They tried that one year with the amazing Olympics debacle, trying valiantly to embargo the results of the events. Bob Costas, somehow, played it with a straight face, pretending that the athletes weren’t already home in bed with their medals. It was the infancy of the internet, and some people could get the results real time, or on short wave radio.
Nowadays, people would just snicker and to online and watch the BTSports feed on overnight British TV.
Our cable company (Cox) branded box does that, too. It knows what you want to record is following a live sporting event, (or is a live sporting event) and asks up front if you’d like to extend the time. It gives increments of half-hour extensions, I believe.
That still doesn’t help much if there is an outage, which is why even with extended time, I don’t have last nights’ The Orville. I have two hours of “Off the Air”. Thanks, Cox. Bucha dicks…
Even so, back in the day when Fox Sunday had an entire lineup worth watching, and all I had was a VCR, I still knew to add extra time. It’s not that hard, people!
The next step in cable evolution should be smart programming guides that update in real time. Right now I can tell my machine to record a show whenever it is on, but it still can be fooled by delays or if the programming changed. If the guides update constantly, this problem would go away. Of course, making everything available on-demand also cures that problem.
This is what trips me up. I only record live sports. It’s easy to add time on the end just in case the game runs long or goes into overtime. What, apparently, my DVR can’t do is record the GAME. It can only record the time slot. Often, on ESPN, they will punt the game I want to watch over to a different channel, such as ESPN News or ESPN Classic. Eventually, they may snag it back to the original channel. How hard could it be for Comcast to understand that I am trying to record a specific GAME, especially when I choose that game from the guide and hit “record.” Impossibly hard, I guess.
Also, there is a Comcast feature “auto-extend recording.” You would *think *that means “Oh, Comcast will automatically extend its recording until the game is over.” You would be wrong. I’m not sure what “auto-extend” refers to, but I assure you it does NOT refer to recording a live game to its finish. I learned that the hard way. 10 minutes to go in a tight game and…NOOOOOO!
Clearly you haven’t seen Golf Channel. Tournament routinely run into each other.
It’s not about sports. If you’re going to have a schedule, then have a schedule. If you’re going to have a game, then figure out how long games last, and allocate that amount of time. Then show the next thing you have scheduled.
If Star Trek were scheduled to be on before a football game, and Star Trek ran long, then the game should absolutely start on time and cut off the end of Star Trek, because that’s what the schedule says. Except that Star Trek never runs long.
Look at the ratings. The folks have already decided what they would rather prefer - they’d rather watch a Live Event than a scripted show. I mean the Emmy’s didn’t get cut off because they ran long last night. You can say stick to your schedule all you want, but TV networks are not in the scheduling business they are in the money making business and if more people are watching sports, they will cater to them.
Commercials.
I can remember long enough ago that all those baseball games were on the local stations - and whatever else they might have done, they did not schedule a new episode of anything right after the baseball game, in large part because the local stations that showed local sports did not have new episodes of anything. As best as I can remember the same went for basketball and hockey. For whatever reason, the NFL sold the broadcast rights as a league to networks while in the other sports, individual teams sold broadcast rights to local stations/cable stations. And that’s how we end up with the problem of football running into shows that people actually want to watch - whether it’s Heidi or 60 Minutes or whatever. Nobody ever got annoyed when the baseball game running over caused the 11:00 showing of the Honeymooners to be cut from the schedule.
At the other end, any baseball fan in Japan knows this situation:
Ninth inning, tie score, runners on base, and it’s 10 o’ clock.
For a long time, TV schedules were treated as set in stone here, so games that went long were simply cut away from when time was up, regardless of the game situation.
There tends to be a bit more leeway given now, but it still happens, especially with baseball.
Yeah, but it’s golf. That’s only a little snarky. It’s watched in a different manner than other events.
I don’t know if “keeping broadcast TV afloat” is exactly the right term, but let’s look at the ratings for Sunday night.
The highest rated program was the NFL game overtime on Fox with 18.86 million viewers
The next highest rated program was the NFL game on NBC with 18.46 million
Third highest was the Emmy Awards.
Three live programs, two of them football.
The Orrville finished fifth, behind 60 Minutes.
In other words, The Orville was delayed more than 90 minutes, and still posted a higher rating than the previous week. I have to think that following the night’s highest-rated program, helped its ratings. Which is why Fox chose to run the first two episodes on Sunday nights in the first place.
I didn’t say single handedly because obviously they still make money but if sports start being streamed and no longer air on the networks, that would be the last nail in the coffin of broadcast TV as it currently exists. It wouldn’t be over night and it’s probably going to happen anyway but it would accelerate it. Losing sports would be a point of no return and they know it.
If the person I was replying to had said said sports was keeping Fox afloat, I wouldn’t have quibbled. But it makes more sense to say sports are keeping cable/satellite services afloat than it does to say they’re keeping broadcast TV afloat - the one thing I can’t have if I get rid of cable is local sports other than football.