#how to play packer game on hulu when its not showing up

[translgbtq]

15 Best Realistic Pack And Play Packers

The word “Pack And Play” sounds like something that means you suddenly doing something for enjoyment. Yes, you come to the right place. Here we gonna talk about Pack and Play Packers and Sexual Pleasure Points. Let’s start discussing. Intro: Pack And Play Packer Pack And Play Packers are known as Erect STP Packers. It allows a user to play sexual intercourse. The packer is made of silicone…

[ericdeggans]

CBS’ Diversity Controversy, HBO’s Confederate Highlight Fight to Resist the White, Male Gaze in TV

To some, it was a landmark moment; when a roomful of journalists descended on CBS executives to pillory the company at length for its lack of diversity in primetime shows.

But, to me, it felt like a flashback to a time five or 10 years ago, when every network played this game.

Facing reporters at the TV Critics Association summer press tour Wednesday, CBS executives tried their best to frame the situation to their advantage. Their executives took the stage after a press conference with the cast and producers of its S.W.A.T. reboot, which is the only new show on the network featuring a non-white person in the lead role, with a white man, black man and Asian man as executive producers.

Still, they had few good explanations why, for the second year in a row, all their new fall primetime shows star males (in fact, every new show they have planned for the entire 2017-18 TV season stars men). Or why they couldn’t pay the two most prominent non-white co-stars on their Hawaii Five-O reboot the same as the two white males who star in the show. Or why the casting departments for the network – as alleged by Maureen Ryan from Variety and not contradicted by the network – are staffed entirely by white people.

“There is change happening on CBS,” insisted Kelly Kahl, a longtime executive in charge of scheduling at the network who became entertainment president earlier this year. “We have two shows with diverse leads this year that we didn’t have on the schedule last year. We have a midseason show with a lead character who’s gay. And over the last few years, if you look at the number of diverse series regulars, that’s up almost 60 percent.”

This is how TV executives at most every network talked about representation years ago, as incremental, careful advancement. Numbers of inclusion barely budged as network executives insisted they were doing the best they could. Of course, that was before shows like Fox’s Empire, ABC’s Scandal and Black-ish and NBC’s This Is Us revealed how much success could be found in featuring non-white characters without reservation or equivocations.

I think this issue boils down to something simple: Resisting the white, male gaze.

Shows with people of color in starring roles and status as creators and/or executive producers – for example, in series like FX’s Atlanta, HBO’s Insecure or Netflix’s Master of None -- have told unique stories through the perspectives of non-white people. Women have found similar success with series like Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and HBO’s Big Little Lies. And once those perspectives brought success, it was surprising how quickly many TV outlets figured out how to bring more of those characters and stories to their air.

But CBS, long considered the most traditional broadcast network, has moved slowest to offer something similar. It has a profitable, long-running business model built on formulaic programming. And as much as executives like Kahl insist they are changing things, there’s also a sense they are too hesitant to challenge their audience -- with a slate of new shows which feel like slightly tweaked versions of many series which came before. 

A long line of CBS’ most popular shows, from NCIS and Hawaii Five-O to Bull and MacGuyver, start and center their narratives on the perspectives of white, male characters.

And it feels long past time for that to change.

Even the way TV executives talk about these issues can make progress difficult. “Every single drama on our air has at least one diverse regular character,” Kahl said of CBS during the press conference.

Using the word “diverse” as an adjective is an odd way to refer to non-white characters, though it is something TV executives do regularly. It both avoids mentioning the topic of race – which is the heart of the issue, most times – and positions non-white characters as a divergence from typical casting and programming decisions. And it leaves women out of the discussion entirely.

CBS has outsourced much of its diversity to other platforms in its media family. Its streaming network, CBS All Access, will feature the first Star Trek series centered on a female, non-white Federation officer, Star Trek: Discovery. And its sister network The CW has Latino-centered comedy Jane the Virgin and a midseason show which will be the first primetime network TV series to feature a black superhero since the mid-1990s, called Black Lightning.

But if diversity in casting is good enough for sister networks and streaming, why isn’t it good enough for the mothership network?

A version of this struggle also seems to fuel to controversy over HBO’s proposed series Confederate – a drama set in an alternate reality where the Confederacy didn’t lose the Civil War and slavery remains a reality in modern America.

HBO announced the series back in mid-July by emphasizing its creators – David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the executive producers of its hit Game of Thrones. But when the Twitterverse heard that two white guys were going to produce this series – overlooking the fact that two black producers will be working on it, too – the backlash was severe and continues today.

Some critics seemed to make an awful lot of assumptions about a show that doesn’t even have a script yet. But others made arguments which hearken back to objections over the white, male gaze. Why must this alternate reality be centered on black subjugation and suffering, yet again? Why can’t producers imagine a world where non-white people actually achieve freedom?

African American producer Will Packer stepped forward with an alternative, telling the industry website Deadline about a show he is developing for Amazon, called Black America, about a world where black people formed a country from three states given to them after the Civil War as reparations.

This is a show where black people likely won’t be victims of a system they can’t control. And it may be no coincidence that it is created by a black producer.

I spoke to CBS’ Kahl after his press conference ended, and he remained steadfast. “In my heart, I believe we’re moving in the right direction…I think we are getting the job done,” he said, in response to a question on whether their pace of chance is too slow and ineffective. “We want also want to put on, not just diverse shows but successful shows that are inclusive…I would hope you see the progress going forward.”

I hope so, too. Because it seems one of the most venerated names in broadcasting is in danger of becoming a symbol of the bad old days, when the white male gaze was the only perspective available on television.

[truesportsfan]

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

Graphics by Ryan Best

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/how-much-football-is-even-in-a-football-broadcast/

[truesportsfan]

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

Graphics by Ryan Best

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/how-much-football-is-even-in-a-football-broadcast/

[truesportsfan]

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

Graphics by Ryan Best

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/how-much-football-is-even-in-a-football-broadcast/

[truesportsfan]

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

Graphics by Ryan Best

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/how-much-football-is-even-in-a-football-broadcast/

[truesportsfan]

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

Graphics by Ryan Best

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/how-much-football-is-even-in-a-football-broadcast/