TV is now about games: how live games dominate television

102 million people attended this year's Super Bowl - an average year for the biggest event on television. This is the most-watched featurette on TV every year since 1977, with the end of Roots series being watched by 99 million people. This trend has only intensified in recent years; The top 10 most watched events of 2010 were the Super Bowls.

But this isn't the biggest game of the year - all forms of sports now dominate live television. In 1998, live sports events were 25 of the top 100 TV broadcasts of the year. Two decades later, that number has reached 88 out of 100, 47 of them NFL games.

Most of that change has occurred in recent memory. For example, in 2015, sports accounted for only 40% of the top 20 broadcasts of the year; By 2019 this number is up to 75%. What happened in those five years? Streaming.

Games don’t grow. Everyone else is running away from the TV
Netflix and other streaming services have fundamentally changed the way we watch TV. A few years after Netflix began producing original content, the most-watched shows continued to shut down cable and move to streaming services. Netflix spent $ 15 billion on original shows and films in 2019 alone.

Streaming services usually don't tell us how many people are watching their shows, but we can see the impact of everything that comes with money.
Since 2013, the first year the streaming service has been nominated for an Emmy, the share of awards for shows produced by streaming services has increased almost every year, from just five nominations in 2013 to 61 in 2019. HBO does not have this count, either, but its streaming service currently has at least eight million members.

As a result, TV shows have disappeared from the list of most-watched broadcasts every year. In 2016, for example, the season seven premiere of The Walking Dead drew 13.7 million viewers - for the fifth most-watched show of the year. As of 2019, there are no TV shows listed in Game 11 of Game of Thrones.

This drop may not look like a shoestring, but a lot has already happened. The end of the Game of Thrones series garnered 19.3 million viewers; The last episode of Friends scored 52.5. It's hard to imagine looking back a decade from now and seeing this moment as the dirty breath of appointment television. There is absolutely nothing like Game of Thrones on the horizon for 2020.

Simply put, this is not something to watch live. And for that reason, people don't pay a premium for live TV. According to technology, media and telecommunication research firm Light Shade Partners, 80 million homes in the U.S. still have fiber or satellite from 100 million a decade ago.

The content that binds people to live TV (and the average 7 107 bill) is two words: sports and news. According to research by analysts at Moffett Nathanson, 86% of TV subscribers are regular sports and / or news viewers. This leaves 14% of people who don't watch live TV with their expensive TV subscriptions - in other words, cord cutters of the future.

And he can really understand it. 26% of viewers regularly watch news, but not sports, and news channels are increasingly available through free live TV streaming services. Through apps such as Pluto and Zumo, viewers can watch live news from channels like CNN and NBC for free. They also have the option of TV antenna and locust (in some markets) for free local channels.

With the game, those options are not really there. If you want to watch the College Football Playoff, Monday Night Football and many more MLB and NBA Playoffs, pay for cable or satellite, though there are free streaming services that stream the game for free.

While we've seen some streaming services dip their toes into the game's broadcasting waters - Prime Video has been simulating NFL games for several Thursday nights with Fox and the NFL Network since 2017 - no one has made a serious bid for exclusive broadcast rights.

That may change. The NFL's TV deal expires in 2022, while the NBA's 2025. The rights to College Lodge Sports TV are governed by each exclusive conference, so we may see a streaming-specific sports deal there. And even if that day never comes, it seems increasingly likely that live TV will be synonymous with sports in the near future - if we aren't already there.