Category: gaming

NBC Sport’s “no sh*t, Sherlock” moment…

Apropos of my post yesterday, it was announced that NBC will air the 2018 Winter Games from South Korea completely live. As noted in this article – and the source of my blog title – it was mentioned:

“Live viewers are more likely to sit through commercials.”

And that is the point. It is all about the advertising. As a few cable companies are learning, if you make sports programming a paid exercise, you may lose quite a few viewers. Just witness what has happened here in Los Angeles with both the Dodgers and the Lakers. Plus, getting viewers onto your platform gives a great advantage to promoting other programs that the public might not otherwise be aware of.

There’s also this predictable tidbit about the value of airing awards shows live:

 “Awards shows — which have become major drivers of traffic on social media — have increasingly moved to live telecasts across the country. The Golden Globe Awards on NBC have aired live coast to coast since 2010. CBS gave its West Coast stations and affiliates the option to take the Grammy Awards live starting in 2016.”

The question of expanding sports programming into things like e-games may not hold for awards shows. There seems to be a intrinsic limit to what the public appetite is for more awards programs. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

How sports rule the media world…

I’ve commented on this many times before, but with March Madness almost concluded – and being a graduate of two ACC schools – this article simply reinforces what I’ve been saying time and again. If you need advertisers, and said advertisers don’t want viewers skipping their ads, then sports seem to be the best cure-all for that.

Of course, this is no secret, and the leagues know that. Disney, which owns ESPN, has been feeling the pinch of greater competition and, in turn, higher programming costs. Disney’s stock price peaked in 2015, and pressure from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat has been driving sports programming costs up. Here’s one example of that.

With the advent of so-called “e-sports,” other digital players are seeking out new area’s that will eventually compete with legacy sports. Here, you can read about YouTube’s investment in this new arena, following the lead of singular startups like PewDiePie (which is an incredible story in and of itself). Perhaps we should have seen this coming when watching people play high-stakes poker entered the scene a few years ago.

Granted, the very definition of sports is in flux right now, but it is clear that the drive for viewers that won’t skip commercials are in great demand, and unless we are prepared for a completely ala carte world of consuming content – and that doesn’t seem realistic – we must prepare and predict the future of sports programming.

This is what e-merge is all about!

When I first devised the concept of e-merge Media (back in 2003!), my thought was that the landscape of entertainment would be forever changed by the adoption of digital media. We see it on our mobile devices everyday, and now there is increasing convergence of media devices with entertainment. Apple was the first with its wildly popular merging of iTunes with the iPod and, eventually, iPhone.

Today, we are seeing Amazon, initially a online retailer, using music again to promote a tech device. In this case, its Echo. It already has experience with the Kindle and ebooks, but this now puts it squarely in competition with Apple, Spotify and Pandora. But this poses a larger question…

Will it become necessary for device makers to create (or own) the content it provides? Microsoft tried it with the Xbox, and Sony tried it with the Playstation, but each has had varying degrees of success, and the outlook is still hazy.

I will be watching very carefully to see what happens with Verizon and Yahoo! I will also see what develops with AT&T and DirecTV. Now that Netflix is enjoying success with its original programming, and previous suppliers becoming reluctant to sell to a direct competitor, will the it become a takeover target for a television manufacturer or wireless provider?

I am very excited about the prospects of this merging of entertainment with technology… and I humbly (or not) say that i saw it coming way back in 2003.

All hail e-merge Media!

Is this the start of true VR content?

With the Oculus Rift now hitting shelves, and competing headsets either already here, or on the way, what is the future of virtual reality? Ever since seeing VR5 on Fox in the mid-1990s, and “The Lawnmower Man” with Jeff Fahey in 1992, I’ve longed for a story that matched the promise of virtual reality. And, according to AdAge, so are others out there.

You’ve probably seen the “Hardcore Henry” trailer recently, and I am fearful that this is the start of content specifically designed for virtual reality. In the same way that writing for video games differs from interactive television, which differs from sequential storytelling, there needs to be a compelling reason to see a story told via a special mechanism or appliance. I can’t tell you how often I was lured into 3-D movies with the red and blue glasses, only to be bored silly with the inane plots and exaggerated movements. Many of you will recall the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, too, and they all point to the faddish nature of these efforts.

There is a lot of money invested, and at stake, in the next iteration of tech-based storytelling, and the first to crack that code will likely become very wealthy. But with the recent history of these kind of efforts, I will not hold my breath, because the many will try, but few will succeed – at least, for a while.