remains valuable and attractive to programmers for several distinct reasons

Except for the big ticket events like the NCAA Basketball Championships, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the National Basketball Association (NBA) Championships and the major college football bowl games, televised sports generally produce smaller audiences than prime-time network programming. Of course, for independents and cable channels sports contests may often draw their biggest viewership. But regardless of the size of the audience for a sports telecast, it is audience composition that is important--this is the demographically attractive audience for advertisers who want to reach males, 18 to 49 years old. Certain sports also bring with them even more narrowly defined audience segments. The products advertised during a bowling match, a game of golf or an auto race, make it immediately clear that a particular demographic group is being targeted. And advertising rates for these events are usually well below those charged on more general-interest programming.

When the new technologies began to divide the television audience, huge rights fees to big sports leagues became a burden for the networks. But for cable channels, local broadcasters and even for certain events on the networks, sports are often cheaper to buy and air than much first-run programming. This is why many regional sports networks such as the Boston Red Sox Baseball Network have developed. This is why team- and conference-centered ad hoc networks (groups of stations that come together in a network for specific programming like the Pac-10 Football Network or the Big East Game of the Week) have grown in number. And this is why ballgames or boxing matches are programmed on cable channels such as HBO, WTBS, WGN, and TNT.

Sports is the only programming that has successfully attracted large audiences on a weekend day. This creation of regularized audience behavior enables the medium to maintain its role as a familiar aspect of "everyday life." Sports also link the medium into a system of cross-promotion. Newspapers, radio stations, even stations in competition with a channel airing the weekend's big game all provide free advertising in the course of their usual sports coverage.

Ultimately, the reason sports are popular with broadcasters is that they are popular with viewers. Even the 1993 "low rated" World Series drew an average of fourteen and a half million households a game. The National Hockey League's (NHL) tiny 0.8 rating per game translates into three quarters of a million homes. And, as FOX Television's 1994 acquisition of the pro football rights from CBS makes clear, the networks still see the ownership of the rights to major league sports as tantamount to being in the Big Time. Owner Rupert Murdoch dismissed the $350 million loss for FOX Television in its first year of NFL broadcasts as "an investment" in altering audience perceptions of his low-rated fourth network.

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