Now here's a Surprise--after 15 years of record growth, NASCAR TV ratings are slipping. This from USA Today today (kinda redundant, wasn't that?):
"TV audiences sagged for 31 of 35 races this year. For 12 of those races the decline was at least 10%. Ratings on Fox, which broadcast the first half of the season, dropped 7%. TNT and NBC were down, respectively, 5% and 12% for the second half.
"I've told everybody I know to tune in," Dale Earnhardt Jr., says with a laugh. "But I'm only one guy. The racing is really the same. The drivers are the same. That big splash is gone. Maybe it's not quite as dramatic as we believe."
Oooof! Now there's a punch in the pants. I could launch into my usual howl about how Surprise needs to be continuous and all that, but frankly, I think NASCAR has done a fine job of keeping itself fresh. And with its always-unsure outcome, the world of sports is tailor-made Surprise.
Methinks the problem isn't the product, but the medium of broadcast itself.
Look at Major League Baseball. A recent Globe and Mail article about MLB.com gushed about the site's 1.7 billion visitors, 1.3 million paid subs, $19.5 million 2005 revenue and (pant, pant!) $4-to-5 billion valuation. Whew! Take me out to the IPO! Yet every year we're met with the same October headline: "World Series TV Ratings Reach All-Time Low."
We kicked this around at a recent R&D meeting at Airborne Entertainment, and the very wise John Bowie came up with this sage explanation:
"Maybe people are more interested in data than lying around watching the games."
Think about it. Sports in general--baseball, racing and football in particular--are stats driven and data intensive. Who needs to sit through the entire event when granular results can be fed to us instantaneously? And if we're really interested, we can watch the eye-popping highlights on TV, on the net, or on our cellphones almost immediately after they happen...and for days to come. If we're gonna spend time on the couch, we're gonna watch doofuses dance with stars, or sexy medical dramas, or pirated DVDs.
The big Surprise is not that sports are changing. No, the big Surprise is the way we are consuming them, and how they will be adapted for us because of this in the near future. (And not just on TV. Check out this CNN piece on the high-tech ballfield Cisco is proposing.)