1. chapter 15
Electronic Media

2. Objectives To gain an overview of current electronic media
To become familiar with the technological basics and terminology of electronic media
To examine how the sport industry can use electronic media to market and promote products
To gain an understanding of how sporting events are produced and distributed through the electronic media.

3. Electronic Media
Television is the dominant electronic medium in terms of both market penetration and audience impact.
Radio is often overlooked, but it continues to reach local and regional sport audiences efficiently.
The Internet and its digital offspring offer immediate, international reach and the ability to pinpoint specific consumers but have yet to approach either television or radio in terms of mass audience numbers or response.

4. The Electronic Media Landscape
Although there are obvious differences among the electronic media, all follow the same simple model:
Information—the sounds of a contest, pictures of an event, or textual accounts— is encoded as digital bits and bytes.
Sent via satellite, wire, or over-the-air transmission to a receiving device that decodes the impulses and reproduces the information in usable form.

5. Television Facts
110 million of the approximately 112 million U.S. households own at least one television and nearly 4 out of 5 homes own two or more sets.
In the typical household, the television is tuned in to one of the nation’s 1,600 TV stations or hundreds of cable channels for 8 hours every day.
Women, on average, watch for 5 hours a day; men, 30 minutes a day less.
Advertisers paid an estimated $68 billion for commercials to reach those viewers in 2004.

6. Radio Facts Radio reaches 94% of the population every week.
Radio has some 10,000 commercial stations, 2,500 noncommercial stations on the air in the United States, and rival satellite services offering hundreds of channels of personalized programming.
Advertisers spent nearly $21.5 billion on radio in 2005.

7. Internet Facts
The Internet, conceived as a research tool in the 1960s, became a mass medium by the 1990s.
In 2005, more than two-thirds of all Americans had Internet access at home, school, or work. About a third of users had high-speed broadband connections that allowed them to download audio and video effortlessly.
No longer do you need a radio to listen to radio programs or a television set to watch TV broadcasts.
Computers and portable digital devices make it possible to watch games in progress, get the latest sports news, and retrieve past performances and feature material from vast digital archives any time and any place, threatening the assumption that the greatest virtue of the electronic media is immediacy.
Advertisers followed consumers into cyberspace, spending nearly $10 billion on Internet advertising in the U.S. in 2005.

8. Sport–Media Relationship
Well-established legal precedents give the home team, the tournament organizer, or event promoter the exclusive right to determine who can and cannot broadcast the events.
Established teams, leagues, and events usually auction their broadcast rights to the highest bidder.
In exchange for a guaranteed payment, the winning bidder receives exclusive rights; pays production, distribution, and promotional expenses; and sells advertising time to cover its costs.

9. Players in Sport–Media Relationship
Sport property owns rights and sells them to media.
Media buy rights and sell ads to cover costs.
Advertisers look to reach customers through commercials during broadcast.

10. Other Broadcast Models
Syndication
In-house production
In-house production distribution
Internet broadcast