sports broadcasting

Sports broadcasting has become ubiquitous in the 21st century. Content is available on various devices and in nearly any form (e.g., ESPN’s coverage of college football’s national championship game on eight distinct channels with unique approaches to each outlet). It was not always this way, but is the new norm. From nationally broadcast but sometimes tape-delayed “game of the week” to 24-hour access, sports broadcasting remains as a last frontier of live consumption in traditional mass media form. The foundation of television production remains the core of sports broadcasting, despite access points (e.g., X [formerly Twitter], MLB.tv) that no longer restrict an audience to watch from home or a place of mass gathering.

Sports offers an unmatched spectacle of excitement and unknown outcomes. The Olympic Games and association football’s (soccer’s) FIFA World Cup provide a global audience with billions of viewers cheering for their respective nations while witnessing sporting events that are only available every 4 years. The Olympic Games are available in summer and winter formats that alternate every 2 years. The FIFA World Cup hosts a men’s event and a women’s event in consecutive years but each iteration is limited to a 4-year cycle. Thus, the events garner billion-dollar television and multimedia contracts that fuel the spectacle.

Outside these events that are global in scope and not annually available, professional sports leagues and U.S. college sports provide the content that fuels the business model and regular programming for sports broadcasting. Highlights of the marquee events include the National Football League (NFL) Super Bowl, the College Football Playoff, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball tournament (i.e., March Madness), the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals, Premiere League soccer, and golf and tennis major championships. The “regular season” games and matches in each of these respective sports leagues and associations provide the consistent programming that broadcast networks seek—and subsequently pay billions of dollars—in order to reach a highly engaged fan base willing to spend their time and money consuming sports.

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The history of sports broadcasting traces to five key times that provide context for its pervasive reach: (1) the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany; (2) sports as spectacle; (3) satellite technology and the rise of superstations; (4) ESPN and the legal fight for college football; and (4) online and streaming technology. These five elements are significant because they outline the role of sports broadcasting in a social transition from access to the construction of sports fandom through consumption. The increase in opportunities for consumption has been expanded by new technologies that have impacted audience reach.

Broadcast Potential and the 1936 Olympic Games

The rise of sports’ popularity in media started in newspapers in the late 1800s around the same time that sports gained social significance beyond physical exercise. The creation of modern sports leagues was underway with baseball and the construction of the college sports system in the United States. Newspapers provided daily space to recap what happened in sports, not just locally, but across the country and the world. However, that was yesterday’s news. Live programming of sports provided a way to participate in and engage with sports even if not attending an event as a spectator. The first broadcast of a sporting event was a radio transmission of the 1921 World Series. It was another 18 years before U.S. viewers would “see” a baseball game via television. This would forecast two interesting effects of sports broadcasting: visibility and profitability. Sports presented a vested audience for advertisers to reach and a financial windfall for sports leagues that positioned them as economic drivers for media.

In between those benchmark dates and long-term implications, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin gave rise to the broadcast potential for sports. Germany wanted to highlight the nation through Olympic prowess on its home soil as a support to the early rise of Nazi control under Adolf Hitler. Therefore, Germany offered radio transmission free to anyone willing to carry the signal. This was well-received in the United States where CBS and NBC both tapped into the broadcast in their battle for early radio supremacy. The first glimpse of what “transoceanic” transmission could offer through sports programing provided a way for an audience to experience a place only seen by the few elite travelers who could afford to visit.

The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin also offered the first visual broadcast of a sporting event through film technology. Theaters in Germany “showed” what the Olympic Games looked like, not just what could be heard or read. The film had to be processed and shipped before it could be seen beyond Germany’s closed-circuit signal. However, the visuals that film provided helped produce how the events are historically and socially remembered. Jesse Owens, a Black athlete, won four gold medals, a symbolic afront to both Hitler and segregation in the United States. In addition, the story of the removal of Jewish athletes from competition was visible through their omission. The opportunity to visually access the Games had a lasting impact, despite poor broadcast quality. The opportunity to offer sports for its perceived transcendental impact on social issues as well as a space to glorify athletes to a growing sports audience with disposable income was why broadcast networks started to spend heavily on sports programming.

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Sports as Spectacle

Following World War II, broadcast networks turned to sports as a supplement to primetime and news programming. Sports were reaching front pages of newspapers, and the creation of Sports Illustrated in 1954 was another harbinger of access that blended the power of the visual element in sports coverage. Sports Illustrated also impacted the depth of journalistic coverage devoted to sports and recognized an audience willing to pay for content beyond the record-keeping of winners and losers. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and U.S.-based networks CBS and NBC were willing to pay for programming that they considered extremely valuable in a growing financial model centered on advertising.

The early transmission of broadcast signals was limited to closed-circuit viewing, which meant a transmission was sent to a central location to see the content, usually movie theaters. Boxing was the primary sport in this early process, which Florian Hoof noted made sense because of the limited physical space occupied by two participants. These ideas expanded with microwave technology to send a video signal. The 1948 Olympic Games in London were broadcast to viewers within a limited geographic distance from Wembley Stadium. The 1956 Olympic Games were significant for two reasons. The Summer Games in Melbourne, Australia, became the first sporting event to sell broadcast rights, and the Winter Games were introduced as another competition. Broadcast content was limited to news stories that were edited and shipped to networks to rebroadcast as highlight packages. Technology was not yet advanced to transmit live sports beyond a geographic region limited by linear transmission of air waves (i.e., local markets).

This represented recognition of sports as a spectacle that viewers were willing to watch, even in a significantly delayed manner. The overlap between sports and media forged a symbiotic relationship that eventually positioned broadcast networks in a battle for limited, yet highly competitive, professional sports content. Sut Jhally defined this as the sports/media complex, whereby sports as broadcast programming became a material commodity that networks negotiated to own, and in the process, converted audiences into commodities to be sold to advertisers. This evolution of the role of sports broadcasting accomplished two goals. First, it turned marquee sporting events into a spectacle of consumption. Second, and as a byproduct of this first achievement, sports programming gained significant economic value that elevated sports’ social significance.

The Super Bowl became the single-day sporting event to command significant money from broadcast networks, and it helped position the NFL as the leader in the sports/media complex with significant leverage. In less than a decade of existence, the Super Bowl surpassed the Kentucky Derby and the World Series as the most-watched sporting event in the United States. However, the Super Bowl was positioned as more than a football game. Media hype leading to the game, the commercials embedded in the live transmission, and the coverage of the event afterward constructed the Super Bowl as the annual spectacle of sports, given that the Olympic Games were every 4 years. Each of these marquee events was retransmitted through a broadcast network that controlled the output, and thus viewers were limited to access through antennas at homes within geographic proximity to the transmitted signal.

Satellite Communication and Liveness

Once access and consumption were evident within the potential impact for sports broadcasting, satellite communication was the transcendent space to elevate sports broadcasting into a global empire for television. BBC was a trendsetter with satellite transmission of the Olympic Games and European Cup finals that reportedly reached at least 30 countries as early as 1960. This started to enhance soccer as the “global game” because it was played in nearly every nation and, thus, moved the world’s best players from stadiums into living rooms. In the United States, NBC dominated World Series coverage from 1950 to 1976 and CBS and NBC alternated the first 18 Super Bowl telecasts. However, ABC forged its way into the network battle with the creation of Wide World of Sports in 1961 and Monday Night Football in 1970. The reach of these shows to a sports audience that wanted content beyond the weekend and outside traditional approaches to sports broadcasting pushed technical boundaries. These two shows also introduced on-air personalities within sports broadcasting, including Jim McKay and Howard Cosell. Despite this new reach for networks, sports were not offered live in many areas because of their conflict with primetime programming in different time zones. Thus, tape-delayed events were a normal occurrence dictated by the networks.

The regulation of cable companies and satellite communication helped sports reach more viewers than was limited to the traditional three broadcast networks in the United States. In 1972, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was granted regulatory agency over satellite signal transmission that eventually opened space for the concept of subscription-based access to sports broadcasting content. Where satellite technology helped sports flourish was the ability to reach a live audience through the developing cable subscription-based system. In 1975, Home Box Office (HBO) transmitted the signal of the “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to cable subscribers who paid to receive HBO. According to Hoof, this initial moment of experiencing the “liveness” of sports provided through satellite transmission started a landslide of sports programming opportunities through the 1970s and 1980s.

In addition to simply reaching fans beyond their geographically accessible teams, satellite technology assisted in making fans. For example, before the construction of all-sports broadcast channels, TBS and WGN launched as superstations through satellite technology in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Ted Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in the same year he started TBS, and he used the Braves broadcasts as flagship programming for his network along with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. WGN-TV started as an independent station in Chicago in 1948, and the station launched with a sports broadcast of the Golden Gloves boxing finals from Chicago Stadium. Therefore, WGN as a superstation simply began simulcasting the local broadcast offerings from Chicago to anyone who could access the superstation. Chicago Cubs baseball games had been televised locally on WGN since 1948. Through satellite expansion, this extended the reach of the Cubs, the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, and to a lesser extent, the Cubs’ crosstown rival Chicago White Sox because of fewer televised games, noted Robert V. Bellamy and James R. Walker. WWOR in New York followed the WGN model of retransmitting its signal in 1979 and provided viewers with access to New York Mets games. These broadcast opportunities through superstations provided the local station, and subsequently the teams, a financial head start over other Major League Baseball (MLB) teams before the emergence of regional sports networks. The superstations maintained for a few decades, and despite their disappearance, the impact they had on merging sports with the potential for global reach was historically significant.

One element that lagged behind was overall production value and multiple camera angles to create an immersive experience for the audience, in an effort to replicate the drama of in-person spectatorship. With use of up to three cameras in early sports production, television offered a mostly wide-angle perspective that placed the viewer in a stadium through visuals and sound. According to Garry Whannel, one overriding benefit that sports broadcasting offered versus in-stadium experience was the use of replay. This technological enhancement provided viewers with recall and better understanding of what occurred and how it could be interpreted. However, the experience was not immersive until the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s, when the concept of all-sports networks took shape.

ESPN and the Rise of College Sports

After superstations emerged, ESPN launched in September 1979. Dubbed the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN started as an idea to help expand the reach of University of Connecticut athletics and the New England (later Hartford) Whalers professional hockey team to a rapidly developing fanbase. The “Worldwide Leader in Sports” was born after ESPN’s founders recognized a more cost-efficient use of satellite technology used by HBO and others. If Sports Illustrated highlighted a significant value on visuals and long-form journalism, ESPN amplified sports journalism as a news-gathering source but also an available space to enhance the quantity of live sports broadcasting opportunities on a daily basis. Thus, ESPN influenced the blurred overlap between sports-as-news and sports-as-entertainment, first through its creation of SportsCenter and the central value of highlights and second for its live and entertainment programming.

Before becoming a global media empire, ESPN offered sports coverage of events that were not considered mainstream, ranging from world’s strongest man competitions and Australian rules football to sports trivia and replays of home run derbies from the 1960s. However, maintaining a business model central to sports provided a foundation for a viewership that clearly was building around daily sports content being available. ESPN eventually landed contracts with professional sports leagues, fostered through the network’s ability to create spectacle out of events that were not actual sports competition, such as the NFL Draft and College Gameday.

At the core of ESPN’s business plan was the use of college sports as a brand to build upon because of its core fan base and an abundance of programming options. ESPN televised opening rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament that was a financial boom for CBS for the Final Four events, so ESPN televised opening round games as early as 1980 and helped develop the “March Madness” moniker that is affiliated with the three-week long tournament. However, the greatest impact for ESPN was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1984. The University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia sued the NCAA for the right to have more football games televised beyond the NCAA broadcast contract that limited national appearances. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the universities and shifted negotiating power for college football from the NCAA to the individual conferences that included groups of eight to ten schools. ESPN capitalized as a 24-hour space available to assist in the rapid expansion of college football as a live sports programming powerhouse, but one that had ramifications that moved college sporting events to any day of the week and amplified the commercialization of college sport despite its desire to be marketed as amateurism.

During its history, ESPN has contracted to televise every U.S. professional sports league as well as golf and tennis professional tours. Regardless, college sports have remained a staple that has expanded to include every college championship event, and ESPN was crucial for college sports, especially in the 12-year agreement to host the College Football Playoff beginning in 2017. Other broadcast networks such as CBS and FOX showcase college sports, but ESPN is co-branded through the creation of conference platforms including the Longhorn Network, SEC Network, and ACC Network that devote around-the-clock and exclusive coverage to these power conferences and schools. ESPN combined access, spectacle, and distribution potential to gain control over how and where fans consume college sports.

Internet, Mobile, and Streaming Technology

The final frontier (for now) in the ubiquity of sports broadcasting is the intersection of Internet, mobile, and streaming technologies. These opportunities exist because of the rapid advances in high-definition equipment that have made sports broadcasting an immersive, and sometimes interactive, experience through the combination of multiscreen options. Camera and audio equipment advanced so far that viewers can see a visual perspective from a game official or hear conversations between coaches and players during timeouts. These technological advancements enhanced the viewing experience, but it was the rapid evolution of access points beyond a television screen that pushed the reach of sports broadcasting.

Major League Baseball was at the forefront of tapping into these advances through a subscription service known as MLB.tv. Each MLB team has its own independent broadcast contract with a regional sports network to engage their local viewers. Then MLB offered a cohesive broadcast package to subscribers whereby they can watch or hear the radio broadcast for nearly every baseball game with the exception of the viewer’s home market, which is blacked out to maintain the exclusive contract for the regional sports network. For example, a viewer in Florida who previously relied on WGN to watch Cubs games could access everything, including the play-by-play radio broadcast that was once relegated to Chicago-area residents limited by signal strength. This model generated additional revenue and audience for MLB without any extra production costs.

That transference of over-the-air content to online and streaming platforms targeted unique subscribers and “cord-cutters” who wanted to minimize growing cable fees. Other professional sports leagues followed a similar MLB model to offer their broadcast partner content in some capacity through the league’s online and mobile platforms. A desire by fans to watch away from home forced broadcast networks to target mobile users through tangential sports broadcasting opportunities including incorporating fantasy sports statistics into broadcasts. Major networks such as ESPN created streaming-specific platforms to simulcast over-the-air offerings as well as content branded solely to the streaming platform to supplement the loss of cable subscriptions. Third-party services such as YouTube TV and Sling TV offered less-expensive options to cable with an emphasis on sports channels as a draw for subscribers. In addition, platforms such as Amazon and Hulu partnered with leagues to simulcast and create unique content as multiple ways for audiences to engage with sports broadcasting from anywhere.

These streaming platforms targeted sports fans of long-standing legacy sports, but new audiences emerged with the construction of esports and its translation to visual media for fan consumption. It is a testament to how advanced video game technology has become and an avid fan base that desires user-engaged programming. Similar to how the sports/media complex rapidly developed through increased availability of programming for consumption, esports has followed that same trajectory with potentially greater synergy between media consumption and desire to participate, according to Kenon A. Brown and colleagues. Esports have increased in viewership and sold out arenas for audiences to watch global esports championship events in the same manner as baseball and basketball. Thus, sports broadcasting has evolved to engage a new audience of consumers.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the technological boundaries of sports broadcasting because it forced live sports to a global halt. The pandemic had negative implications for start-up sports leagues such as the XFL, which canceled midseason and shuttered the league after filing for bankruptcy. This highlighted how reliant sports are on live broadcasting content to remain a salient business. The broadcast networks that partner with sports leagues in the symbiotic relationship turned to a combination of real athletes competing in esports to engage viewers through what looked like sports broadcasting. NASCAR and the Indy Racing League were leaders in this area with iRacing televised on FOX. NBA players competed against each other on ESPN in an NBA 2K video game tournament. Lastly, ESPN produced a HORSE competition among eight current and former NBA and WNBA players in social isolation from their home basketball court. The transmission signal strength harkened to original sports programming of the 1940s that was blurry and minimal, yet still showed sport. The long-term sustainability of the sports/media complex came into question because of the pandemic and could force a restructuring of how sports broadcasting looks in the future. However, what the pandemic showed was a reliance on technology to find innovative ways to produce desirable sports content.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.