As sports media evolves, fans pay

The evolution of sports and the media continues. Thursday’s NFL game between the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, an important matchup only televised on the new NFL Network, drew stinging criticism since it was not available on many cable outlets.

They’ll be more such situations like this in every sport.

Follow the dollars – that’s still all you need to know.

It was worth a smile when all the bloggers and talk show hosts were moaning about the NFL and other sports not caring about the fan. How could they do this to the fans!

Get serious.

If the fans wanted to protest, don’t watch the game. That was not the response. Instead, fans were looking for the brew pub that would carry the game where they could spend even more money to watch.

Leagues, teams and networks are all fully aware that this whole fan thing has reached ridiculous heights. For far too many so-called sports fans, their teams, their leagues and their games have become life and death.

Fans can’t spend enough money and time on their “heroes,” a term with little meaning in sports anymore.

The Big Ten launched its network this year, colleges have networks that are national in scope, Major League Baseball is putting a network together, and teams like the Red Sox and Yankees make a fortune off their networks.

Fans will be asked to pay more and more to see games – and they will pay. So long as that is the case, all leagues and teams will be trying to figure out how to pull their sports in and secure ad dollars for themselves.

The lightning speed at which the ability exists to hear and see events on everything from TV to your cell phone to your laptop has only increased the speed at which sports broadcasts are taken in-house by owners and teams.

There are dollars to be made in doing so since each of the outlets where a game might be seen is a separate sales event. Even better for the owners, the games can be bundled – an advertiser buys across the board for multiple events and sports to connect with that team, school or league.

One of the ironies of this is that radio has come back into the fore. In the transition where games disappear from over-the-air and cable TV, radio fills a void.

Radio has learned to expand in the same way television has. Now radio is HD and satellite and digital and available on computers and Ipods and telephones.

What next? As in all transitional times for businesses, a shakeout will occur. Some outlets will survive and others will not attract the necessary eyes and ears to succeed.

That will be determined by the fans. For the moment, loyalty to teams and particular sports is sufficiently strong to allow reducing the games seen on traditional outlets and placing them on new and specifically defined outlets like the NFL Network.

That transition will continue and the cost of watching and listening will continue up.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.