Two brief comments because I don’t have the brain cells firing after a long week. One, if she is serious about polisci, and she wants to chat about the field/study/what do you do with that degree/dont get a PHD 🙃 - I’m available. I can also connect her to people who stayed in academia as well. :). 2 - Mitchell & Webb “The football is officially going on forever!!!” And ‘Are we the baddies!?!’ Comedy gold
People have been talking for years about the end of monoculture, but I think an underrated aspect of that is that cultural production of all types is more profitable with a narrow base of superfans than a broad base of casual ones. At the low end, I there are plenty of individual "creators" who once made a big splash online but are now working specifically for a loyal Patreon audience that sustains them. (I know this from some experience: while my blog is still public and gets thousands of viewers a day, I now get about 60% of my revenue from the ~450 people who have chosen one of the various ways to subscribe to ad-free versions of my posts, which is twice as much as I actually make from the ads.)
Anyway, your talk about the NBA made me wonder whether, at the completely other end of the cultural production spectrum, something similar is going on with pro sports. Trump went on one his classic riffs in an interview a couple years ago about baseball, and how you used to be able to turn on the TV in the summer and it was just kind of on, but now you can't find it anywhere. When he's right, he's right: now it's usually on cable, and your home team specifically is usually on a team-owned cable channel that has squeezed the local monopoly for all it can get and you can only watch if you subscribe to an upper-tier package. Teams are probably making tons more money that way than they would just selling to a local UHF channel, so they're perfectly happy, but it cuts down the number of casual fans and the overall impacts of sports on the culture.
I think that's a really important point. Baseball is a great example because it's clearly declining, most teams are cutting payroll, and MLB just walked away from ESPN because ESPN isn't covering baseball enough.
Baseball does have inertia, and millions of kids still play it. But it's hard to see how it would be successful in our current media landscape if it were invented today and didn't have that older fan base from the "it's just on" era.
The regional sports networks are only available on big cable or streaming bundles. That means if you actually want to watch more than the occasional national game by your home MLB, NBA, or NHL team, you have to shell out the full $86 a month for hundreds of channels you don't want to watch.
It would be great to have something like the niche patreon model for local sports. You love the Red Sox? You can just get NESN. They can obviously get a lot more per household than they would through the bundles, but they need to keep the bundle scam going as long as possible.
Yeah the bundle is the drug they can't get away from! The average person who actively wants to watch the local baseball team would probably pay more than the per-subscriber fee they get from the cable monopoly, but there are SO MANY MORE cable subscribers willing to pay that subscriber fee not bc they care about the local baseball team but bc it's part of some larger package they want. At some point the number of cord-cutters is gonna be high enough that this will no longer work, but honestly I've been waiting for that day for nearly a decade and it hasn't happened yet so who knows when at this point.
Two brief comments because I don’t have the brain cells firing after a long week. One, if she is serious about polisci, and she wants to chat about the field/study/what do you do with that degree/dont get a PHD 🙃 - I’m available. I can also connect her to people who stayed in academia as well. :). 2 - Mitchell & Webb “The football is officially going on forever!!!” And ‘Are we the baddies!?!’ Comedy gold
People have been talking for years about the end of monoculture, but I think an underrated aspect of that is that cultural production of all types is more profitable with a narrow base of superfans than a broad base of casual ones. At the low end, I there are plenty of individual "creators" who once made a big splash online but are now working specifically for a loyal Patreon audience that sustains them. (I know this from some experience: while my blog is still public and gets thousands of viewers a day, I now get about 60% of my revenue from the ~450 people who have chosen one of the various ways to subscribe to ad-free versions of my posts, which is twice as much as I actually make from the ads.)
Anyway, your talk about the NBA made me wonder whether, at the completely other end of the cultural production spectrum, something similar is going on with pro sports. Trump went on one his classic riffs in an interview a couple years ago about baseball, and how you used to be able to turn on the TV in the summer and it was just kind of on, but now you can't find it anywhere. When he's right, he's right: now it's usually on cable, and your home team specifically is usually on a team-owned cable channel that has squeezed the local monopoly for all it can get and you can only watch if you subscribe to an upper-tier package. Teams are probably making tons more money that way than they would just selling to a local UHF channel, so they're perfectly happy, but it cuts down the number of casual fans and the overall impacts of sports on the culture.
I think that's a really important point. Baseball is a great example because it's clearly declining, most teams are cutting payroll, and MLB just walked away from ESPN because ESPN isn't covering baseball enough.
Baseball does have inertia, and millions of kids still play it. But it's hard to see how it would be successful in our current media landscape if it were invented today and didn't have that older fan base from the "it's just on" era.
The regional sports networks are only available on big cable or streaming bundles. That means if you actually want to watch more than the occasional national game by your home MLB, NBA, or NHL team, you have to shell out the full $86 a month for hundreds of channels you don't want to watch.
It would be great to have something like the niche patreon model for local sports. You love the Red Sox? You can just get NESN. They can obviously get a lot more per household than they would through the bundles, but they need to keep the bundle scam going as long as possible.
Yeah the bundle is the drug they can't get away from! The average person who actively wants to watch the local baseball team would probably pay more than the per-subscriber fee they get from the cable monopoly, but there are SO MANY MORE cable subscribers willing to pay that subscriber fee not bc they care about the local baseball team but bc it's part of some larger package they want. At some point the number of cord-cutters is gonna be high enough that this will no longer work, but honestly I've been waiting for that day for nearly a decade and it hasn't happened yet so who knows when at this point.