Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-Albert Einstein
I'm a huge football fan. It's pretty much all I watch on TV these days* and while I'll catch my favorite shows online or on DVD, there's no value in watching sports after the fact. I'm pretty much the NFL's wet dream when it comes to a TV watcher. I'll watch football over anything else that's on. So it's surprising to me that this Thursday night's game won't be on my TV. It's surprising to me that they wouldn't do everything in their power to get the Cowboys / Packers game in front of my grubby little eyeballs.
The problem is that the NFL has its own channel and the NFL channel isn't carried by cable providers. Or something, I don't really care. All I know is that I won't be watching it and while that's good for my productivity, it's bad for the NFL.
I've never really given it much thought before but the idea of having an NFL channel seems kind of stupid. If the writers strike (which is over internet residuals) is teaching us anything, it's that everyone knows that distribution is changing radically**. And if Napster taught us anything it's that we're not always going to want a CD, but we are for damn sure going to want music.
The NFL isn't in the content delivery business (as far as I know). They're in the content creation business. And they're wildly successful. Football is the most popular sport in America. Given that popularity, why restrict who can consume your product? It doesn't make any sense to me. Does the NFL not understand the shift that's happening? Or is it a ploy to either force viewers onto satellite TV or the cable company to carry the NFL network? Or is it something else all together?
(Check out the comments from Time Slicing Advertisements. It proves two things. One of you out there has an answer and (although hard to admit) my readers are smarter than me. Especially Tim.)
*I also watch UCLA basketball. And college football. And sports center. And I watched the World Series. And UFC events. Alright, I'm sort of a liar but I was making a point.
**To be fair, I don't watch any of the shows I listed. Friends tell me they suck, but I listed them because two of the three (Quarterlife and We Need Girlfriends) have been picked up by networks. The point is that new and established players aren't afraid to take their content to the Internet.
Posted by Ben Corman at 7:09 PM