Feeling a bit lazy, I decided to see what the world of sports entertainment was offering on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In a better age, the answer would have been nothing unless you lived in a city with an NBA or NHL team. They would play their games before the weekend and then take off for the holiday. In this age, the people who run the sports leagues think Christmas is the perfect time to make their mostly black employees perform for them and the rest of us.
A few minutes looking at the sports sites and it was clear it was going to be college basketball or nothing at all, always a good option. It has been so long since I have consumed college basketball, it was a bit confusing. The game that jumped out at me was Midway University versus Bellarmine. Midway is not located on a Pacific island, as the name would suggest. It is in Kentucky and originally called the Kentucky Female Orphan School. Now they play men’s basketball.
One of the things you quickly notice when scanning the college basketball schedule is that we have far too many colleges. Not to pick on the good folks at the Kentucky Female Orphan School, but what is the point? When it was actually a female orphan school, it made some sense. Taking care of female orphans is a good thing, but now it is a university handing out worthless credentials. We could easily shutter half of our colleges, and no one would notice.
That aside, the other thing that caught my eye is the array or weird platforms on which these games are now broadcast. The shift away from traditional television to the internet has led to a proliferation of sites. There was a tournament broadcast on something called FloSports, which sounds like a name created by the con men who run the sports nutrition rackets. It turns out that they specialize in low interest niche sports and the small-timers in major sports.
They charge $30 per month for their service, which seems like a big number for the content they are offering. Perhaps if you love F1 racing and you live in the United States, that is a bargain. They are sponsoring college basketball tournaments on the assumption that the fans of the teams involved will spend the money to watch a few games of their favorite team. It is a clever racket, but it also a form of kidnapping in that they are holding the content hostage.
This is something happening with all sports. The NFL is now posting games on Amazon Prime, thus forcing fans to subscribe to it for games, in addition to whatever they use for other television content. There is a network called Peacock that now has select college football games. If you are a fan of Notre Dame, you now must subscribe to the Peacock thing to see their games. It will not be long before much of the sports content is behind an array of paywalls.
This is a sign of decline. As these pay-per-view schemes proliferate, the ways around them proliferate just as fast. Getting the content from FloSports, for example, is simple if you know where to look. There are lots of overseas operators who are indifferent to the financial dreams of our entertainment schemers. With a VPN you can watch just about any sporting event on earth without paying a dime. In fact, you can get any content you like this way, even new release movies.
What you see forming up is what happened to the music rackets. By the 1980’s, the music industry was dependent on two bottlenecks. One was album sales where you paid for ten songs, even though you wanted just one song. The other was commercial radio where you could listen to that one song, but also hours of ads and live reads from drug-addled disc jockeys. The music rackets charged the crap out of the radio stations for use of their content.
Then the mp3 arrived and that was the end of the music rackets. Suddenly you could get that one song without buying an album. Not only that, but the song was also free, and you could easily make copies for your friends. The music industry fought this, but eventually they lost the fight. Now recorded music is just a marketing expense to promote live shows and sell other product. Bands now make more money selling t-shirts and caps than they make from recorded music.
This is what is happening to sports. People are willing to watch a game made twice as long by the insertion of advertising. They will pay a small fee to watch games with the same ads, but if they have choices. They will pay a higher fee for ad free content and lots of choices. They will not pay high fees for what amounts to a three-hour ad campaign with some sports content sprinkled into it. They will find other ways to see the games or simply stop watching.
The lesson of the mp3 is that you cannot beat technology. The music companies sued people for sharing music, but it had no impact on the process. The sports leagues can try the same thing with the pirate sites, but it will fail too. It is simply too easy to access these sites. What is even funnier about this is most of the pirate sites block the ads during the games. The leagues cannot even say to their advertisers that their ads are getting viewed by the pirate users.
There is a cost to this. Pop music has reached a nadir because the only way to make money is to generate Potemkin stars like Taylor Swift. The reason you never hear anyone talk about the content of a Taylor Swift song is because even her fans do not care about the content. It is simply a thing to be swept up in until she gets too fat to make it work and a new star is generated. The same is true for the butt wigglers who target the black music audience.
This may be why movies and television are terrible now. On the one hand, they need to make going to the theater appealing, which means massive computer-generated worlds that dazzle on the big screen. On the other hand, it means dealing with the reality that content best watched at home is easily pirated. That leaves little motivation to pay for quality writing and directing. Instead, the money goes to attention grabbing nonsense like race-swapping and girl bosses.
That paints a bleak picture for sports entertainment. A model built on the assumption that television revenues will continue to grow at double digit rates is not going to do well when the revenue stops growing entirely. Throw in the fact that owning a team is mostly about tax dodging and rent seeking and you see the problem. Like music in the 1980’s, the sports entertainment world is a massive bubble. Similarly, technology is the pin that will pop that bubble.
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Frankly, there’s too much of everything these days, except for competence and level-headedness in government circles. I counted up the college bowl games and there’s 49 of them – 49! And most of the sponsors you’ve probably never heard of. It used to be a matter of honor to qualify for one, now it’s like who doesn’t get in? In my neck of the woods we have the “snoop diggity dog Arizona bowl presented by gin & juice dr. dre and snoop” – sounds like a real winner – lol.
Personally I’ve always preferred the classic contests put on by the Poulan Weedeater Bowl and the Taxslayer.com Bowl.
The Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl may be a decent replacement.
The various bowl games are just excuses to rake in the advertising dollars.
Only a die-hard sports fanatic would take them seriously. Watching one is an exercise in patience because not only does the advertiser get his say so, but the sponsor speaks up too, since he has shelled out good fist currency greenbacks for the privilege.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
I do miss the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl. The best name ever.
Yes, the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Shreveport…it’s a fine town. NOT! Had to fly to nearby Bossier City and Barksdale and always stayed on the post. Not a good liberty town, that’s for sure.
Northern Louisiana is basically southern Arkansas with lots of feral blacks.
I once was going through Shreveport and decided to stop and eat in a hurry. I pulled off and stopped at a Church’s, bad move. I was the only pale person within shouting distance. it was daytime fortunately or else I would have got back on 20 and went somewhere else. As it was, I got the food to go and ate while driving.
Seeing a white person in a Church’s is a rare event. I am pretty sure the company deliberately locates them in negro heavy areas. You brave the negros to get the chicken, or not.
Locating a fried chicken shack in Hutuland seems like a pretty solid business play to me.
Anybody willing to bet on how long before we are going to have a
DoubleDown Sports Gambling and MaxOuts Payday Advance Bowl?
Halftime show brought to you by Breakout Rooms Interactive Porn Labyrinths – Upgrade to get the full fifteen minutes advertisement free.
From what I see, guys are spending more money than ever on sports. Whether it is gambling, buying incredibly overpriced tickets, the apparel, or the multitude of services like Red Zone, it seems like more of a cash cow than ever. One thing that might spell its doom though is that younger kids don’t have near the interest anymore. There’s still a lot, but gone are the days of sports cards, hanging out with your buds to watch the game, and the frenzy for local teams. They might suck the current adults dry of money, but it likely won’t last… Read more »
I thought COVID was going to beat out much of the excessive money sloshing around in sportsball: boy, was I wrong! It all roared back bigger than ever.
The gambling thing has truly killed professional sports for me. When SCOTUS struck down the ban, I thought it meant that I could go to AC or Vegas and have a fun time betting on a couple of games or laying down a couple of props. What it actually meant was that these leagues all turned into casinos that have a suspiciously high amount of influence and power over the future outcomes that people are betting on. The leagues are all in bed with these casino companies, you see a gambling ad every single commercial break, all the sports shows… Read more »
Gambling is going to destroy sports. There’s too much money in rigging the games. It’ll be just as notorious as boxing in the Don King era.
Although you can pay the players enough to make bribing them to throw a game prohibitively expensive, the glaring point of weakness continues to be the referees
Players have already been suspended for betting on their own sport, and one guy has already been banned for life for manipulating his own props. I find the idea that nobody is colluding with these companies (that are not shady bookies, they are huge corporations that operate in the open) to be totally implausible. You could be making $50M a year and still end up with a gambling problem – see Phil Mickelson, or Michael Jordan.
Yup.
It’s an accepted part of the NBA the refs have supported some star players over others since forever. Heck, once went to a girls high school basketball game where the refs were clearly corrupt.
Same here with my sons hockey team.
This post got stuck in ‘approval jail’ as originally worded- see below…
Yep- it’s gotten bad. I decided supporting 18+ junior & minor league sports was the answer since that’s an option in my market…
I have a nice MLB team but the last couple of summers started driving around a bit to attend some AAA and AA-league baseball. It was really great—smaller towns, cheaper tickets, close-up seats at intimate stadiums, paler crowds.
I always laugh at the lip service “call this number if you have gambling problem” as the hot blonde chick talks about covering the spread, double entendre intended.
It wouldn’t surprise me if calling that number results in you paying $1.99 a minute to hear some bookie’s “can’t miss” pick of the week.
On local teams, although it’s a common complaint, all my local teams are filled with people with no connection to the area. Even the lower levels are like this. Even the damn colleges are like this since everyone nowadays is a transient that uproots their lives every 5 years for the next big scam. It inspires nothing in me and is difficult to get into. There is no pride in it.
Only thing my family watches is World Cup (mostly for the drama and corruption) and the Thanksgiving parade. No TV, no Netflix, no Prime. Not interested.
Not since the early 1960s has there been anything resembling a team full of local boys. The joke – which most people don’t want to think about too deeply – is that they’re merely “rooting for laundry”. I grew up in Lagos-on-the-Mississippi (AKA St. Louis) and the sportswriters were always fully erect when a local boy made good in the local laundry. Whitey Herzog, Kurt Warner (kinda), David Freese. They tried to make Dominican baseball players and Slav hockey players wax poetic about STL, but only dull sportsball enjoyers fell for it. Fun fact: Stan Kroenke (owner of the LA… Read more »
Local morning radio guy’s son is transferring to a SEC college supposedly just for the football gameday experience. Even taking out student loans. Radio guy’s friend told him it would be cheaper to NetJet to their home games rather than paying the tuition and other expenses.
The roster mayhem brought on by far too free and easy free agency has destroyed sports at all levels.
In the 50s NHL all the teams were family units that hated all other teams. Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and Boston fought wars on the ice.
Now? It’s just a bunch of random meat bots that all go out for drinks after the game because they are bros on social media.
…owning a team is mostly about tax dodging and rent seeking and you see the problem…
Unless you are the Rooneys, who turned owning the Steelers and local political influence in Pittsburgh into controlling an entire league, and in the process making themselves the Democratic Party kingmakers in Pennsylvania by controlling the billions in the nationwide NFL economy. When you have every Democratic President from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden pay homage to you, and you have the power to call off the fraud machine in a swing state in 2024, you are more than that.
You are the mob. The Rooneys tried to go straight, but like the godfather, they pull you back in. It also gets your minimally talented female family members movie roles.
I don’t know. I thought the NFL would lose a bulk of its fan base but it hasn’t. It’s stronger than ever. The product is worse than ever but I still see fat Norman V. Cheespuffs wearing his favorite brown guy who hates him jersey. It’s really quite remarkable.
How much of it is Professional Sports is one avenue of escape from the feminization of entertainment? If a guy wants to watch some TV, Professional Sports doesn’t make fun of him, tell him he’s a loser, nor shoves “Stronk, Induhpendent Whamen!” into his face and down his throat 24/7/365. (Oh the ADVERTISEMENTS do, but what guy watches the ads? Except us, cursed with the ability to notice. And don’t get My Lovely 🥰 Mrs. nor I started on chicks on the sidelines.) So a dude can watch a football game for a couple of hours in peace, or go… Read more »
Does the NFL still force its players to wear pink in fealty to the Susan G. Komen Foundation? Does it have dyke officials and announcers?
Actually the NFL has dumped “Pink October”. It was last a thing in 2018-19.
As for your other question, danged if I know. 🤷♂️
Just goes to show how long it’s been since I paid the NFL any nevermind.
The NFL became unwatchable when they changed the rules to keep the clock running on out-of-bounds and other plays. They kept the games at 3 hours, effectively replacing game content with more ads. On the rare occasion when I watch, it is unbelievable how little action there is. I can watch maybe a quarter or so, before I switch to a movie.
Same thing happened with college football. Difference being televised college games tend to run to more like 4 hours, with similar proportional increase in how much of it is advertising. I don’t know how they expect to gain new fans. But I’ve been puzzled by people’s entertainment choices for many, many years.
It’s even worse in stadium; all of the delays without even a sembelence of entertainment. Amusingly, the NFL has countered with “club levels,” basically sports bars with really high cover charges.
To me, the worst parts are the instant replay reviews, which add long delays at precisely the wrong moments in the melo-drama that is sports.
Something weird happened with basketball recently. The NBA signed yet another record TV deal. This by itself is basically business as usual when it comes to sports, as Z indicates. Yet, this deal was signed while the NBA is in the middle of a full throated collapse in ratings. We are talking about 40%-50% declines year-over-year, after last year’s already horrible ratings. The NBA’s signature day of Christmas is now getting eaten alive by the NFL. It seems people have just totally tuned out the NBA, and it isn’t too surprising. The players are just the most unlikeable and obnoxious… Read more »
Consider the possibility that sportsball is at least somewhat subsidized, much as broadcast media in general is, because the circuses must go on, just as the propaganda must be propagated. Some of the same fedloldollars that prop up the networks can be redirected to prop up the circuses. It is not a big leap, after you notice all the sportsball stadiums paid for with public funds.
It’s because they are not just paying for the live broadcasts, but also highlights, access to players/coaches, and (while probably not explicitly in the contract) tip offs of “breaking news”. Essentially 24/7/365 content to fill not just TV but also their online properties as well.
This post touches on something that the entire current global system is desperate to avoid thinking about, which is that the current cycle is about to turn over over and the end of the constant growth of the last couple of centuries is nearly upon us. The global population will probably peak within the next 2 decades, possibly even 1. At that point, or even before(do even the morons in charge think Africa is going to be a comparable market to the West or Asia?), so many of the current systems that are based on more, More, MORE are not… Read more »
Good comment. It touches on Z-man’s point about oversaturation of higher education. Who is going to attend these colleges and universities if the smart kids aren’t being born? From what I see the higher education racket is banking on immigrants. That’s one reason the country is being flooded with third world trash; the MORE MORE rackets need human flesh to keep going. In regards to higher education, the low quality human capital they are bringing into the class room will come out four years later as low quality human capital with a degree. If you think the Indian engineers are… Read more »
I never bought albums where I was only interested in one song. The best artists made the whole album good.
I agree. There were so many albums from the past where each song is very good, sometimes great. Often the album was considered an art form, such as the “concept album,” like Tommy, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Wall, Sergeant Pepper, etc.
Thick as a Brick, Dark Side of the Moon, What’s Goin’ On by Marvin Gaye, The Payback by James Brown…all early 1970s, too, which was the best five years in music history.
American Beauty
Although it’s an unvarnished anti-white racist screed, Blue Sky Mining by Midnight Oil is probably the greatest rock album I’ve heard. Every song a gem.
Yeah, that was sometimes lame. However, if the album in question was Appetite for Destruction bought on the basis of Welcome to the Jungle, then it was a win-win!
Of course, most albums are not Appetite.
Actually, there were a lot of great albums back in the musical peak times of the ’60s and ’70s, and they are still avidly collected by people who weren’t born until the ’80s and ’90s…and they play them on turntables…As to the new generation of vaccine and fluoride damaged kids, not sure that’s the case…
I am one of those 80s born aficionados, and I play them on the turntable. I love albums – clarifying that album means the estimation of the sum, not the parts. The reason for the turntable is not just sound quality (to be fair, I am a decent musician as a hobbyist), but the who ritual of selecting, putting on, and focusing on nothing else, except maybe the sleeve cover. The point is, Music used to be the focus, where the auditory used to be the sole stimulus. Now, music serves as non diegetic background music to whatever else is… Read more »
The real artists wanted to take listeners on a journey with their albums – this started back in the mid-1960s but bloated out with the pre-punk “concept albums” of the 1970s. Talentless cut-outs like Vanilla Ice were the ones selling an album on the back of a single song.
Yeah, the Boomers can suck it, Appetite For Destruction is the perfect album, front to back.
The perfect accompaniment to an hour of rollerblading.
The album was a highly unusual art form born of technological accident, its flourishing a unique aspect of Peak Whiteness—now past. I often see conservatives complain about it. Record companies didn’t like it either. (That’s why conservatives complain about it. They’re suckers and shills.) The industry resisted it, thwarted it, and tried to flee from it at every opportunity. There are whole nerd museums full of the literal hundreds of instantly failed gimmick single-song formats that followed the 45. Consumers rejected every one of them, even the ones you think were popular (cassingles, e.g.)—until the 99¢ mp3 “ringtone,” which black… Read more »
Like real estate in California for a long time now it has mystified me how people can pay these huge prices for sports and concert tickets and the subscription fees to watch their favorite, usually black, sportsballer?
Operations like Ticketmaster and its upcharges would make Al Capone blush.
Never mind $250 or much more for tickets to see NFL games live to avoid the race mixing tv commercials.
But it just keeps going on.
Until it doesnt, i guess.
deflation is in the answer. Another guy i read likes to point out that the “rich” have almost all their wealth in paper value and can’t access this, but he is incorrect. Worked at a big investment bank about a decade ago and the “rich” were taking out jumbo loans against the value of their portfolios. Round and round we go…………………..where we stop…….deflation
The reason why people fear deflation instinctively is because when you boil it down, it means you’ve got too many people.
“The reason why people fear deflation instinctively is because when you boil it down, it means you’ve got too many people.”
It’s much simpler than that. It’s feared because we’ve been told almost since birth to fear it. It’s hard to fight a lifetime of propaganda. And it’s doubly hard when most people who end up unafraid of deflation got there just by being contrarian, not reasoning it out from first principles.
Deflation is just a symptom of the moneyed elites losing power to steal from you. That should be a cause for joy, not trepidation.
Why do we pay so much to live in California? Because we are insane.
I’d pay good money to live somewhere like Bishop or Lake Tahoe.
I sadly left coastal California because of overcrowding and non-whites, but I miss it a lot because the weather is mild summer almost all year round and you have quick access to the gorgeous ocean and mountains. Marin County or Laurel Canyon in the 1960s must have been paradise.
But one of the curses of being a human is that you usually don’t appreciate the good times as you are living through them.
I’ve spent enough time in LA and Miami to get a sense of the paradises they must have been in the mid 20th century
Perpetual summer would bore the hell outta me. I like seasons and climatic variety, even if that means very harsh weather at times.
Tickets for the first World Series games this year at Dodgers Stadium started at around $1,200. For the June 1st UEFA Champions League soccer final in London, secondary market tickets started at just over $3,000 (almost impossible to get direct tickets). Event sold out, of course.
Plenty of idiots maxing out their plastic.
Just today I was remarking to a fellow at work that my last NFL game was in 1986. End zone seats, a few rows up from the field in the then-Rich Stadium, were $10. Those seats are now in excess of $200. And when the Bills move to their new – taxpayer funded – stadium in a year or two, they will likely cost double that amount.
And still the meatheads pony up for the privilege of worshipping a tribe of entitled luggage testers.
There is a car detailing business near me that charges 450. They have a waiting list and most of the cars are middle class ones not luxury. People seem to have a lot of money to toss around
On the one hand, they need to make going to the theater appealing, which means massive computer-generated worlds that dazzle on the big screen. On the other hand, it means dealing with the reality that content best watched at home is easily pirated. That leaves little motivation to pay for quality writing and directing. So true. I was lamenting this to my wife the other day. It’s all amazing CGI and special effects. Doubt a movie like The Deer Hunter would ever be green-lit today. What a story that told. Then again, I think the director (Cimino?) was one of… Read more »
Live attendance at sporting events is an interesting trend to watch. Colleges still have a built in base of support that is willing to spend a lot of money to go to games. Last night Duke and Kansas played in Las Vegas, reported attendance was over 14,000 and it looked like it on TV. The Maui Invitational is currently being held in Maui, and although played in a small gym, each of the eight schools involved can get a couple thousand fans to travel over to Hawaii during Thanksgiving week to watch the games. With college football, attendance has held… Read more »
Now see here, Barnard! You know dam’ well all those players are student-athletes in the truest sense of the term!
Well, if you qualify your statement as “athletes pretending to be students”. You’d have something. Waay back when, about 30 years or so at my old institution someone did the numbers on our a basketball team. Seems that 96% never graduated with a degree. They played as long as they were eligible and then vanished! Athletic department got all huffy and so, but they were never able to refute the numbers. Football was little better. Never was a sports ball fan, so I couldn’t care less. Athletics dept was a wart on the ass of the university as far as… Read more »
I’d hoped my facetiousness was brighter than a supernova and three quasars.
First, I want to wish our esteemed host and everyone here a very Happy! Thanksgiving and one filled with joy and cheer. Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Secondly, its pretty clear that Live Sports presents a big issue for streamers. Anyone seeing the glitches with the Tyson Fight knows that Netflix has not solved that, though Amazon Prime with Thursday Night Football has. Live sports is the only way to get the male audience. They’ve checked out long ago from anything Network or Cable, which remains a female/gay ghetto. Example: CBS “Tracker” is absolutely repellent and of no interest to any straight… Read more »
Whiskey, I usually like to read you, but the above is so “encrypted” with abbreviations and unfathomable monikers, that I can’t understand a word you’ve written.
Is there such a thing as virulent HIV that overwhelms the current regime of drugs? Magic Johnson’s still hanging in there more than 30 years after his prognosis, so I can’t imagine The Lightbringer wouldn’t be getting drugs that were even more effective. There’s no way they’d let him die from what was called “gay cancer” at one point.
Seconding the recommendation of the Rogan interview with Marc Andreesen. Andreesen points out how much commie garbage was already implemented and how much more commie garbage was in the cards.
I’m not sure about the Lightbringer’s health, but Slick Willie is looking absolutely terrible these days. Maybe it’s because he knows his only offspring is actually a Hubbell rather than a Clinton?
I made the mistake of going to a Boston College football game with a relative perhaps 8 or 9 years ago in Newton, MA. There was no advertising at the game other than posters and the like. But the game was frequently halted 2 or 3 minutes at a shot for what appeared to be no reason at all. Of course it was for advertising to the television and radio audience. If you’re at home you can get up to take a wizz or whatnot. But at the stadium you pretty much have to just sit there and wait for… Read more »
You’ve got to be a true blue fan to make the hassle of the gameday experience worth it. When football games lasted two hours it was one thing, sort of like going to the movies, but now it’s 4, not counting the drive there, parking, getting inside and back out, making it more like a 6 hour odyssey, and a whole day commitment for anybody who wants to tailgate.
The average gameplay for an NFL game is around 11 minutes. It’s bad enough on TV when you can distract yourself during commercials. But sacrificing 6 hours for 11 minutes of content is torture.
Not only must you sit there, but you’re also relentlessly assaulted by rap blared at deafening levels. That millions of people are completely willing to subject themselves to what should be considered torture is one of many phenomena that has pushed me toward misanthropy. I have nothing but deep contempt for these people.
Those ‘overseas operators’ also conveniently strip out the increasingly-horrible advertising….
However, after Woke found Baseball’s front office and leaked onto the field, I quit cold-turkey.
It seems like more than just a coincidence that right when growth in sportsball as a business concern is beginning to become threatened, gambling on it is becoming more legalized and much more promoted. Helping draw and keep the attention of “fans” who might otherwise not have cared so much. Which helps keep those streaming subscriptions up. The mysterious unexplainable thing about the new music industry economy is why so many fans are still willing to pay top dollar to be packed in like sardines, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, to listen to shit music. But they do. Which suggests sportsball… Read more »
“The mysterious unexplainable thing about the new music industry economy is why so many fans are still willing to pay top dollar to be packed in like sardines, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, to listen to shit music.”
I couldn’t agree more. I would add that most music acts are using autotune and pre-recordings, so you are really just there for the choreography. I would rather watch a no-name local band at a small venue, than watch tiny figures running around faking it to a soundtrack I can listen to at home.
A bit off topic, but do you suppose Bruce Springsteen was paid for the Harris endorsement? Beyoncé was paid millions if you believe the reports.
Entertainment is extremely price sensitive. When prices become unreasonable people will just run up the Jolly Roger and pirate what they want. I think I paid $4 to get the entirety of the Rugby World Cup last year. I could have found it for free with minimum difficulty, but why bother when it was four bucks.
I think sports will devolve into a gambling racket. Young people seem more interested in their fantasy teams or the myriad ways to bet on just about anything that happens during the game. That may be the major source of revenue for them going forward.
Very sad, but it is what it is.
I agree. I think you’ll know that the end of the process is nigh when “meta-gambling” appears. How many bets will there be on this or that game next Thurs? How much will be wagered on this or that team? Place your bets!!
“You can’t beat technology” should be the motto of the age. Power will belong to the set of incipient elites that best adapts to this reality. So far, amazingly enough, it is the Trump/Vance/Musk triumvirate is winning the future, but they do have less baggage from the old managerial world.
Note: That does not necessarily mean “our side” is winning. Power requires sacrifices, and the DR, or whatever we’re calling it these days, will (probably) be the first on the altar.
There’s a small ray of light on this topic w/ 2 NHL teams: the Anaheim Ducks and Dallas Stars. Starting this season, they stood up an app called ‘Victory+’ on which nearly all of their regular season games can be watched for free within their respective territories (based on IP address) on cell phone, tablet, smart TV etc.. They figured out the cable model was failing, many of their fans had already cut the cord, and decided to make the leap into running their own app & production. Unfortunately it reverts to TNT and Max when the playoffs come round.… Read more »
I think I read recently that 99 of the top 100 TV programs last year in terms of viewership were mostly NFL games, and a few marquee college football games. Almost no artistic content, or whatever name we want to give it. Tomorrow we will see the continuation of the (relatively new) 3-game Thanksgiving football. But there’s now a game on Black Friday. Then, right back to the Sunday routine. It’s becoming 6-sigma problem. The effort to squeeze the first couple of decimal places of profit requires little energy. But the next 3 sigmas, so to speak, grow exponentially harder.… Read more »
don’t know how much general interest there is in vinyl, here, but i recently purchased a ‘near mint’ copy of the Manassas double album. It originally sold for $9 in 1972; the equivalent price today would be $57. I paid about $50 including shipping. sounds gorgeous in a way digital just can’t match. what is peculiar to me, is that many people today are buying vinyl that was based on a digital source?! not sure what you are actually hearing at that point. here’s the thing, a shiton of master tapes (that any vinyl reprint should be using) were lost… Read more »
Vinyl records suck. They are delicate, prone to damage, cumbersome and non-user friendly. All the folks raving about the fidelity are just imagining things.*** Just like high end bourbon consumers. Sorry fellas, its all the same stuff. I have 4000 songs on my Ipod and I can carry it in my pocket and pick out any number of them by twirling my finger. You can’t even make it through an entire LP with out having to trundle over to the blasted record player and flip the disc. No sale. OK, there are some folks who like the old cumbersome stuff.… Read more »
Vinyl does suck! Give me wax cylinders or give me death!
I demand ownership of the physical, tactile thing, not some file floating around in the ether. And nobody can take those things without kicking in the door of my casa and laying down a sustained burst of artillery. There are no such assurances that those files won’t somehow just disappear when the nutters declare them rayciss.
Buy the CD. You don’t have to flip it to hear the B side. LPs and 45s were great in their day, but in every way a CD is superior.
Oh, no doubt. I collect CDs rather than vinyl. Also DVDs.
Fairly put, but for me mp3 stuff doesn’t cut it, so I rip CD’s. If you want to get a good idea of such—for me at least—tune into your Sirius Radio. They compress the hell out of their downloaded stuff. Very noticeable when you switch to any local fm channel while driving through the city.
It may not be that your ear sucks but that you haven’t dropped high 4 figures to low 5 figures for a system. If your amp isn’t tubes, and you don’t test/replace them constantly, you might as well go with transistors, at which point there’s little difference between that and digital.
If you rip your own 256 or 320 mp3s, like @Compsci is evidently doing, that’s going to be really hard to beat. Extract to FLAC, and probably no audiophile with less than mid-5 figure setup can tell the difference.
There’s another factor that’s ready to pop the sports bubble: Gen-z has absolutely no interest in sports. Sports consumption is almost entirely driven by boomers and Gen-x to an extent. Millennials are interested mostly for reasons of fantasy football, but other than that there’s a huge dropoff. As boomers die off, you’ll see enormous drops in viewership.
Great essay. Only thing I think was left out is the rise of legal sports gambling, and how that industry (just like the pharmaceutical industry and legacy news media) is in many ways heavily subsidizing the entire sports industry even as traditional revenue streams are starting to decline. I haven’t checked in a while, but I understand the lifetime value of a customer for Draft Kings or Fan Duel is so extreme, that they are both willing to pay an abnormally high amount for advertising and customer acquisition, and not really bothered by low overall ratings of casual fans.
Fortunately jazz, Z’s favorite genre, has only benefitted from tech.
You no longer have to live in an urban area to hear it and since the 90s there has been a steady flow of out-of-print albums being released as CDs and Mp3s.
If you haven’t already, dig into some McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver. They’re far lesser known than the Coltranes and Davises of the musical world, but for my money considerably better songwriters and musicians.
On the other hand, Tyner’s best work was with the John Coltrane quintet, so it’s hard to separate him from the big names.
I actually prefer Tyner’s solo work.
One thing about Prime though – they toss in the channel for free with the Amazon subscription which usually pays for itself with the free shipping. So not as bad a deal as others.
The content is not that great, but there are a few things that are interesting – the behind the scenes sports documentaries are pretty good (“All or Nothing” I think they are called).
almost all my non-prime orders ship for free anyway. Prime is not worth having IMO.
Amazon shipping is subsidized by the taxpayers in the form of below cost USPS deliveries. It’s a win-win-lose. Amazon gets a monopoly in online selling because it’s too good of a deal to pass up and USPS gets to keep it’s bloated employee base. The only losers are the taxpayers funding this shell game. But yes, I am a subscriber. It’s too big to beat, and I figure I am already paying for it with my taxes.
Amazon is the ideal business. Its product is the destruction of other businesses. It’s wholly above traditional economic incentives and motivations, yet it’s run by insane chiselers, ruthless maximizers of workplace dystopian-ness, with a management philosophy inspired by the Saw movies. Given an unbreakable monopoly in mail-order junk, it’s still unwaveringly devoted to ripping you off with fake products and reviews, “AI”-enforced packing practices so incompetent they seem optimized to break your shit (which they’ll gladly send again, broken again, until the whole stock is smashed), etc. And— The submerged 90+% of the Amazon iceberg is “black” surveillance and censorship… Read more »
The alt rebel dissidents at Z blog who shop at … wait for it… wait for it… globalist af Amazon. Laughable.
Sports sports sports sports, sports sport sports sports, danana-nah-na-naaah! Charge!
Butt wigglers could be here…I HATE butt wigglers
Hollywood is accounting fraud. Most movies never make money according to this accounting fraud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-l2oFKZNak&
At least with American sports, you generally only need one subscription to watch, say, the NFL. If you are a soccer fan (especially European/SA), each league seems to be on a separate platform. And then the international tournaments are on yet another platform.
Sucks.
Any self-respecting American doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that Euroweenie “sport.”
But America now has one of the world’s major soccer stars in Christian Pulisic.
Wrong skin color for (GM).
Yeah they’ve really started pushing soccer here… it’s OK to me to play it, but watching it on TV is incredibly boring.
Rugby OTOH, not so bad. Much more watchable than NFL, and matches finish in much less time since that clock keeps running.
Rugby World Cup is one of the best major world sporting events. rarely fails to deliver.
Anybody who tries to tell you soccer isn’t boring is a stone liar. Nobody thinks it’s exciting. Nobody. Not even the Euro hooligans, who had to come up with songs to sing during the games to keep themselves entertained. But they are loyal to it in spite of the boredom, because it’s their culture, and they feel that certain something inside when their team (finally) scores against the enemy team from wherever. Kind of like how the Ohio State fan endures the irritation of the endless commercials and stoppages in play for that feeling he gets when they score the… Read more »
Speaking for myself, there have been very few films that I’ve deemed worth watching in the last few years — Dune 1 and 2, Blade Runner 2049, Parasite, Snow Piercer. The first two were directed by a Canadian and the last two by a South Korean. There seems to be a dearth of good ideas and/or the courage to invest in them.
Agreed, but in fairness the low hanging fruit has been picked. I was a TV watcher as a child in the 50’s and beyond. We didn’t know it was slow poison then. Now in old age, I’m quite bored with it all as new ideas are becoming rare and most shows/movies are reboots or remakes of old plot lines. I note as examples of how bad it is the movies you mention—they are complete exceptions to the above and pop up perhaps a few time in a year. Hollywood knocks out between 500-700 movies a year however. You can compute… Read more »
Happy thanksgiving, Z and all true Americans. I’ve brined agin this year a pretty potent brine so we’ll see if Mr gobbles is over seasoned again. This time one gonna soak in water right before cooking to get out a bit of the saltiness
It’s a rare person who can cook turkey well enough to make it worth the effort. Filet mignon at my house this year.
You can never go wrong with a good steak. Grilled a jerk paste-encrusted NY strip over pecan last night, topped it with a sauce of lime, cilantro and sour cream, and accompanied by corn fritters and a bottle of Sicilian red. Mos’ satisfyin’.
Yep. I rather have a good steak than crappy leftovers for a week afterwards.
Leftover Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey is one of the most overrated cuisines there is.
I just do a bone-in turkey breast, roasted over lemon slices and coated with herb butter. Generally makes a square meal with southern cornbread dressing and the rest of the trimmins.
And toward that end, happy Thanksgiving to Z and all the Zsters. Thanks to Trump, Musk and a few others we can at least be thankful to have been spared four years of Kamaltoe and Minnesota Spats.
As the cost to produce and distribute digital media started dropping in the 90s due to the internet the amount of media produced grows exponentially because everyone can do it. Now there is so much media being produced there isn’t enough time to even watch it let alone find it, even with recommendation algorithms. This has led to the exponential growth of online ads as well because the ease of content production is connected to the ease of selling ads to monetize it. Clearly media is in a bubble that will have to burst at some point otherwise all media… Read more »
Nowadays, my only contact with sporting events occurs on NFL Sunday, if and only if the Buffalo Bills play at 1 or 4 in the afternoon. I get three hours of chores done while drinking beer and listening to the ballgame on the radio. TV? Never. If they play in another slot, I’ll catch the highlights on Youtube the next day, if I think of it.
Speaking of Midway 1942, the 2019 movie “Midway” was pretty decent.
Technology kills that which it loves. It’s like the scorpion crossing the river on the back of the frog and promising not to sting. But of course technology is going to sting. The biggest stinger of all is on the scorpion we call AI. If Skynet ever arises, we can thank our greed and laziness for making it possible, on the river we call our lives.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
The one good thing about the modern age is that with websites around, you can follow your favorite band and see when they’re going to be performing near you. The internet has made a whole raft of things possible, mostly good. I don’t see many people hating Amazon Dot Com or Reddit — some things *have* gotten better. The internet will undergo rapid evolution in the centuries to come, its architecture adapted for the holographic and VR worlds. And with every new step into a new frontier, there will be billions to be made by the quick and clever. Long… Read more »