How Is Social Media Changing Sports Broadcasting
Sports broadcasting around the world is slowly moving away from the TV screens and is getting closer to online streaming. As fewer people watch TV nowadays, sports broadcasting companies are facing a drop in viewership.
Numerous online streaming services and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, are the go-to places for millennials and young adults who wish to stay up to date with the latest sports-related information.
Will this affect the general viewership, and if so – how exactly? The team behind BettingSites was wondering the same thing, so they created an infographic that presents a lot of useful and relevant information that answers the question. Let’s take a look.
The New Relationship Between Social Media and Sports Fans
The sports industry transition from TV broadcasting to the internet is not a new phenomenon. It started more than a decade ago, and by 2015, the sports industry has almost fully embraced different social media services.
The reason they did this was that sports fans had been asking for it. People nowadays crave information without any delay, which is evident from the fact that the number of fans viewing sports content on smartphones and tablets has spiked from 21% to 39% between 2013 – 2016.
Even though this number is impressive, 93.3% of global sports experts are convinced that the engagement of sports fans on social media will grow even more over the next decade.
Top Sports Leagues Embrace Online Streaming
Sports leagues, clubs, and organizations all depend on fans and viewership to create profit. Therefore, the majority of the biggest sports leagues are embracing online streaming and moving to social media platforms.
For example, Twitter paid the NFL $10 million to get the rights for streaming 10 live games on the platform. Similarly, Facebook got the rights for streaming 46 live matches from Mexico’s Liga MX soccer league in 2017.
Fewer and fewer sports fans own a TV device nowadays, so this is a logical move from sports leagues to increase the number of new fans and offer more convenience to existing fans.
Consequently, in 2016, the view-per-share ratio shows a 40% increase in sharing sports clips, meaning that the brunt of sports industry-related events are happening online.
Sports Broadcasting Companies: Adapt or Disappear
Popular sports broadcasting companies, such as ESPN and Sky Sports, have no other solution than to adapt to this trend. If they choose to go against the flow, they might be signing own death sentence.
For example, before it learned the lesson, ESPN had lost 12 million subscribers by 2012. This has resulted in a huge loss of $52 million in revenue.Similarly, Sky Sports viewership base decreased by 19% in 2016, as the internet has become a much more convenient and reliable source of sports information.
This is just the beginning of the saga between the sports industry on the one side and social media on the other. If you want to learn more about it, we encourage you to take a closer look at the infographic.
