to adopt the language of the social sciences, the decline in the nfl<u+2019>s early-season tv ratings this year has been overdetermined : the games have been bad. the trump show on the cable channels has pulled away viewers. big-name nfl stars have retired or been sidelined by injuries or disciplinary actions. colin kaepernick <u+2019>s antics have turned off many fans, especially because his national anthem protests primarily play to a constituency that already believes football should be banned. a few quarterbacks or other players who can recapture the public<u+2019>s imagination could probably resuscitate the nfl<u+2019>s ratings all by themselves. the league could also end its sad thursday night experiment. the deeper problem isn<u+2019>t professional football so much as the broadcast tv business model that supplies its revenues. netflix is killing america<u+2019>s tolerance for commercials. on-demand services like netflix, amazon and hbo also compete with the nfl in a way that live tv never did: their shows can be paused and the game watched only when it<u+2019>s interesting. the eternal trade-off question<u+2014> <u+201c>what do i want to do with my time?<u+201d><u+2014>is being beneficently transformed for the fan who regrets spending three-plus hours and enduring 100 commercials to watch 11 minutes of game action. technology means liberation. a smartphone screen, it turns out, is a perfectly serviceable way to consume 90 seconds of game highlights and you don<u+2019>t go away feeling a sport you love has abused your time. helping to fast-forward this trend is the fantasy football boom. millions of fans care less about a particular team than about how a particular selection of players across the league are faring on a sunday afternoon. according to the samford university sports business report, 70% of smartphone owners use the gadgets for sports consumption. no, the nfl need not panic. there will still be an audience for the full game, commercials and all. when audiences are fragmenting, programming that can pull in large audiences (even if those audiences are shrinking) can still command a rising value. if you<u+2019>re a company with a message that<u+2019>s best-suited to a 30-second commercial seen by lots of young men, the nfl is still hard to beat. for the league and its business partners, the challenge is how to exploit the new revenue opportunities technology is creating. the nfl annoyed kibitzers when it recently banned individual teams from posting video to twitter or facebook while a game is going on. but the league works for the team owners, not the other way around<u+2014>and team owners evidently supported a move aimed at beginning to develop a centralized (i.e., non cannibalistic) strategy for monetizing short clips. the nfl is a giant content machine, most of whose revenues are not captured by the nfl. it provides a constant flow of sports-fan soap opera that sustains dozens of businesses, including web commentators who spend their days trashing league management. one way or another, the league was destined to seek more licensing money for the video clips that keep this soap-opera world turning. a confounding variable, unfortunately, is the special problem of espn, owner of a $15 billion monday night football contract that runs through 2021. espn, by a factor of five, is the most expensive part of the standard cable tv package that cord cutters increasingly find they can live without. its golden age, don<u+2019>t say it too loudly, was financed by millions of non-fans who were forced to pay for sports programming they never watched in order to get a basic cable package. espn<u+2019>s current subscription leakage is running at four million households a year. its <u+201c>sportscenter<u+201d> franchise is being disemboweled by the timelier availability and searchability of game highlights on the web. its parent, disney , recently looked at buying twitter; in august, it bought a stake in major league baseball<u+2019>s streaming affiliate, which also provides streaming technology for the national hockey league and hbo. in some ways, the company is trying to make the cart pull the horse. disney is in the early stages of flailing after a way not to be dragged down by the large sports-rights contracts that espn signed in the heyday of cable<u+2019>s market power. of course, there<u+2019>s always a chance the cavalry will ride over the hill. on friday came word that wireless giant at&t is seriously eyeing time warne r, owner of hbo, cnn and tbs as well as nba and baseball rights. if wireless operators decide they now must offer sports content in their own fierce rivalry for subscribers, a spurt of fresh billions could yet be flowing toward the nfl and its current rights owners.
nfl problem<u+2014>or tv problem? - wsj
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