Headline I missed yesterday being offline most of the day:
In New-Media First, Super Bowl to Be Streamed Online
That’s from Advertising Age, which continues:
The next Super Bowl will be streamed online by NBC Universal, adding a new-media dimension to one of the oldest but most viable big-TV properties on the prime-time schedule.
…
Under current plans, all postseason games broadcast by NBC, including a wild card Saturday game, the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl, will be streamed via NBC’s website and Verizon’s NFL Mobile application. Online viewers will be able to access additional camera angles and live statistics.
Cool. Not that I care in the least about football, but this is huge news for new media. As ReadWriteWeb notes:
One of the biggest deal killers for would-be “cord cutters”… has always been live sports. If you’re a huge football fan, for example, there’s no way around it: you need TV the old fashioned way.
Though Ad Age points out:
In recent years NBC began online streaming of its “Sunday Night Football” telecasts.
And that obviously hasn’t killed cable or broadcast TV.
The Super Bowl is, though, enormous, and always gets one of the biggest TV audiences in the U.S. (and Canada?) every year.
So: Is a streaming Super Bowl a nail in the coffin for broadcast and cable TV in North America? If it isn’t, is there anything that would prompt huge numbers of people to “cut the cord” and get their info-tainment purely online? Is streaming major league games a way to get some crosscultural interest in sports that haven’t been able to catch on via old-fashioned TV, such as soccer (aka what the rest of the world calls football) in the U.S. or baseball in Europe?
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