The NA710N

For centuries, athletics have remained a core part of human culture and, especially in America, a base of cultural growth and development of national identity. Just this past month we experienced the highest form of this cultural adaptation—the Super Bowl, a sports event so important that the actual game takes a backseat to the spectacle of family, friends, freedom and country that accompanies it. Yet sports traditions as we know them are increasingly threatened by the evolution of entertainment technology. Events that were once necessarily group viewing will soon become available for mass individual consumption on wireless devices and personal computers.

The Consumer Electronics Association recently released a survey of sports fans with finding that seem to indicate the sports culture most Americans grow up with is, in large part, safe, and that of the international community, depending on the sport, is close to significant positive changes. The poll, conducted several weeks before the Super Bowl and spanning across the fan bases of most major sports in the United States, shows that there is a great willingness on the part of consumers to go online to find sports information and actually watch the events online as they occur. One in five sports fans polled said they were interested in watching live, televised games on a wireless or mobile device, though the willingness to go online varied from sport to sport. As the CEA’s Digital Answer Girl Megan Pollack tells us in her exclusive breakdown of the survey results for The NA710N, while the Super Bowl is still out of bounds for most sports viewers, those who plan on watching the Olympics are more open to wireless or mobile viewing.

For an event like the Super Bowl, that consists of a single game and is broadcast on a Sunday evening when very few Americans are working, the availability of alternative viewing methods might not have that much of an impact on the culture surrounding it. So much of the Super Bowl as we know it revolves around group eating, drinking, cheering, and partying that, by virtue of the game itself often being secondary to the near-holiday that surrounds it, few might opt to watch the event through a more personal medium. While the survey noted that 57% of respondents were planning to watch the Super Bowl this past weekend, only 13% said they would watch highlights online.

Sports events like the Super Bowl—a championship decided on one game broadcast at an extremely convenient time for most Americans—are few and far between, however. Most sports require a more crowded play schedule that spans a number of days. For example, the four tennis major tournaments span two weeks each, and since the male and female trophies are contested simultaneously, there is rarely a time when only one match is going on. The fact that three of the four tournaments (Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and the Australian Open) occur at least five hours off of the four American time zones makes following them during the weekdays even more difficult. In fact, the US Open has already implemented an online way to watch many matches not broadcast on TV while they occur simultaneously, and for free. Fans of international soccer tournaments—the World Cup, the Euro Cup, the America Cup, et al—find similar scheduling conflicts. In these cases, many fans turn to the internet to watch a live match that is not being broadcast on television but, due to their personal affiliations, are more invested in watching. Similarly, they can turn to the internet for highlights of matches they were unable to catch live. The CEA survey shows that, currently, nearly one in four (23%) sports fans follow statistics from other live games while watching a game, and this statistic spans baseball, basketball, tennis, soccer, and almost every other sport that requires more than one game to occur simultaneously. Nearly one in five are planning to use online coverage to keep track of the Olympic games, as well, which are an exaggerated form of a multi-game tournament in that dozens of sports are often occurring simultaneously.

With technology ever-expanding to include entertainment not formerly conceived in an individually-consumed medium, the fear of losing some of the mystique of the great sports events most of us grew up on is present. However, as of now it appears that the only way that our sports experiences are about to change thanks to the internet is that events requiring more than two eyes to keep track of are becoming increasingly attainable for spectators. It is already possible to watch multiple events simultaneously for some sports, but as access to the internet becomes more widespread and demand for further coverage continues, sports and sports culture will follow their lead.

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