Bite-sized basketball for live TV leaves a sour taste
The NBA’S plan to sell sections of matches for broadcast is risky – sport needs its boring bits, writes Alan Tyers
If you are too busy to watch a match, perhaps basketball is not the sport for you
An intriguing announcement from America’s National Basketball Association this week: it plans to sell broadcast rights to sections of matches, not just entire games, to fans who wish to watch via computer, tablet or mobile.
The NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, gave an example to ESPN of how this might work. “We imagine a situation where a fan has dinner at 8 o’clock and only has 30 minutes and can choose to buy a half-hour of a game,” Silver said.
For starters, they are going to offer the final quarter (12 minutes) for a fee of $1.99. (Although there are 12 minutes on the clock, basketball games generally run for about 2hr 15min, due to time-outs and such like; so you might be getting 30-40 minutes of programming for your £1.50.)
In future, the NBA plans to slice up the games for purchase in fractions on its app: watch the first quarter, the third, whatever.
With 82 games per team in the regular season, it seems reasonable enough that you might not want to watch every second. In my own deeply limited experience of watching basketball, if you are going to bother watching any of it, the ending is the bit to go for: a couple of hours of relentless you-go-i-go scoring in the first three quarters can set the table for a tight, exciting finish.
With the US opening up sports to legalised gambling, punters might be served by the offer of watching only the part of the match in which they have a financial interest, or so the NBA has conceded. Not exactly the Corinthian ideal, but we are where we are with betting’s iron grip of sport, because it seems to matter more when there is money on it.
It will be interesting to see if fans go for the NBA’S scheme, not least because other sports could follow suit. For those whose attention span does not run to an entire T20 cricket match, perhaps just the death overs. Save poor Steve Cram the taxing business of talking you through 24 laps of the Olympic 10,000 metres and drop in for the shakedown at the end. Skip 90 minutes of Manchester United trying to play football and cut straight to the sour, petulant, post-match Jose Mourinho interview.
It occurs that the NBA is trying to offer its fans what it thinks they want: everybody feels busy these days, basketball, like everything else, is competing for time and space – why not slice and dice the exciting bits?
But what of context, of rising tension? While one is not suggesting it as a marketing strategy, a lot of sport can be boring, grinding, attritional, quotidian. The lastminute winner is all the more exciting because we fans know that we have endured many, many more minutes of frustration, tedium or worse to get to this point.
The NBA proposal makes one queasy: a sort of junk-food offering for those without the taste or palate for the real Mccoy.
Sport needs its quiet, flat periods to throw the peaks and troughs of triumph and despair into relief. If you are too busy or hyperactive to watch a basketball match, perhaps watching basketball is not the pastime for you. Or are we all babies now, in need of constant stimulation with no thought for meaning, just hungry for little clips of confected drama piped into our faces?