Blog: e-sports

The NFL’s commissioner Roger Goodell announced to all 32 teams in a memo on March 26th that the NFL draft will go ahead as scheduled from the 23 rd to 25 th of April, despite growing pressures resulting from COVID-19 to postpone the event.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is increasing pressure on the viability of emerging and legacy media business models, and is already having an unprecedented impact on the sports industry. An unprecedented swathe of cancelled sports events has left rights holders unable to monetise their existing broadcasting of rights within tightly-scheduled windows.

Sports as a product is feeling the squeeze of the peak attention economy. Sports fans in the traditional sense are ageing, and appealing to a younger digitally-native audience is a fundamental issue that rights holders can no longer ignore.

5 September marked the kick-off of the 2019 National Football League (NFL) season – its 100th season to-date. This will be particularly relevant for broadcasters and sports rights holders alike, as the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl LIII back in February recorded its TV audience at an all-time low since 2008.

Is the peaking attention economy the underlying cause for the decline in sports consumption from the younger demographic, or is it the mediums through which rights holders are distributing sports content ? MIDiA argues… both.

Imagine you’ve got three behaviourally defined consumer segments: PC Gamers Console Gamers Live concert goers Which group is most likely to attend an e-sports event? Intuitively, it has to be Gamers, right? …WRONG! Data from the Q1 MIDiA Research survey across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and India (n=12,000) states that 5% of gamers attend e-sports events, compared to a 3% all-consumer average.

This article is derived from MIDiA’s report, 'eSports: An alternative future for televised sports?' The days of overpriced suspect hotdogs and rioting stadiums are far from over. Sports, despite their inability to retain cord cutting TV viewers , remain an immovable part of the attention economy.

In December, we wrote about a deal that brought the NBA’s G League (minor league) live matches to Twitch. Now Twitch’s focus on basketball is about to extend further, though this time it will be through video games, as it was announced that the platform will live stream all matches of the NBA 2K League in 2018.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, said in an interview that while genres like sport simulators are still in the running to be considered for 2024, the Olympics have no interest in promoting anything to do with violence and killing.