Ticat radio won’t likely be Ticat radio
The indicators point toward broadcast going online on their own website and other platforms
Where will Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans find their radio broadcasts in 2021 and beyond?
Short answer: The team — meaning owner Bob Young, CEO Scott Mitchell and president Matt Afinec — won’t say yet.
Long answer: They already have said it, in several ways: in their hint-filled response to TSN 1150’s Tuesday abracadabra from All-Sports to all-business; in their website’s continued expansion of media content; in Young’s general state-of-the-industry answer to direct questions from The Spectator; and, most informingly, in the approach the franchise brain trust has taken toward many other traditionally accepted structures.
It’s our belief you will hear the Ticats’ games primarily via online streaming, on Ticats.ca and other platforms. And one or more of those platforms will eventually be shaped in a way we laypeople have never even thought about.
That is a purely personal guesstimate, but not very heavy on the “guess” part. Looking at a lot of two-plus-twos, almost every time they come up four.
And they’re no longer radio rights, but voice or audio rights, as the Ticats have been so carefully phrasing it.
The Ticats are likely still fine-tuning specific scenarios. Perhaps, for instance, they could look at offering simulcast opportunities of the online audio to local over-the-air radio stations. When The Spectator asked Thursday where the audio broadcast would land and if Marshall Ferguson would still be the play-by-play announcer, the team said right now it had no comment on anything, beyond Tuesday’s public statement after local TSN went dark about “our plans to deliver more audio content to our fans than ever before and distributing it on platforms where our fans want to consume it, when they want to consume it.”
That kind of access has always been the overarching mantra of online proponents and it’s not offbase at all. The sports world and its related media were already changing rapidly and, says Young, that’s been hyper-accelerated by the pandemic.
“People blame technology and say it’s hurting consumers, but that’s backwards,” Young told The Spectator this week. “Consumers are changing their behaviours and that’s causing this decline (in traditional sports and sports news consumption via traditional sources). The pandemic locked up 35 million Canadians and now they’re getting things by streaming on the internet.
“Bob Young, customer and sports fan, is disappointed and heartbroken that TSN didn’t succeed in Hamilton and was very impressed with their effort to make it work. Customers shifted where they consumed their sports and advertisers who supported the (old) model have shifted online with them,” he said. “As Bob Young, businessman, it’s up to me to help provide support for Scott and Matt as the Ticats try to serve our fans in their preference.”
Because of consumer-monitoring conditions specific to smaller Canadian radio markets — we’ll take a deeper dive into that in a future column — it’s impossible to gauge exactly how many fans are listening to any Ticats game on over-the-air radio. There are only approximations and, with today’s targeted marketing and branding and the desire to monetize fan interest beyond people in the stadium, that’s archaic and not enough.
While the Ticats respect the historic, they clearly don’t do archaic. Outside-the-box thinking informed the social-viewing design of Tim Hortons Field, where through the 2019 season a significant percentage of fans there in person were “watching” the game online or on stadium screens, while also socializing.
And, it was the Ticat group that spearheaded not only the successful creation of soccer’s Canadian Premier League, but also the 10year, $200-million domestic broadcast/streaming contract with a Spanish media giant. Hands up all those who saw any of that coming.
Through algorithms, online streaming can accurately inform teams, in this case the Ticats, exactly how many people are listening in at any time, and where and who they are. When you’re moving toward becoming less dependent upon the gates of just 10 home games per year, specific fan-knowledge is an economic imperative.
“We are well underway working on innovative ways to reimagine how our hundreds of thousands of fans around the world engage with our brand and consume our audio rights,” Afinec’s statement said.
There you have it.