Why television’s days as sport’s medium of choice are numbered

Television’s audience is finding there are more convenient, less prescriptive, cheaper ways to get what they want without having to put up with – and pay for – the stuff they don’t want.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

SPORT’S revolution will not be televised. Instead it will be streamed to any number of devices near you. One of them is probably in your pocket or in your hand. You could be reading this story on it.

Your television? It will go the way of the dear old landline telephone, these days a significant presence only in the workplace and probably only until current contracts with service providers run out.

People who make televisions and programming know this. That’s why modern sets are able to connect to the internet, and why programming that was never intended for television is bought up by their suits and broadcast on their channels.

These are desperate measures by a medium that knows it’s in the departure lounge of society, that it will be killed off by a better idea that is already upon us.

Television will not be able to save itself that way any more than carphones, once considered a great leap forward from landlines, were able to stave off their extinction by the still soaring popularity of that sleek object you’re holding in your hand.

Sport is at the centre of all that. The embarrassingly badly run SABC is past the point of redemption, it’s announcement on Monday that Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana games will disappear from its screens hardly a surprise after last week’s news — since rescinded — that it couldn’t even afford to put Premier Soccer League matches on radio. But would you subscribe to DStv if it wasn’t for SuperSport?

Even if you have a thing for the crappier movies out there, or can’t bear the thought of not being able to watch endless reruns of some hammy series, or have to put up with children who become ungovernable if they can’t watch cartoons, or you are a news junkie, your decision to keep paying MultiChoice R969 a month is likely to be tightly tethered to your interest in sport.  

That’s not only true in here SuperSport country. In the United States last year 60 of the top 100 primetime live broadcasts among people aged 18 to 49 were sport events. The only exception in the top 10 was the Oscars.

So, why is television in trouble considering it gives its audience what they want? Because that audience is finding there are other, more convenient, less prescriptive, cheaper ways to get what they want without having to put up with — and pay for — all the stuff they don’t want. One of these years the idea of a “channel bouquet” will be like memories of the Rubik’s cube, that thing we all used to have when we also all had telephones that weren’t cellular.

Boxing, like it has been so often, is ahead of the game; all the other games. Floyd Mayweather junior asking fight fans for US$89.95 or, for HD, US$99.95 in pay-per-view fees to watch him take on Conor McGregor last August sounds like a new-fangled notion. But the original idea was hatched when Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott ducked through the ropes at Yankee Stadium in New York in June 1948 in the first sport event sold on closed-circuit television to paying patrons gathered in cinemas far and wide.

The Mayweather-McGregor fight was on Showtime, a cable television service, and could be ordered through several providers of what Americans call cable. For those who have seen life after television it was also available on a range of streaming services. But that doesn’t mean television is safe as long as it plays nice with the geeky newish kids on the block who prefer code to Coke, or even to coke.

Naspers, who own SuperSport, are trying to pass themselves off as hip and happening. In their 2018 annual report, under the heading “Who we are”, they describe themselves thus: “Founded in 1915, we are a global internet and entertainment group and one of the largest and most successful technology investors in the world.”

Snarkier readers might wonder how Naspers were, in 1915, part of something that didn’t exist until 1990, when the internet was invented. Others might wonder why they aren’t keen to reveal up front that they remain, as they were originally, newspaper publishers and printers — Naspers is a contraction of Nasionale Pers, or National Press — before becoming television barons.

Because they and their ilk are trying to stay relevant in a world that increasingly sees them as money-sucking middlemen. Television is being squeezed from both ends of the broadcast equation: its consumers prefer to connect directly with the source of what they want to watch — the producers of sport, news and entertainment — and those sources are becoming more attuned to firming up those connections.

Formula 1 fans will this year be able to subscribe, for between US$8 and US$12 a month, to a service that will give them live coverage during races from in-car cameras. They’ll also get practice, qualifying, press conferences and pre and post-race interviews.

That sounds a lot like what you will see if you tune in to SuperSport during the F1 season. Except that the service is being sold by Formula 1 itself.

Who needs television when the means of broadcast production are within reach of anyone with a smartphone and a decent internet connection, much less F1’s resources for producing quality content?

It’s called an OTT — over the top — platform and it’s becoming the go-to option for many sports, albeit at this stage the smaller codes who struggle to attract fusty old broadcasters. Now all those barefoot waterskiing fans have somewhere to watch the stuff, and to hell with television.

But how long will it take for football, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf and athletics and the Americans and their sports — most of which already produce plenty of their own video content — to wise up to the fact that they don’t need to sell rights to make money if they can flog advertising and pay-per-view plans instead?

Only as long as broadcasters can afford to pay them enough to make it worth their while not to go it alone. The bubble has to burst, perhaps when subscribing to a service like DStv costs significantly more than, say, R1000 and sport’s consumers decide to put those funds into a fibre internet connection instead.

This is already happening in the United States, where ESPN are haemorrhaging subscribers from their cable television service while gaining many for their streaming services. That’s led, in other ESPN publications, to a scramble to catch the wave and to massive staff cuts. Those who remain at, for instance, websites that were built on quality longform writing now find themselves working for a video-driven publication.

Like all of us they will be keen to see how Cristiano Ronaldo gets on in his first game for Juventus, which will be against Chievo on August 18.

No longer have a television? No worries: the game will be streamed live on Facebook. For free …

Blame Muhammad Ali for the monstrosity that is MMA

The path to the rattiest, tattiest form of two people trying to beat the crap out of each other leads straight back to the classiest boxer who has yet lived.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

REMEMBER Antonio Inoki? Of course not. Unless you’re a Muhammad Ali fan, and who isn’t?

Even so, you’re excused if you’re a South African who doesn’t know the answer considering this went down on June 26, 1976. Or while the country was going up in flames.

So, who or what was Inoki? Here’s a clue: Tokyo. And another: US$6-million.

“Six million dollars, that’s why,” Ali replied when he was asked why he had agreed to fight Antonio Inoki, a catch wrestling and karate champion, under a specially cooked up set of rules in Tokyo almost 42 years ago.

The Budokan, the 14 471-seater arena where the fight was staged, and that had served as a venue for the Beatles in 1966 and would in 1979 be where Bob Dylan recorded a live album, was sold out.

In New York, Shea stadium, home to baseball’s Mets, had 32 897 spectators watching the action on closed circuit television.

The fix was in. The deal, agreed among the suits and the tracksuits, was that Ali would accidentally on purpose KO the referee, who would rise from the canvas just in time to count out the WBA and WBC heavyweight champion — who would by then have been poleaxed by Inoki’s flying kick to the head as he stood, distracted by his concern, over the felled ref.

But Ali got wind of the plan and told everyone where the hell to get off. As it happened, what transpired was scarcely less believable.

Inoki spent most of the 15 rounds on his back trying to snare the legs of Ali, who didn’t throw a punch until the seventh round. He fired only six in total and left the ring bleeding from his knee and thigh — and to thrown rubbish raining into the ring and chants of, “Money back! Money back!” — after the bout was declared a draw.

But that’s not where the story ended. The sheer spectacle and the possibilities it offered struck a chord with two of Inoki’s students, who established a company called Pancrase — a twist on pankration, a combat sport that was part of the ancient Olympics — in 1993.

That inspired the founding, four years later, of the Pride Fighting Championship, which 10 years after that was bought out by its major competitor: Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), or what has become the jewel in the crown of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

That’s right, fight fans, the path to the rattiest, tattiest form of two people trying to beat the crap out of each other in the name of organised, professional sport leads straight back to the classiest boxer who has yet lived.

So before we fire up our high dudgeon about these violent, unskilled, tattooed punks and their haircuts calculated to enrage adults everywhere scrambling around the floor of a cage like a couple of drunk cockroaches in an alley and daring to call it something worth paying money to see, let’s consider Ali’s role in making that happen.

And, by extension, boxing’s part in making MMA a modern monstrosity. Because that’s what it is: a disgusting display of human desire at its most base, bulletproof truth that we are not as civilised as we like to think we are, something that shouldn’t be allowed.

You want objective reporting? Go read the share prices.

Far from being the next big thing in pugilism, MMA is what happens when a sport goes backwards. Boxing’s regression from something that used to matter on the world stage — when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in 1936, even Americans suspended their racial enmity to unite against Hitler’s hitman — to the sad shadow of itself it has become has given MMA the chance to fill the void like some malignant virus.

Boxing attracted writers of the calibre and stature of Norman Mailer, who’s book, “The Fight”, about Ali and George Foreman’s “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa in 1974, and AJ Liebling, who titled his classic boxing book “The Sweet Science” and critiqued the fight game for no less august a magazine than the New Yorker.

You can’t stop progress. But MMA doesn’t represent progress. Instead it’s a stop on boxing’s way down from the pinnacle it reached in the 1950s as one of the blue riband sports.

Ali versus Inoki is exhibit A in an array of evidence that was added to in August when Floyd Mayweather earned a 10th-round TKO over UFC star Conor McGregor in a fight that was strictly about boxing.

That Mayweather’s reported earnings were US$300-million — or three times what McGregor made — tells us the mainstream still considers boxing more acceptable.

Similarly, that the gate takings amounted to almost US$17-million less than Mayweather’s fight with Manny Pacquiao in May 2015 will hearten boxing purists, as will the fact that the venture sold 300 000 fewer pay-per-views than Mayweather-Pacquiao.

But before we celebrate those truths let’s remember that Mayweather, the greatest boxer of the age, is a piece of unlikeable scum who has been jailed for beating up his girlfriend and who has won 50 professional fights largely by not getting hit.

Mayweather inherited the mantle of boxing’s leading brand ambassador from Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist whose idea of sushi involves human ear lobe.

So maybe we should give MMA’s violent, unskilled, tattooed punks and their haircuts calculated to enrage adults a chance, not least to prove they’re better at being people.

McGregor has already done so. He wore the Golden State Warriors jersey of basketball player CJ Watson before his showdown with Mayweather.

And Watson’s relationship with Josie Harris — Mayweather’s former partner and the mother of three of his four children — was why she was assaulted by the boxer.

There’s a real man in that mess, and his name isn’t Mayweather.