UTK Special 9/29/23

Per Game

Before I get into the actual article here, I want to both thank all my subscribers and readers for their support. I want to earn your five bucks every month by making my content valuable enough that you don’t even think of cancelling. I get that with inflation and the world the way it is, baseball injuries aren’t the most important things. I decided against raising prices last year and I hope to hold things at $5 again next year. I don’t run a bunch of sales or try to game the system (though those are smart techniques), I just try to work hard and produce good information.

Many of you will cancel your monthly subscription as the season ends. I’ll ask you to consider not doing that. There’s a lot of really good things I can do here, stories I can tell, and this off-season could be one of the biggest ever, with Shohei Ohtani being an injury story as he heads into a consequential free agency for the sport. I have a number of longer articles, the kind I can do when I’m freed from the daily schedule of baseball, that I hope you want to read (and support!)

If you cancel, I get it. I hope you’ll be back in the spring and I hope you’ve enjoyed all the information as we head into the playoffs. Now, for something different:

The Vegas Golden Knights - current Stanley Cup champs - have introduced something I think is new to major sports:

https://twitter.com/FOS/status/1706366596757721101

I hate these don’t embed any more, but the innovation is per-game pricing. The Knights’ new DTC streaming is $69 for the year, or $6.99 for a single game. Now, it’s just a normal game on the normal broadcast, but I think this is the future, especially when VR takes hold. (I will not mention the stupid name, with the stupid extraneous plus tacked on.)

Being able to watch a single game makes sense, because not everyone is a Knights fan. Let’s say I’m a Rangers fan, or a Lightning fan, and my team’s playing the Knights. Boom, I’m in, if I don’t have a standard way in.

In VR, this makes even more sense. However, I’m not sure the standard broadcast on a virtual big screen makes as much sense as watching Napoleon on a virtual IMAX.

We’ve already seen Meta produce “courtside” games for the NBA and with NBA rights coming up at the end of the year, I’m curious if there will be more innovation, along the lines of the MLS deal. The NBA is a bigger property for sure, but they still have very lofty international goals for expansion. TV rights there are balkanized, literally, and having a single international deal would be pretty amazing.

We also saw Apple demo some sort of baseball content at their Vision unveiling, while they also experimented with a couple MLB games on Friday. They didn’t make nearly the commitment or effort to baseball that they did with the MLS, but that kind of experimentation could easily continue with the “Vision Game of the Week.” Apple doesn’t have to care about audience, but filling the demand for entertainment to the early adopters of their VR headset. Sports is right there and there’s going to be a big question about whether there’s any non-Vision content the company will want. The back catalog exists, but going forward, something like their Godzilla property will clearly have added elements, if not the whole show, in Vision.

(While I was editing this, another thought came to me and it makes sense, but I bet it’s not right. AppleTV+ has been pinged for a lack of a back catalog or purchasing shows like The Office or Suits to prop it up. What if the intention was to shoot everything for Vision? We know that project was in development for years, so maybe the content was ready ahead of the delivery, so they just went with streaming as a stop-gap.)

The other area where I’m curious is after the announcement of the new iPhones 15 Pro, how does “Spatial” content make it to the Vision? Let’s say I go to a game and get nice seats behind the plate, catching some nice videos of Elly De La Cruz going first to home, or a Devin Williams airbender. That can’t just get slapped up on X/Twitter or even YouTube. Apple’s never been much about user-generated content, so I don’t know how this will work. I’m having some visions of Lenny Nero here, but expect Apple will have a solution.

So let’s say we do see an acceptance of per-game pricing, coming hand in hand with the long-awaited maturation of VR headsets. That means we could see what I call the “infinite stadium.” Instead of building bigger and bigger stadiums with bad seats, good suites, and an experience and cost that’s sub-optimal, a place like Tampa’s new 30,000 seat stadium isn’t a disadvantage. A seven dollar ticket to the game drives revenue in ways Tampa hasn’t been able to get people to drive cars. It’s bad for parking lots, good for ball.

Segmenting seats is possible. Pay ten bucks for good seats, a buck for decent, and you get numbers and dollars that can add up pretty quickly. Forget adding fancy cameras, just put an iPhone on a stick in the seats. Actually, this could really cut costs for production, just as RSN's are collapsing. The downside here is, do announcers and commentators get disintermediated? Baseball may not be paying Jason Benetti and Steve Stone the kind of money that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are getting for MNF, but it’s not nothing. Do we need a studio full of ex-players if what the people want is a virtual ticket to the game?

One issue per-game could cause is a big/small market issue. The NFL already nationalizes fees and doesn’t have local games, but it’s a huge problem for MLB and the NBA. Per-game could be huge for the Yankees, Dodgers, and Lakers, further opening the revenue gap, but at the same time, it could open up things for small markets even more. The Apple-MLS deal wiped out blackouts by controlling all the rights, a difficult trick. A per-game is new and might supersede or at least augment rights in local markets, allowing teams to market games for matchups, events, or teams that suddenly catch fire. Could a lower fee be charged to let someone come in a game late, say a no-hitter in progress? Absolutely. I’d hate to see one-size pricing for a per-game product.

Add in the influence of gambling. Rob Manfred acknowledged that baseball is working on its own casts, in hopes of getting in front of the Genius product that will roll out soon for Fanatics Sportsbook and others. I have to think ESPN will be using this as well. Watching in-app doesn’t make a ton of sense, even though I probably watch more baseball on my iPad than anything else. (That changed when I got a projector for my office …) Splitting the screen and scrolling through parlays and play-calls is tougher than having a synced, low-latency feed, but that’s an even bigger issue for in-game betting (and why the NFL is going to have to push in-stadium betting first, which is a vanishingly smaller audience.)

There’s no doubt that the confluence of technologies is either going to be the synergy that pushes things forward or the fly in the ointment that holds it back. Imagine low-latency, high-bandwidth VR by Apple and Meta, with cost of the headset being subsidized by bet volume. Imagine OpenAI rethinking the interface altogether, and allowing a kind of KITT for betting. “Alexa, parlay Cole over on strikeouts and Yankees to score next inning.” There’s dark sides to this - addiction, bankruptcy, and the inevitable scammers and ramoras who will dive into the space.

What the advent of per-game does is open things up. There was a time when pundits said that everything would be pay-per-view, and we’re kind of there, just not the way anyone expected. There was a time when people thought a la carte would be great, but now we have it and subscribing to six streaming services isn’t cheaper or better. I think the infinite stadium is going to be an option first, an early adopter tech that teams will realize opens up new revenue streams, a more direct connection, and an ability to innovate.

As one revenue model collapses along with RSNs and broadcast rights hikes - the NBA’s upcoming deal will be the peak - another emerges. MLB and other leagues might not get the cut of gambling they wanted initially, but per-game revenue might be better, or at least similar. It’s not without issue, but the Knights - again, the NHL’s reigning champs - are willing to experiment and think this will succeed, right now.

The convergence and synergies of technology, commerce, and opportunity might save sports teams and sports fans from some of the worst problems of the modern age, from blackouts to bankruptcies to bloated ticket prices. It has the chance to truly change, once again, how we watch and interact with the sports we love.