Appears to Be No Limit to Future of Sports on TV

It is March 2020. The San Francisco Giants are prohibitive favorites to extend the Steroid League’s nine-year reign of World Series dominance over the Still Natural League. Thirty-five-year-old LeBron James, having signed for short money to win a championship ring with the Lakers, is grumbling about his minutes. UCLA and USC are back in the NCAA basketball tournament, testament to a recommitment to defense, discipline and the newly expanded 128-team tournament field.

And how will we be consuming all this exciting sports action?

Would you believe hand-held wireless pay-per-view high-definition video-on-demand, with an interactive proposition-bet gambling component and real-time second-by-second updates on how your fantasy-league players are performing?

No?

Wanna bet?

That’s the spirit of 2020, as envisioned by a group of sports media executives toying with a crystal ball during the World Congress of Sports conference in Newport Beach last week.

Before looking ahead to 2020, sportsline.com founder Mike Levy advised looking back 20 years.

“Twenty years ago, nobody knew what the Internet was,” he said. “Twenty years ago, PCs were just starting out. Modems weren’t built into those PCs.... And there were no online services to go on except for text-based services. So 20 years from now, who knows?

“I can tell you one thing that was true 20 years ago and will be true 20 years from now -- and that is that people are going to be gambling a lot of money on sports ... and gamblers are looking for more interactive ways to do it. The Internet made it possible for these guys to open offshore accounts. And fantasy leagues have come on strong.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more interactivity in fantasy leagues. Every office in America is starting to put one together. If you’re not in the league, you want to be in one next year, because everybody’s having fun with it.”

Levy imagines telecasts of sporting events catering more to betting interests, with television viewers toggling their remote controls to place down-by-down proposition bets during NFL games. (Brace yourself for the accompanying ESPN studio show, “Oddsmakers.”) He also foresees interactive poker tournaments, open to the public, beginning with 1,000 tables of 10 players each and a television program showing highlights as tournament play progresses.

Steve Bornstein, president and chief executive of the NFL Network, said “it’s pretty clear” the future of sports consumption will be on demand.

“I don’t think it will be 100% on demand,” he said. “Television will still be primarily a passive experience. But ultimately, when you look out into the future, the majority of the consumption will be on demand.”

It is happening now. TiVo represents the tip of the video-on-demand iceberg, with networks already worried about becoming TV Titanics.

DirecTV founder Eddy Hartenstein said TiVo was viewed “by some segments of our world as an anti-Christ. It is the ultimate form of empowerment to the consumer we are after. It’s an on-demand type of world that we’re coming to, and as we’re able to have the economics to produce every single game that’s out there, once it’s out there, how do you put it into a format by which consumers can literally watch what they want to watch when they want it?

“Imagine for a moment, instead of the 1 million people that have TiVo today, if you get very quickly to 10 million and then 50 million, it’s not too wild [to envision that in] about five, six years from now, TiVo penetration in the 100 million television households that [will be similar] to what DVD penetration is.

“And then what happens to the very economics, the advertising-over-the air television model?”

Because TiVo enables viewers to record programs and fast-forward through the commercials, traditional television advertising could be rendered obsolete.

How will advertisers compensate?

If you watched last year’s World Series on Fox, glutted with virtual billboards behind the batter and Joe Buck fooling around with mid-game mobile phone calls to plug the manufacturer of that mobile phone, you have glimpsed the future.

“Product placement is going to become more and more popular,” Fox Sports President Ed Goren predicted.

So will pay-per-view, in Goren’s estimation, as networks try to cope with escalating sports rights fees.

“Long-term, if these rights keep going up, we’re going to stop writing the checks and the free ride 20 years from now will be over,” Goren said.

“One way or another, the consumer is going to pay. Either in higher cable fees, higher satellite fees, or ‘Let’s take the Super Bowl and make it pay-per-view, $49.95, just like a heavyweight championship fight.’ ”

What sports will we be watching in 2020? Twenty years ago, the idea of stock car racing drawing better TV ratings than the NBA was as unthinkable as life on Mars. A decade ago, hockey in this country was considered a boom sport.

There’s no accounting for tastes 16 years down the line, but Sports Illustrated Managing Editor Terry McDonell sees popular new sports developing from the surf and hip-hop cultures.

“There is so much coming out of those cultures,” he said. “They are churning down there. The clothing business, music, whatever. The potential of those sports in China, for example, is staggering to me, and I can’t believe that won’t be part of our niche 20 years down the road.”

The panel agreed that the NFL would remain prosperous in 2020.

“The NFL is the 2,000-pound gorilla,” Goren said. “They’re in great shape. They don’t need to change. Everybody else is chasing.”

Might Los Angeles have an NFL franchise by then?

There we go, playing fantasy football again.