Why Nfl Viewership Decline

The three factors that are causing viewership to decline include the Olympic year, the presidential race, and over the top services. The Olympic year started on the 5th of August and ran to 21st of August while the Paralympics went from September 7th to the 18th. This leaches viewers from the MLB and NFL, which makes their ratings look lower. Moving to the presidential race, there have been four debates occurring on September 26th, October 4th, October 9th, and October 19th. This directly affects the MLB regular season and playoffs and NFL. Two dates, September 26th and October 9th, affected the NFL prime time slots. Finally looking at over the top services, many have started taking viewership away from cable affecting ratings. The problem
lies with the over the top services not being rated, which makes it appear as if viewers are disappearing. With the Olympic over with, and the presidential race wrapping up, most networks will just have to compete with over the top services for viewership.
According to the article, NFL is dealing with decreased viewership.
To start with the basics, “Sunday Night Football, television’s highest-rated prime-time show for five years running, has seen a 10 percent viewership drop so far this season. Cable’s top sports property, “Monday Night Football,” is down 19 percent — the series’ slowest start in a decade. Through two games, “Thursday Night Football” viewership is down 15 percent” (Ourand, Karp, & Kaplan, "Time to panic over declining viewership? ", 2016).
All three of the prime time games are down by at least 10 percent two weeks into the season. This one stat should be enough to make the NFL very concerned for the future.
Consumers are watching sports in a variety of ways in the current day in age. Led by live TV via cable, many are starting to migrate to over the top services, social media and illegal streaming. Why watch the game when you can see all of the stats and highlights on Twitter? Or why pay for an expensive cable bill, when a simple Google search can locate an illegal stream of games. Also, many bars are starting to carry NFL Sunday ticket which means dozens of fans can watch games for “free”. The day of age where consumers would watch live TV at home is starting to
diminish.
While viewership has been dropping as of recent, many are trying to define the effects of the drop. The article doesn’t seem to touch on this much, but looking at where professional teams can tap into for profit, the first area that comes to mind is the fans. Since a lot of revenue comes from media rights, if the media bubble were to burst, teams would still have bills to pay. The instant reaction would be to hike up everything from ticket prices to food prices at the stadium. In the long term, we could see teams or markets create over the top services to broadcast their own games meaning they would not need to sell their rights. The future is murky at best as to the potential consequences of a media bubble bursting.
While talking to my roommate Pat, we got into the conversation of how our viewing habits have changed over the year.
He stated, “Last year we watched a lot of sport events on live TV, while this year we have Sunday Ticket and Center Ice, we watch a lot less live TV. Not only that, but with Sportscenter now on late night, I can miss the games during the night and watch the late night Sportscenter and be caught up. Those are the two major differences.” This is something I noticed that I do a lot of also, which would add to the viewership numbers of over the top services, a directly competitor of live TV. Also, as we get older and busier, it is easier to look up scores and highlights on social media like Instagram and Twitter. This allows access to all the important information and plays that happened within the games that
night.
If I was an executive, there might not be much to chance the drop in ratings in the current setting. This is due to many sports channels being locked into cable packages. I am also a firm believer that much of the viewership decrease is thanks to over the top services, which could be bias in this situation. As an executive, I would try to get out of cable packages if the ratings continue to drop for two more years and market, for example, ESPN as its own service. Why two more years? Currently ESPN gets a lot of revenue from cable packages in which many viewers don’t even watch ESPN. But with all of the “cable cutters” getting rid of cable, this will drop the revenue generated by “non-watchers” in which making it more valuable to market ESPN as its own identity. Hopefully within two years streaming will be rated, which will make the data show a spike in viewership. Making ESPN a over the top service will allow easier access to the sports that the viewer wants to view.
Current executives are not worried about the current drop in ratings because in the words of ESPN’s senior vice president of global research and analytics Artie Bulgrin, “It’s impossible to suggest that there’s anything going wrong here, particularly in light of the fact that we are in a really odd year in terms of the protracted presidential race, which has captured the attention of Americans going back a year now. Plus, it’s an Olympic year, which clearly had an impact during the summer” (Ourand, Karp, & Kaplan, "Time to panic over declining viewership? ", 2016). Many executives might not be concerned because they cannot be. They have to act as if nothings wrong when facing the public in order to not cause panic. Surely executives cannot pin all of the bad ratings on more competition. While the executives wait in stress, we shall see where the wild sports ride takes us.
As stated earlier in the essay, I think that much of the viewership is being leached by over the top services where there are no ratings currently. Therefore it would make this the beginning of a tread. While many are starting to engage in other ways to watch or keep up with sports, cable ratings are on a downward trend.