We’re in a post agency age, would someone please notify the sports leagues? While middlemen everywhere cry out in pain, umbrella sports organizations from high school to the pros skip blithely along with blinders on, slicing their member institutions’ intellectual property into ever smaller segments while their lawyers kick and scream at technological advancements and rail at the consumers themselves – yes, that’s right, the very fans who comprise what ESPN dubs Sports Nation, otherwise known as the blood that courses through the veins of the mighty American sports machine.
Does this sound sustainable to you?
The Southeastern Conference is the latest and greatest example of a group that wants to have their cake and eat it too. Sure they want you to file into their stadiums and live and die with the success of their/your teams. But here’s the caveat: they say you can’t broadcast that love live. That is, you can’t distribute photographs or video of its games in real time for commercial use.
They love free coverage and they love the fan love – that is, until fan love starts to hurt. Their fear is that your love may indeed cut into their revenue streams. They sell exclusivity for a pretty penny and you and your smart phone and social network might just muck all that up for all the people who don’t actually play the games but profit from them.
As an incomplete list – the leagues and conferences generally want to :
• Negotiate escalating fees for exclusive rights to game action
• Produce their own content in the form of digital, regional and cable networks and charge for access
• Peddle merchandise and license intellectual property – from video game likenesses and stats to t-shirts
• Receive free promotion and PR from media outlets
So they want to sell rights to media coverage, be the media themselves and benefit from produced content, be the event “owner” and benefit from licensing and merchandising (both tangible and intangible items) while receiving constant free promotion in the papers, on the radio, on tv and on blogs.
If you’re a league what’s not to love?
In short, a sports association doesn’t want to pay for coverage – and they want you to pay for their coverage, whether you’re a network or a fan. That’s been the model for a long time, before ESPN was a powerhouse. But for all this – smart lawyers versed in IP issues notwithstanding – what they need to make this happen are the fans. Fans fuel the demand that lets the leagues increase the value of exclusive access to their properties.
Here’s the problem: the changing face of fandom and how that is impacting exclusivity. As the St. Petersburg press puts it, the digital reality is that armed with smart phones, blogs and real time posting abilities, the “SEC’s greatest supporters are now also the SEC’s biggest competitors.” Hence the SEC’s line in the sand. The piece by Michael Kruse notes that the league has come up against the fact that “the audience isn’t the audience anymore,” and it cites NYU’s Jay Rosen’s manifesto about ”the people formerly known as the audience” – which, please note, was written in 2006. In that piece, Rosen includes a quote from a suit at the NFL: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.”
As the one-way “broadcast” model continues to erode, it becomes much harder to maintain (and increase) all these sports revenue buckets that are built on the back of exclusive access and the slicing and dicing of intellectual property. Darn things just won’t stay fixed, similar to definitions like “old media” and “new media.” And just what is credentialed media today anyway?
In the last ten years, as viewership of traditional television programming declined, the sports entities made a big pitch for the fact that “live” made them immune to the forces of audience erosion. Because games were live, they were the ultimate tune-in property — see it here now or forever hold your peace — and they sold that argument hard to the networks who shelled out big bucks for exclusive rights fees. But “live” in an era of citizen journalists armed with smart phones and passion also means you have potentially thousands of fans who, by virtue of sitting in the stadium, can also broadcast — call it the many-to-many network – and who only shelled out for the price of a ticket. That’s what the SEC is grappling with. The leagues have had a great run, beginning in the 80’s with the explosion of cable and regional networks and into the millennium with digital properties and increasingly desperate networks anxious to exclusively align with properties that could deliver eyeballs and engagement.
But going forward, will that same passionate sports nation which literally fed the sports league IP extravaganza now cannibalize its business model? Will the middlemen of sports leagues find themselves with middlemen everywhere – searching for ways to make a buck – or worse, like the music industry, fighting the very fans of its product?
