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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The major sports industry may have a problem. Especially Major League Baseball™, with an average viewer age of 53.[1]

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/12/baseballs-advertising-worries...

MLB deserves a special level of scorn for building the technology to bring them in to the digital age and then blocking a majority of users from seeing their favorite team. Local blackouts are fucking asinine -- especially when the service itself costs $120.

100% agree, NHL does this as well. Living near San Jose, can't watch a local Sharks game when it's happening. Tickets for playoffs games were >$100, and it's $25/month just for NHL.TV. Details of their blackouts: https://subscribe.nhl.com/us#blackouts

It's really just burning the biggest fans. I personally don't care about any sports, but if I did, I'd probably just find some shady streams online instead of trying to deal with all their restrictions, rules, and commercials. It really seems like they have no clue what people want, since they're unwilling to give it to them at any price. Smart business, IMO, would say, OK, you want no ads and no blackouts? $500 a year, or whatever. Figure out what it would cost and show people, so they understand how much they pay with their credit card and how much they pay with their time + eyeballs each month.

Edit: I'm sure the hardcore fans would take the more expensive package. You could even offer things like exclusive programming which would happen during times when commercials play for other lower-tier subscribers. Make it even cost twice what you're losing in ad revenue. The good will it would do for the brand, to even offer a no-commercial, no blackout, no contract, no BS option is not a zero-dollar value for the company either.

I cancelled my NHL.tv subscription because they subjected me to team/region blackouts despite _literally living in another continent_. Was a total waste of money - it could have been great.

Take journalism. You can purchase digital only for this much money, or you can purchase a digital + paper subscription for some amount more. Maybe even a premium subscription like the New York Times has with the crossword puzzle.

Why can't sports teams do that? Buy paper tickets for individual games for some amount. Buy digital access for individual games for some other amount. Buy digital season passes for another amount. Buy paper ticket season passes, includes digital season passes. Pre-order your digital season pass before the team goes to pre-season training and get a voucher for a free bleachers seat for one of the games. If you have a digital season pass, pay a premium to use an app which lets you decide which camera to watch through, control over rewinds, etc. Pay another premium to get get a version of the game, a week after it happened, with audio commentary tracks from the coaches and players.

It's not that hard, and honestly, they'd probably get even more money from the die-hard fans than they're getting now. The executives are just stuck in the stone age.

Stone age and profiting b/c people keep giving them money. Damned if I'm going to spend $hundreds on paper tickets, parking & over-priced junk food when the location of the seats(in said price tier) is determined by someone else to fit their preferences. The capacity for customer service is huge, but TV ratings and ads are all they seem to care about... tired pandering script and contractually required player comments to the 'great fans' notwithstanding.

Tickets for sharks playoff games are perfectly reasonable, especially considering what I'd have to pay in arenas in the east coast or the cost of going to a giants/warriors playoff game.

Where I live now, a Sharks playoff game ticket is cheaper than me going to a regular season hockey game.

NHL Center Ice was awesome when the commercial break came & you got the static camera image as the guy announced he has to hit the head and additional audio of announcers' goings on in the booth prepping for next segment. Of course, it couldn't last, I can pay AND get commercials; just like ad-free cable & ad-free sat radio.

The MLB service is pretty good, except for the blackouts. I think the issue is that they sell exclusive broadcast rights in team home markets. They need to find a way to fix that and if it means the service is $150 instead of $120, fine.

Can someone explain those local and national blackouts to me? As a european this concept sounds very foreign and absurd. Sure, I'll have to subscribe to Pay TV, but not being able to watch my favorite football (as in soccer) team is pretty much unthinkable over here, particularly if I already pay to do exactly that.

The UK does this with a lot of games - they're not on TV at all. Idea is to keep the fans going to the physical match.

Local tv channels have the broadcast rights for the home team area - like SNY in New York has the rights for the Mets. Their contracts specify that they have exclusive rights to the broadcast for their coverage area, so internet coverage must be blacked out.

Grew up a Red Sox fan, watching free games on broadcast TV every week and attending games for less than $10. At one point in the mid-80s bleacher seats were $2.

Left Boston, came back 8 years later, found that you can only watch games on cable and tickets are unbelievably expensive. The Red Sox's new owners want to make a lot of money and hire top talent to make them a winning team. But not all fans can afford to go along for the ride.

Now I have a family. We don't have cable so my son can't watch 95% of games on TV. The one time four of us went to Fenway it was nearly $400 about 15 rows back from the third base line. How can anyone keep that up? He never got a chance to be a fan like I did.

Correlation doesn't imply causation may be the wrong phrase here but as people get older they have more free time to watch these sort of things. Therefore it's possible the older folks passing are simply going to be replaced by younger folks aging. I have 0 evidence, just proposing a thought.

"traditional" sports are also struggling to engage a newer audience

Then they should stop refusing to allow cord cutters to stream live games. They either need to renegotiate or break their current contracts that lock them into their affiliates having the only broadcast rights to games.

Seriously it's obscene I can't stream live in market Chiefs games in KC via my Apple TV. Cable is dead, in so many ways. Adapt or die.

> Adapt or die.

Yes, and you see how entrenched companies with old management deals with new stuff

Their current contracts are worth billions of dollars. Breaking them would be a total disaster. This situation is absolutely a catch 22 for the sports leagues.

And how much is the cord cutter market that isn't streaming any of their sports except NHL right now? All the cord cutters are just simply not watching it.

Good lord even Cricket is streamable from Willow. And few Americans watch cricket.

To be fair, the average age of those viewers was 35 at first pitch.

Great article on the demographics of sports. NBA is the youngest fan base 45% are under 35 and PGA has the oldest fan base with a 63% are over 55 years old.

MLB has only 24% of it fans under 35 and 50% are over 55 years old.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/which-sp...

"The NCAA demographics for football and basketball are practically identical but they are surprising old (about 40% over 55+) and surprisingly white (about 80%), which clearly has as much to do with who owns a TV rather than who follows the sports."

I say NHL will be the last great cable sport: "The NHL audience is the richest of all professional sports. One-third of its viewers make more than $100k, compared to about 19 percent of the general population."

This is because as a former hockey player in the US it was cost thousands of dollars just for the equipment not even counting the ice fees.

NBA will rule the digital distribution in the future.

I think the NBA is by far the most forward-thinking of the four major pro sports and NCAA. They did just sign a pretty massive cable package that in effect for the next nine years and slow progress with streaming, but they are also heavily invested in finding new revenue streams to help replace what will likely be lost one day with these cable deals.

It will be interesting to see how the financials of that work as cable keeps bleeding customers. I think the entire situation will be a mess as long as these long-term contracts are in place. ESPN has rights to stream their NBA games digitally but you can't stream those ESPN games through NBA League Pass digital, nor does NBA League Pass allow you to your local team because that would interfere with local television rights.

As long as you have all these different rights packages in place, it will handcuff the league from producing something centrally that appeals to the most people. However, that type of service is also less likely to bring in the money that ESPN and Turner and the local sports channels are bringing to teams, so what's happening is in the best financial interest of the league, at least in the short term.

With the DirecTV NHL ShutOut package, people can enjoy all 1,230 professional hockey games each year the way they were meant to be enjoyed: by not seeing them at all."[1]

[1] http://www.theonion.com/article/popular-new-directv-package-...

this place is so stiff, i think you and i are the only ones laughing. cheers.

As a youth baseball coach, I have noticed that none of the players talk about a favorite baseball player or team. We're cord-cutters and my own kids never even mention watching a game. Not a good sign for MLB.

Great point, I have seen the same situation and we don't have cable as well. The other coach and I can tell the kids that do watch a lot of baseball. Their baseball IQ is a lot higher... but they've copied the swings and mannerisms of some pro players. Those little hitches in their swings or deliveries hurt them on the field. The kids that don't watch baseball have some pure swings... its pretty... but they are situationally clueless until or if they really dive in.

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