So today, on football Sunday, I have learned that the San Diego Chargers did not sell enough seats for the game to be broadcast. As a result, the game will be ‘blacked out’ and not shown, forcing fans to scramble to sports bars, watch it online, or other lamer means.
But my question is, why does this ever happen, short of the game being a complete bust where virtually no seats are sold? The unsold seats probably translates to a few hundred thousand in lost revenues from seat and concession sales. However, over the course of a three hour game, I have to believe the networks (including the NFL) are missing out on several million dollars in advertising sales by not broadcasting the game and having to back fill the time slot with crappy re-runs or infomercials. How does it make financial sense to ever black out all but the absolute lamest football games?
Remember that the team and the local stations that broadcast games are separate organizations. The station pays a licensing fee for the right to broadcast games. The team earns that fee plus whatever tickets they can sell. If they don’t sell enough tickets, it’s worth it for them to black out the game and try to get more asses in the seats. It’s true that the station loses money when this happens, but they agree to the blackout conditions when they sign the licensing agreement.
And don’t forget the practice of “tarping.” In cases where the local station would pay a larger amount then what you’d get for the unsold seats stadiums will cover up unsold sections (typically with tarps) and list them as unuseable. They will give some half hearted reason on why those seats are out of order, but nobody really cares. Since those seats can’t be sold they don’t count and you can then sell out with a smaller crowd. Some stadiums will do this semi-permanently if they believe there isn’t enough support to ever sell out and they just want to grab what money they can get from the local station.
Most teams will try their best to avoid this though since not being on tv provides an incentive for people to buy tickets to later games and they really want both streams of revenue. Being unable to sell out also provides a good reason to justify a move if you’re looking to get out of town.
If instead of large sections of unsold seats they just have smaller scattered patches the team will typically give them away to charities or even buy the tickets themselves to count as sold out. This is how you get “sold out” stadiums where the attendence doesn’t match the number of seats.
Thanks for explaining the financial arrangement Friedo. I always assumed the local station paid a licensing fee, but that they also shared a portion of the advertising dollars with the team/NFL in exchange. It seems strange to me to have a single licensing fee and not have it reflect the awesomeness/ lameness of the team. That is, if you, the NFL team, draws more viewers, we the TV station get more advertising dollars, which we kick back to you as X% of the take. If your team sucks, you get the same X%, but it represents a smaller dollar amount.
Our local baseball team, the Padres, does seems to have a lot of military in the stands on Sunday home games, which I always assumed was them doing what you called ‘tarping’, because even when they are in first place, they can’t seem to fill the stadium. The truth is, San Diego is too nice of a city with too nice of weather all the time to sit and watch an endless number of baseball games. Football is a much shorter season and there are even fewer home games, so to black one out seems like a big “fuck you” to the fans in my opinion. Why they don’t give the extra football tickets away to the military is an equally big mystery to me.
Scrambling to a sports bar won’t do them any good, i don’t think. I’m pretty sure that the blackout applies to the cable/satellite stations used in sports bars, and not just to the local network broadcast.
In football, licensing is granted to networks, not individual TV station. The stations don’t pay anything other than their usual fees to the networks to carry network programming.
The NFL gets a set fee each season for the length of the contract. This is not affected by which games they broadcast. Each individual team gets a share of this fee. Again, this it not affected by whether the game is blacked out or not. I’m not sure if the Sunday or Monday night games are paid out equally to all teams (most likely) or if they vary depending on whether your team appears in the game (logical, in some ways, but the NFL may feel it better to just divvy up the money equally)>
The stations make money by selling local ads. They sell the ads for the show, not for who’s playing.
What this means is that if a game is blacked out, the local station takes no economic loss. Nor would they make more money if the local game is played. They play whatever games are available to them and what they chose to play
Sports bars can carry any game if the sign up for the NFL Sunday ticket, as will individuals. (I believe that the blackout only applies to local TV affilates).
I guess there must be quite a few bars in San Diego that don’t carry Sunday Ticket, then, because there were a few bar owners quoted in the local news as saying that the blackout would cost them thousands of dollars in revenue today.
Also, this SD Union Tribune article, giving advice about what to do during the blackout, never suggests going to a sports bar to watch the game. One would think, if the sports bars had the game, that the paper would have revealed this as an option for football fans.
I don’t know the rules, but all the local media articles about the blackout suggest that it will be impossible to see the game in San Diego, and none of them mention a sports bar with Sunday Ticket as a possible exception.
The current blackout rule (which basically states that the game may not be televised locally if not sold out 72 hours prior to its start time), came into effect in 1973. Prior to that, NFL games were always blacked out locally, sellout or not (wiki cite).
I was surprised to discover this some time ago; I had always assumed that the current policy was more stringent than what had come before, rather than more lenient.
The economic logic of the blackout rule fails though, I think. The NFL says, if not enough of you fans buy tickets then none of you can watch it on free-TV. But if there isn’t enough interest to buy tickets, generally because the team is bad, then how is the populace being penalized by not being able to watch the game of a lousy team, such as the Detroit Lions?
Other sports, including big time NCAA football, do quite well without the blackout rule. They use the games as promotions for their sport without using the threat of a blackout as pseudo-punishment for non-compliant customers who don’t buy enough tickets.
Additionally, I pity those poor people in San Diego who have to suffer through the perfect weather and the lovely beach rather than watching the Chargers play.
That, and (in my experience of NHL games), those streams tend to be illegal copies of TV streams. So if it’s not on TV, you may be out of luck just the same!
Iunno. I think it works. Suppose only 60,000 people show up at Qualcomm, but another 100,000 would want to watch it at home. Depending on when they announce the blackout (anyone want to help me out on this?), I could see 5-10,000 in a city of 3 million deciding to buy tickets at the gate, those 100,000 or so being especially motivated.
And IMHO, it seems to me that the NFL are masters at marketing a really slow sport. I have to imagine that they know what the right threshold is for a blackout better than the other big three sports leagues in North America.
I believe the choice isn’t between watching the Lions game in person or some other game on TV. When the team is playing at home, it gets exclusive rights to that time slot, and the other network (Fox for the NFC, CBS for the AFC) isn’t allowed to show any game in that market.
Granted, that doesn’t have as much impact now that there’s one set of games shown at 1:00 and another set at 4:00 (not to mention the Sunday night game) but the idea is to protect the home team when it’s playing.
Actually, as we established above, that’s not the extent of it. If the only blackout were on free-to-air TV, i wouldn’t be as annoyed, but they also prevent people who have actually forked over good money for Sunday Ticket from watching the game. And, in a shitty economy, they also screw a whole bunch of local sports bars and other venues out of customer revenue by not allowing them to show the hometown team.
I realize the NFL isn’t a charity, but i think there are times when it appears to go out of its way to say “fuck you” to the people who support its product.
That’s still not much of an incentive to buy tickets though. The NFL is saying “You can’t watch any other team either, your choices are watch the lousy Lions or watch infomercials and/or Matlock reruns.” Plenty of people in Detroit say, “Bring on the infomericals and Matlock.”
Ok, I amend my statement to: “The NFL says, if not enough of you fans buy tickets then none of you can watch it on free-TV or Sunday Ticket”. The incentive is ass-backward. Shell out more money for game tickets, so those of who who shelled out for Sunday Ticket won’t get screwed. How does that perverse incentive get anyone to buy game tickets?
The NFL’d do better to get rid of the blackout rule.
To a certain extent the NFL has been a victim of their own success. They’ve been the most successful of the big 3 in turning TV viewing into an exciting product, then frown upon people staying home to watch it.
IMHO, blackout rules are one of the things that nearly killed the Canadian Football League in eastern Canada. Having grown up in Toronto, where many Argonaut games were blacked out due to the team being unable to fill the stadium, we rarely got to see the home team play. But football fans in Toronto could get their fill of football from the NFL telecasts we got every Sunday and Monday. At some point, the CFL wondered why it had no fans (in Toronto anyway), and had no idea why. Well, it should have been obvious: we never got to watch our home team–the Argos–play. If we had, maybe we would have supported the team better; as it was, the NFL and its teams got many fans, and the CFL and the Argos got (and kept) very few.
