With No Fans In The Stands, TV Broadcasters Add Features, Noises
Michael Hedges May 27, 2020 Follow on Twitter
To the delight of many, sports are returning. It’s an ambiguous term, return. Of course, leagues are preparing for something. Sports writers and broadcasters, impatient with rehashing historical bouts, want some action lest their employers find cooking shows for them to work on. Some assume fans are ready to stand in line for seats and beer. Perhaps they will just stay home.
 German professional football league Bundesliga (DFL) has performed during the last two weeks. Broadcasters and streamers are showing fan-free matches. The more adept directors are keeping to closeups of the action, avoiding the empty stands. To close the interest gap, broadcasters and streamers are offering new features.
This week fans watching DFL teams Borussia Dortmund Bayern Munich were treated to an innovation from Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported TechRadar (May 27). Through the miracle of artificial intelligence (AI) and capacity of the Amazon Cloud player positions are tracked in real-time and projected as intended player style. Another feature displays goal probabilities from any position. Both AI tools are available through broadcasts and, of course, the Bundesliga mobile app.
Interest in DFL matches remains strong among streamers DAZN and Amazon Prime Video and satellite broadcaster Sky Germany. All have forced the DFL to renegotiate domestic rights contracts for the current season. Discovery Communications, owner of EuroSport, originally acquired rights broadly to end in 2021 and currently wants out of the deal citing a “special termination” clause, reported SportsBusiness (May 27). Hence, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video could access more matches through short-term agreements.
Pay-TV broadcaster Sky Deutschland, subsidiary of Comcast, also has Bundesliga rights. The first weekend of resumed match play drew 6 million viewers with some, noted Süddeutsche Zeitung (May 27), coming from “abroad, after all, as football returned to Germany faster than anywhere else.” Sky Deutschland, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video have slightly different intentions. DAZN is fixed on becoming the Netflix of sports while Amazon Prime Video remains focused on its retail business. For Sky Deutschland, then, sports is a compliment to its full-range pay-TV package.
Meanwhile in Italy, with Serie A football matches set to resume in mid-June, Sky Italia, also part of Comcast, is balking at paying the final installment of this years’ right fee, €130 million, reported Gazetta dello Sport (May 27). The pay-TV broadcaster is demanding a discount, which the league is not keen to give. A contract is a contract, said the league. International rights for Serie A football are held by the aforementioned DAZN and sports event management company IMG. They have agreed to pay but in two installments.
Fox Sports, subsidiary of Fox Corporation, might augment reality, reports NBC Sports (May 26), and add crowd noises to US National Football League (NFL) matches when play resumes. It’s a throwback to the 1930s when US radio announcers created major league baseball games from real-time wire-services (think: teletype) and engineers added appropriate sounds. That was the time of “theater of the mind.” When the teletype failed these great storytellers got creative. Of course, Fox has plenty of experience with fantasy.
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Sports fans are understandably restless. The season - take your pick - has been cancelled, with a few utterly bizarre exceptions. This is a challenge for sports editors and reporters as well as broadcasters. So far, the sports news hole is being filled with sports stars’ heart-warming stories of donating a million here or there and lesser players’ tales of anguish. Just how much longer the fans will tune to archived broadcasts of feats past is unknown. But the cold hard business of sports continues.
Television thrives on predictability. For two decades reality TV defined the medium - from Big Brother and Survivor to Dancing With Stars and the ubiquitous Got Talent franchise. Broadcasters have been thrown off their pace by the ascendent streaming services, not limited to Netflix, taking advantage of new technologies and spending fortunes on top drawer productions.
As the merry seasons change so, too, sports. Every season has its preferred sports; indoor moves outdoor and vice versa. Every season, though, is fit for TV sports. But for sports fans there is always the next game, match, bout or race - all on TV.
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