(2018-01-10) Wei Beware The Lessons Of Growing Up Galapagos

Eugene Wei: Beware the lessons of growing up Galapagos

I'm wary of all conclusions drawn about media in the scarcity age,

The same mistake, I think, is being made about declining NFL ratings. Owners blame players kneeling for the national anthem, but here's my theory: in an age of infinite content, NFL games measure up poorly as entertainment, especially for a generation that grew up with smartphones and no cable TV and thus little exposure to American football.

if you watch a cut-down version of a game using Sunday Ticket, only about 30 minutes of a 3 to 3.5 hr game involves actual game action

Cultural products must regenerate themselves for each successive age and generation or risk becoming like opera or the symphony is today.

Yes, football has been around for decades, but most of those were in an age of entertainment scarcity. During that time the NFL capitalized on being the only game in town on Sundays,

Football resembles a religion or any other cultural social network; humans being a tribal creature, we find products that satisfy that need, and what are professional sports leagues but an alliance of clans who band together for the network effects of ritual tribal warfare?

I don't trust a bunch of rich old white male owners who grew up in such favorable monopolistic conditions to both understand and adapt in time to rescue the NFL from continued decline in cultural relevance. They are like tortoises who grew up in the Galapagos Islands, shielded on all sides from predators by the ocean, who one day see the moat dry up, connecting them all of a sudden to other continents where an infinite variety of fast-moving predators dwell.

Other major sports leagues are in the same boat though most aren't as oblivious as the NFL.

Make no mistake, one possible successful strategy in this age of abundant media is to double down on scarcity. It's often the optimal strategy for extracting the maximum revenue from a motivated customer segment.

However, you'd better be damn sure your product is unique and compelling to dial up that tactic because the far greater risk in the age of abundance is that you put up walls around your content and set up a bouncer at the door and no one shows up because there are dozens of free clubs all over town with no cover charge.

Sports have long had one massive advantage in production costs over scripted entertainment like TV and movies, and that is that their narrative engine is a random number generator (RNG).

Some players will compete, and someone will win

Unfortunately for major sports, this advantage is now a weakness as sports narrative is much more brittle than its entertainment counterparts. Narrative is a hedge against disaggregation and unbundling, and that is a critical moat in this age of social media and the internet.

I can watch highlights of most games on ESPN or HouseofHighlights on Instagram and extract most of the entertainment marrow and cultural capital of knowing what happened

Two nights ago, I watched a clip of multiple angles of Tua Tagovailoa ripping a laser beam of a pass to win the National Championship for Alabama. I didn't watch it live, or on ESPN. I watched it on HouseofHighlights on Instagram

The most culturally relevant bit of Sportscenter today may just be the Sportscenter Top 10, as athletes who make a stunning play routinely tell reporters they are excited to see if they'll be featured on that evening's roundup of the top 10 plays. Unfortunately, many athletes already see an appearance in HouseofHighlights as the social media alternative to appearing in the Sportscenter Top 10.

The average caption on an Instagram clip of a major sports league highlight is about twice as likely to be fresh and contextually humorous to a young person than any amount of generic sportscaster hooey spouted on ESPN.

While this may sound grim, the major sports, their respective leagues, and ESPN all have a fairly solid near term window.

For one thing, sports is still the highest volume, highest popularity real-time entertainment.

A second and less discussed factor is that most young tech CEO's don't know the first thing about sports.

*Without that intuitive sense of sports' place in culture, they aren't as attuned to the opportunities in that category.

This provides the leagues opportunities to swindle the tech companies for a while longer,*

This happened for tech companies when they tried to add film and television (TV) to their portfolio, too.

Fortunately, all it cost them was some money and some time, something most of the incumbents have a surplus of.