The week of March 13, 2023: Track on TV!

Photo on beloved family TV screen by Ryo Gokita

From the Department of Accounting and Advertising

Written by Intern replaced by ChatGPT

Is the trend toward pay to view track and field part of a vendetta against the sport pursued by mega media companies? a mismanagement of resources by the powers that be? or part of a greater trend toward paid streaming that is influencing at home viewing across the board? Probably a little bit of the latter two and who knows, could be some of the first one, I’m just not in those ivory towers.

The internet has been abuzz lately with Twitter, comment sections and message boards about track and field increasingly being a pay to view experience. Recently, the discussion centered around the NCAA indoor Championships being on ESPN+, a service that viewers must pay $9.99/month to access. There has been a noticeable shift from T&F being on network TV to services with a paid subscription model over the past decade. What is also noticeable, is that the shift is true of content across the media landscape.

The way we have been consuming TV shows, movies and live sports has gone through a major shift over the last decade and continues to change. Many households do not have a cable package anymore, a delicacy that is especially rare amongst younger audiences. The drastic move has been toward streaming services, like Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime and many others. Cable channels have also developed streaming platforms of their own with tiered pricing, including ESPN, CBS, FOX and NBC’s Peacock. The way we are feeling the ripples of this shift is lamented by many of us, deciding which platforms and a la carte options to pay for and which ones to go without, and which subscriptions to remember to sign up for and cancel month after month. What we end up paying for now can equal or surpass what we used to pay for a cable package back when all these channels were bundled together.

The sneaky undercurrent of this shift is something often overlooked and leaves many fans of niche, or even sports and content just below the top, pointing fingers. What a bundled cable package used to do when everyone bought in was subsidize the viewing of other content for fans of that content. For example, HGTV viewers may never watch sports, but they purchased a cable package where ESPN was included and since ESPN received a share of the revenue, HGTV viewers subsidized viewing of sports for sports fans, who in turn subsidized home remodel shows for HGTV viewers.

Then we started complaining.

What we all wished for back in the halcyon days of cable was to just pay for the things we wanted, thinking that the sum of those parts would be less than what we paid for cable as a whole. Lord, how could we ever be so naïve as to believe that a change in payment structure would give us the upper hand over the conglomerates bent on squeezing every dollar out of us?

The repercussions of this carving up of content into different subscription models is that each streaming service is now competing with the other services instead of subsidizing them. It is a war for eyes and the weapons are the most broadly viewed shows and events. The trickle-down effect of this is that ESPN is going to show the sports with the biggest audiences and doesn’t really want to take the hit of showing sports with smaller audiences, because, in the model we asked for, that is not what most of their subscribers are paying for directly. Showing content not broadly desired might drive subscribers to another platform.  Additionally, the sports that they are going to elevate to show on old-fashioned TV (whatever that means anymore) for minimal cost to the consumer (you always have to pay something, whether cable package, subscription, PPV, etc.), are going to again be the ones that garner the most viewers, because advertisers who pay to push them out for ‘free’ want the most eyes, and have always wanted that. The difference is that now, the bar is higher since the cable package net has been pulled. Another caveat to this is that in the past, when track and swimming and The World’s Strongest Man Competition were aired on your home television set, streaming platforms didn’t exist! Things were only on TV because there was nowhere else for them to go. Networks didn’t have the option to push things to a lower level. If you weren’t on ESPN 8, you weren’t on!

The monoculture of shared content and experiences used to be strong because in-home viewable content only existed in one lighted box with limited channels, and there wasn’t that much content being created. Chances are if you made a joke from a TV show by the water cooler at work, most people would get it because everybody watched it. Now, hit rates for show references are much lower. If you throw one out there, chances are the person you’re talking to hasn’t seen the show and doesn’t have the streaming service where it lives. An awkward exchange ensues where you become a sort of pitch person for said streaming service so that one day when they make the purchase and settle down to watch the obscure show, your joke can finally land. Back in 1965, an episode of The Munsters got 50 million viewers regularly. Only the Super bowl gets more than that these days. Networks didn’t care much what was on because people were going to watch anyway and advertisers were throwing money at it because it was the only game in town. With many more single payer services and much more content being created than ever before, advertisers with sophisticated market research are able to be very selective with their dollars. I fear that The Munsters wouldn’t even make it in today’s TV market. The truth is that with the thinner spread of ad money across the bigger bagel of content platforms, most content providers are getting it done with some combination of advertising dollars and subscription fees.

Track is not the only sport suffering from this phenomenon. As the streaming market takes more and more away from cable viewing, it is killing local TV networks, which are the major viewing sources for Major League Baseball. Deals with regional sports networks account for 21% of the MLB’s almost $10.9 billion in revenue each season. Bally, the parent company of Sinclair broadcasting, which owns regional sports networks around the country is going bankrupt, not only leaving baseball fans wondering where they are going to watch their games (and who they are going to pay to watch them) but the MLB wondering how to make up that loss of revenue.

It is in this greater landscape that we find track fans pining for the good old days, when track was on TV, in black and white… but we want high def, with interesting camera angles and data that show the races beautifully, with a professionally produced and directed broadcast like football does (in 2022, the NFL & College football accounted for 44 of the 50 most viewed TV broadcasts). And we would also like no commercials, and please don’t cut away from the longer distance races with other events. Oh, and by the way, at our best estimate, there are around 50,000 of us dedicated track fans nationwide. We may be vocal in our own corner of the internet, but not an audience salivated over by the kinds of corporations who can put up cash to get us front and center.

It is beside the point, but outside of the Diamond League, does pro track have a media property that they could sell to a network where viewers could depend on watching the best compete regularly in a series like The Munsters or the NFL? Many high-level meets are ‘pop-up” meets thrown together to serve the purpose of getting athletes qualifying marks for the World Championships or the Olympics. They don’t have the infrastructure or runway to make lucrative TV deals nor the funding from brands or commitment from athletes to be there year over year, and we’ve learned over and over again that watching athletes try to hit qualifying marks is not something that the general public is interested in watching. Why do fans only care about the sport every four years? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when athletes care about winning the race they are in, viewers will care too.

It is in THIS landscape that we, the Tracklnd team find ourselves. Our goal is to provide all of this. We work our tails off to give you all of the above… except the free part. If we could do it for free, we would, we love it that much. But if we must charge, we want the majority of the revenue coming in to go to the athletes, because they are why you tune in, and they are why we do what we do… and maybe that chunk of PPV money put into the prize purse pushes the sport closer to a professional one where athletes are paid for their performance on the track.

We are not saying you should stop voicing your displeasure on Twitter, maybe it will help. Maybe we will return to a cable subscription package in the future, but right now, due to the state of the media market across the spectrum, it seems unlikely. I do think the best chance we have to get advertisers to put up the funds to make Track & Field viewable for ‘free’ on TV is to show we are a motivated fanbase that loves the sport and the athletes in it. You can do this by paying $5.99 to watch a professional track meet, with $4 going to the athletes competing. The bigger the purses, the more investment-minded marketers will want to market their products in front of an audience that they believe will pay $5.99 for the brand of cheese they are displaying between the 800m and 1500m races.

Boxing and MMA have been PPV sports for a very long time, so their consumers haven’t had a shift in pricing for goods like we are experiencing now. Those sports have also been professional for much longer (track only began allowing sponsors to pay athletes in the 80’s. It’s a system currently more akin the NCAA allowing NIL than it is like other pro sports but that’s a subject for another article), and their athletes earn tens of millions of dollars from the PPV model. Track still exists in an amateur model (for love of country and not money) for the most part and we want it for free. What gives? Who loses?

I think track has the potential to be a wildly popular and broadly viewed sport, and we at Tracklnd are pushing to show it in new and creative ways to take the authentic, dramatic and compelling elements of what make the sport great resonate with more audiences. What you as a track fan can do to help the sport succeed is to watch.

Yes, track fandom is struggling for a number of reasons (sport structure, promotion) and yes, the fanbase is smaller than other sports, but these wounds are also exaggerated by the repercussions of the changing landscape of live sports and content consumption in general.

So, the question right now is not: do you want to pay to watch track or do you want to watch for free? It is: who do you want to pay?

Tracklnd Spring PPV Schedule

LA Track Fest: May 6th

Portland Track Festival: June 3rd & 4th