Sports Business Digest » Now playing on You Tube: Live Sports Broadcasts

Now playing on You Tube: Live Sports Broadcasts

Posted on January 25th, 2010. Written by Emmett Jones.

Flying Cars. Teleportation. The end of network television.

So…which one of these is most likely? I’m not sure, myself, but it seems like network television may be in the process of taking another major hit. This time? Its in the form of the web-based live sports broadcast. The sport? cricket.

YouTube has announced an exclusive deal to broadcast live online the entire cricket season of the upstart Indian Premier League this year. “[This is] the largest and most extensive live streaming that we’ve ever done, I think that’s ever been done on the internet before,” Shailesh Rao, Managing Director, Google India said yesterday. The season will be shown everywhere around the world except inside the United States. (via NYT)

As the article goes on to mention, there have been some other events broadcast live on You Tube previously (i.e. U.S. presidential inauguration), but they were one time special events. Broadcasting the Indian Premier League could be the beginning of a huge shift from the network broadcasting of sports to the seemingly more versatile internet. The hurdle of making money has already been cleared (namely advertising during videos), the infrastructure (YouTube, and others) is already in place, and most importantly the larger scaled infrastructure that surrounds network television (networks having their shows broadcast by affiliate networks to the consumer; a top down approach) is in danger of being replaced by the ever growing world of user based content.

Sure, if you are the NFL or MLB you’d much rather have the top-down approach; there’s much more money to be made. But, if the network television model erodes such that its no longer the premium model or format choice (see: NBC network programming over the last 6 months or various entities attempts to create web-based only television shows) then how can the sports networks justify continuing the current course of action? A factory could make more money producing a plastic pipe over a copper pipe…but if no one is using copper pipes, why would they keep making them?

The live broadcast of the Indian Premier League may be media’s first step towards those “plastic pipes”.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Fringe Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.