Digital Media Sport

Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society

Brett Hutchins, David Rowe, Brett Hutchins, David Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415517515
• eBook ISBN: 9781134108015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Live broadband streaming of the 2008 Beijing Olympics accounted for 2,200 of the estimated 3,600 total hours shown by the American NBC-Universal networks. At the 2012 London Olympics, unprecedented multi-platforming embraced online, mobile devices, game consoles and broadcast television, with the BBC providing 2,500 hours of live coverage, including every competitive event, much in high definition and some in 3D. The BBC also had 12 million requests for video on mobile phones and 9.2 million browsers on its mobile Olympics website and app. This pattern will only intensify at future sport mega events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both of which will take place in Brazil. Increasingly, when people talk of the screen that delivers footage of their favorite professional sport, they are describing desktop, laptop, and tablet computer screens as well as television and mobile handsets.

Digital Media Sport analyzes the intersecting issues of technological change, market power, and cultural practices that shape the contemporary global sports media landscape. The complexity of these related issues demands an interdisciplinary approach that is adopted here in a series of thematically-organized essays by international scholars working in media studies, Internet studies, sociology, cultural studies, and sport studies.

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1 Introduction

Sport in the Network Society and Why It Matters

David Rowe and Brett Hutchins

Introduction: The Coming of Networked Media Sport

In the early years of the twenty-first century, the long-heralded digital transformation of mediated sport announced its arrival with a force that could no longer be ignored. Newspapers, which had literally marked their readers with ink since the first sport reports more than 300 years earlier, suddenly began to lose them to the much cleaner, more flexible combination of keyboard and computer screen. Analogue radio and television, which had provided sport sound and vision for decades, were given firm notice that their wave-based broadcasts were ultimately to be switched off and replaced by the multiplying binary splits of digital signals. The digital regime rapidly proliferated across mobile telephony and gaming, while computer-based desktop, laptop, notebook and tablet devices created an expanding array of uses and connections that steadily eroded the divide between “old” and “new” sport media, providing many new forms of mediated sport text and ways of accessing them. Thus, as we have argued in Sport Beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport (Hutchins & Rowe, 2012), the production and consumption of media sport is in flux, constituting an unstable, unpredictable synthesis of the old and the new, the familiar and the strange, the predictable and the unanticipated.

These are circumstances that demand the close attention of those who are concerned with developments in society and culture in general, and in media and sport in particular. Not only might contemporary transformations in the mediation of sport be instructive in the task of understanding socio-cultural change, but media sport is itself an influential socio-cultural phenomenon that, in a reflexive fashion, is helping to remake the world that has made it. We contend, therefore, that a book devoted to digital media sport is inevitably a study of something much larger—the dynamic “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, 2004) in the context of national, transnational and global social structures and relations.

Sport Beyond Television Encapsulated

In Sport Beyond Television we tracked the development of networked media sport with regard to the intensification of media content production, the acceleration of information flows and expansion of networked communications capacity (p. 17). In these related processes we see the extraordinary growth of the Internet as crucial, not just in terms of the rapidly rising numbers of connections and users across the globe, but in its profound impact on how mediated sport is bought and sold, produced and consumed, accessed and experienced. The “media sport content economy” has shifted from the “scarcity” that was typified by analogue television and radio, and print-based media, to the “plenitude” that is produced by convergent digital media forms that convert cultural data into material that can be reshaped and freely circulated in ways that are difficult to govern. Thus, we contrast broadcast television and its limited “footprints” with the wide-ranging online media sport provision of the “legitimate” likes of Google and the “pirated” live streams of elusive media operators that infringe on the exclusive rights of the television networks. Established broadcast sport interests have tried to adapt to changed market conditions, ranging from harnessing online and mobile content themselves, to undertaking legal action and intensive political lobbying for regulatory change to meet the challenge of new media sport providers.

In the context of the emergent “attention economy” (Lanham, 2006) of the twenty-first century, the relatively static audiences that could be captured and measured via broadcast ratings are pursued in a range of ways in the more variegated online world. Threats to advertising and subscription-based business models call for new metrics to demonstrate who is watching, when and for how long. This networked media world offers new opportunities for sport leagues and established media companies to develop their relationships with fans and customers, but this environment provides a range of other parties with similar communicative and commercial options. Here the website can be shown to be a crucial “meeting point” for sports, fans, sponsors, advertisers and media corporations. Websites are now routinely used both by high-end professional sport and for more modest hobby-based sport pursuits, and can be “mined” for demographic and consumption data in ways that allow more precise targeting and matching of consumers, products and services. Digital media sport, therefore, may be as significant in connecting with people for purposes that have little to do with sport per se as in the task of catering to the commodifiable tastes of sport fans.

A critical area of concern is the codevelopment of large institutional media (what we traditionally call “the media” and that is often now labeled “legacy media”) and the informal, technologically enhanced human communication that we now call “social media”. The latter world of blogging, Facebook friends, Twitter feeds and Tumblrs is of increasing importance to the understanding of a media sports cultural complex that is less easily governed by small clusters of powerful organizations and those who control and operate them. The involvement of participant networks of many shapes and sizes, able to communicate freely across time and space by means of digital technologies, has led to a greater emphasis on user-initiated communication as opposed to producer-led consumption. These users are not only fans, as many athletes themselves want to use social networking to communicate widely without needing to rely on the media and sports organizations as “go betweens”. This desire causes consternation for bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that seek to avoid “ambush marketing” (athletes trying to promote companies who are not official sponsors and licensed suppliers), political controversy arising from the expression of views beyond the usual platitudes, or scandals caused by ill-advised utterances of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature. There is also a fear that freely communicating sportspeople will provide inside information to sporting rivals or, worse, to those engaged in sports betting. As a result, the management of risk becomes paramount at a time when the means of communication are proliferating and the desire to control public messages still registers powerfully among sports organizations.

Fan-made media communication is, in many respects, as troubling for both media and sport organizations as the involvement of athletes in social networking. The capacity to circumvent the “official” channels creates the possibility of new loci of popular power that might, for example, effectively resist a takeover of a football club or the appointment of a new coach. This does not mean that sports hierarchies are suddenly being turned upside down, but they certainly have to take greater account of popular sentiment, exchange and mobilization. Some sport leagues and clubs have displayed intransigence in trying to censor or sue sport fans who use online message boards to criticize them. Others have adopted alternatives to stonewalling and patronizing sport fans, instead choosing to listen to them and harness their energy, expertise and commitment. Here there is often a clash between freewheeling, informal and sometimes-offensive fan discourse and the tightly controlled defense of intellectual property and brand image. The very nature of contemporary sport and fandom is at issue in such disputes: many fans are no longer content to be compliant consumers who might grumble about how the game is run but decline to try to change it. Instead, they might assert “rights of ownership” as the true “custodians” of sport who are able to assemble in convergent media environments with tangible material effects on “mediasport” (Wenner, 1998). At the same time, the “work” of such fans might be harnessed more effectively by sport organizations in, for example, functioning as conduits for consultation on major decisions, or simply by generating interest and consumption through intensive networked communication.

Most sport fans are not paid to communicate about sport, but professional journalists are. The craft of sport journalism has been based in the print media, with radio and television commentary being tied closely to description and discussion of live sport action. The expansion of the media sport sphere has required journalists to be more flexible and multi-skilled in moving across media (for example, print journalists appearing on television and broadcasters writing newspaper articles), but the digitization and convergence of media sport has accelerated and expanded this move towards cross-platform sport journalism. The reason for this change in journalistic practice lies not only in the availability of new technologies and the shrinking journalism workforce caused by the decline of mainstream media business models. It is also because the world of networked media sport contains many competitors with professional sports journalists who are establishing sport websites, blogging, tweeting, podcasting and so on, thereby requiring sports journalists to do likewise in the maintenance of existing audiences and the search for new ears and “eyeballs”. As organizationally-based professional sports journalists operate across platforms and increasingly interact with “citizen journalists”, both are drawn into the confusing conflicts over ownership and control of content that currently bedevil the media sports cultural complex.

So thoroughgoing has been the transformation of the relationship in the media-sport nexus that the traditional conception of sport and media has given way to sport as media within a broader leisure framework (Hutchins & Rowe, 2012, p. 10). The line between “reality” and “fantasy” in media sport cultures is blurring as the Internet, computer, console and handheld platforms have made possible new forms of interaction and sports gaming, including the integration of the fictive and the material in sport management games. In this realm of “remediation”, sport as media can be manifest through Wii-style combinations of technology and athletic skill, and the Olympic-style, international multi-discipline event structure of the World Cyber Games (WCG) (see Taylor, 2012). The futuristic frames of reference for this kind of mediated sporting activity challenge the conventional separation of the human and the mechanical, and the technological and the corporeal. These frames are also indicators of more general disturbances and uncertainties provoked by networked media sport.

As we have noted, the battle over the content, ownership, exploitation and use of mediated sport is being conducted on many fronts, and we are unquestionably going to witness intensified conflict as online distribution meets proprietorial claims over content, and then confronts wider public assertions of media sport-related cultural citizenship (Scherer & Rowe, 2013). The latter concept proposes that access to premium sport content should be widely available rather than confined to the comparatively affluent sectors of the population with the means to partake in media sport culture. Disputation over this matter has deep socio-cultural ramifications. It is clear, then, that concerns with digitally enabled networked media sport cannot be confined to debates about the needs of the sport, media and telecommunications industries. These are matters that go to the heart of debates over the “common culture” and to the essence of what is meant by the “the social” in the contemporary, mediatized world.

The Case for Digital Media Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society

In arguing that networked media sport is an important, dynamic and complex subject, we also recognize that it is even more daunting in scale because it can never be about only sport and media. These are essentially concepts of heuristic convenience that capture a diverse range of institutions, practices, symbols and values, the multi-faceted elusiveness of which we have signaled in conceiving sport as media, and to which we could add, more extensively media/sport as culture/society. Here we acknowledge our own limitations—Sport Beyond Television covered a great deal of ground, and was determinedly global/transnational/international in scope, but there are many other situationally based “takes” on the subject that we cannot comprehensively articulate and empirical knowledge in other contexts that we do not possess. For these reasons, we have devised Digital Media Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society as the first international edited collection of its kind that combines contextual reach with thematic scope. Designed as a companion to the monograph but able to stand alone as a contribution to contemporary work on digital media, it identifies the intersecting issues of technological change, market power and social practice that shape the contemporary media sport landscape. The complexity of these related issues demands an interdisciplinary approach adopted in a series of thematically organized essays by international scholars working in media studies, Internet studies, sociology, cultural studies and sports studies.

It is worth recounting why research and scholarship in this area are so urgently required. The number of Internet users worldwide is estimated to have grown by more than 566 percent since the turn of the century, now reaching almost 2.5 billion people (Internet World Stats, 2012). Video content exceeds half of global consumer Internet traffic (Cisco VNI, 2012), while approximately seventy-one percent of Internet users in the US report using a video-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo, representing a thirty-eight percent increase in just five years (Moore, 2011). Sport supplies a pivotal cluster of this digital content, especially given the appeal of live sport, highlights packages, and news among users. The 2008 Beijing Olympics, a true sports mega-event, reported impressive online coverage and viewing statistics. Live broadband streaming accounted for 2,200 of the estimated 3,600 total hours shown by the American NBC-Universal networks (NBC, 2008). This pattern intensified at the 2012 London Olympics, with multiplatforming of unprecedented proportion, embracing online, mobile devices, game consoles and broadcast television. Dubbed the “Red Button Olympics” (in referring to digital multichanneling), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) provided 2,500 hours of live coverage, including every competitive event, much of it in high definition and some in three dimensions (Rowe, 2012). The BBC also received twelve million requests for video on mobile phones during the 2012 Games, and reported 9.2 million browsers on its mobile Olympics website and app (O’Riordan, 2012). NBC, the US’s Olympic broadcaster, struck partnership arrangements with “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Shazam to promote its coverage of the Games onto these popular social media platforms” and provided “Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, and GetGlue with Olympic content” (NBC Sports Group Press Box, 2012). The search engine Google offered browser-customized national medal counts and “updates, news and photos from the Olympic Games on Google+” alongside traffic-generated trending topics (Google, 2012). There is little doubt that the following Summer Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 2016, will supply an even more extensive range of networked media sport offerings.

As we outlined in Sport Beyond Television, such figures and estimates are evidence of a rich and popular second screen experience for fans and viewers (p. 4), with mobiles and tablets now offering increasingly sophisticated additional screens. These multiscreen experiences continue to grow in both volume and detail, particularly in relation to live events. Yet, despite widespread changes in digital media technologies and practices, there is also significant historical continuity evident in the popularity and commercial value of media sport. As was evident throughout the analogue-broadcast era, sport remains a key source of “must-see” content for massive audiences and large cohorts of fans. This appeal positions sport at the epicenter of power and value in a contemporary media setting characterized by multiplying platforms, changing audience behavior and market volatility. I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Sport in the Network Society and Why It Matters
• PART I Evolving Technologies, Platforms and Markets
• PART II Users, Audiences and Identities
• PART III Content Ecologies, Social Software and Games
• List of Contributors
• Index