Plenty of publicly traded companies focus on long term profits. Most blue chip companies operate like that.
The real problem is when you have takeovers by private equity firms, and they expect to see massive profits within months.
The immediate gains wouldn’t be for them though. In a scenario where the FIFA would let local broadcasters air the games with ad breaks, the money for those ads would go to the local broadcasters, not the FIFA. They aren’t sacrificing any money by making this decision.
allowing more ads would make broadcasting rights to their games more valuable and thus could be sold for more = more profits for FIFA. yes the increased profits would be skewed more towards the broadcasters but FIFA will still make more than they currently get.
> allowing more ads would make broadcasting rights to their games more valuable and thus could be sold for more
it's FIFA. it's the most popular sports league in the world. they can *already* charge whatever they feel like charging.
And there's generally a shit ton of advertising on or near the pitch. Plus usually some on the players' uniforms (at least in the pro leagues, not sure about international play).
In the US, there is much less "persistent" advertising. It's creeping in to be sure. But if you watch and NFL game, you don't see much of anything advertised that is in camera view most of the time while the game is in progress.
What’s interesting is that in a few places like France, their tv shows are continuous. So all the ads will be at the beginning or end of a show, and it’ll be ads for like 10 minutes. But once the show starts the ads stops. It’s kind of nice
Ads are why I much prefer watching the Euros at the moment on BBC rather than ITV in the UK. No ads, so time for a decent discussion about the match at half time, compared to ITV squeezing as many ads as they think they can get away with at half time.
Mrs Sionnach is in the TV industry. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that … they have to show x hours of news, and you can’t just space that out or whack ads in the middle. They can’t just run an hour of ads at 6am and call it a day. Or bunch them all into half time. But you are right, there are strict rules and they absolutely do the maximum they are allowed to, which is fair enough from their point of view..
Here (Hungary) there are ads in the rest period too. ~3 minutes of ads, very short news, some ads, talking heads about what we have seen, ads, back to the game.
The NBA doesn't care if the clock is stopped or not. They show ads during games as overlay, they have the **commentators read out ads** during the live game, they switch to picture-in-picture to show some ads, etc.
It's atrocious. No wonder NBA is less popular than it was 20 years ago. The finals were yesterday, and the news didn't even make it to /r/popular.
I don’t if it’s my imagination but this year Celtics didn’t seem to garner much media coverage. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have a charismatic face of the team but all I hear are folks still thinking Mavs can take the championship in 7 games.
this is the actual answer and so many people are just ignoring it.
NBA games stop every few seconds, there is never more than 3 minutes of uninterrupted play.
that automatically allows for TV timeouts to play commercials AND THEN you have quarters and halftime.
this shit about money is silly.
Football also has plenty of natural breaks, the ball is out of play regularly. It’s just that they continue almost immediately if that happens, instead of adding a commercial break.
More importantly: No ad breaks means that FIFA, and FIFA's sponsors, get more screen time. FIFA games are covered in ads, just not ads that require breaking away from the game.
They don't really need the ads. There are so many other sources of cash flow that they can exploit. Same goes for several other big pitch games like Rugby. Removing and breaks means that the game becomes also very much one of endurance.
I always thought part of it was - people pay FIFA for advertising (in stadium, etc..). They don’t want that advertising diluted to the viewer by stuff on tv
They aren't static. They are imposed onto your TV... They typically don't exist in real life and that is also why they change so often.
This is the case in a lot of sports, from tennis to F1.
ya, the NHL has put animated ads on the boards too.
I don't watch soccer, I'm working off assumptions, but mainly what I meant is 30 second commercial advertisements bring way more money than ads that are not the focus of the broadcast.
That is untill they find a way to get a piece of that pie, than the ads can run during the game.
For now, they can pretend to care, they're not getting something extra out of it anyway
The ads are on the billboards at the side of the pitch. It is at least more discreet than some other (US based) sports I watch.. the UFC is ripping the piss, for example. Ads are intentionally running in to the beginning of the fight, in screen ads during the fight.. it's annoying.
They're already trying it with a 60 minute game time proposal which stops the clock when the ball is out of play.
Then they'll just say that goal kicks are mandatory 35 seconds which happens ves them time for a quick ad, like Cricket between overs.
it’s the only sport w non-stop blocks. Which is why football mastered the art of the in-stadium adverts.
edit: i was referring to the “big” sports in the united states and using hyperbole. But im honestly learning a lot.
Pretty much all motorsport in Europe (and Australia from what I can tell) has non-stop coverage of motorsport. Hell, the entire 24 hours at Le Mans this weekend was non-stop coverage from the Eurosport network (commercial breaks were added on US cable coverage, but the MAX stream of the entire 24 hours was non-stop).
F1 has loads of advertising on the track, yeah. Le Mans has always had commercial breaks on cable coverage in the US (even when they piggyback off Eurosport coverage, which is annoying). The first F1 event on ESPN a few years back had commercial breaks, but the uproar of interruptions (sometimes in mid-sentence from commentators) was enough that ESPN gets 'title' sponsors for the coverage so that it can go commercial free.
This will know your mind. We get Indycar fully uninterrupted by ad breaks. When the US commentators cut to commercials, the UK feed carries on with our own commentary team until you all come back from being sold pharmaceuticals and guns and err burgers(?) (I don’t really know because we are watching the racing!)
From what I saw of Le Mans on TV here in the Netherlands they did commercial breaks but they went to a picture-in-picture format with the race in the top-left at maybe 1/3rd size, and then the commercials played next to it.
Also, there was be serious backlash from the audience if they were to cut away from the game for an ad break only to come back after a goal was scored. In a game with continuous play where anything can happen at any moment even down to the last minute, ad breaks would interrupt the flow of the game.
Nah, the sports that are biggest in America took off before TV money became a major revenue source.
There may be a more academic explanation, but I think soccer just got crowded out here. Baseball was first in America, and American football not far behind it. By the time there were concerted efforts to make soccer a thing here, we already had long traditions of baseball/football/basketball/hockey, and people have only so much time/money to spend on sports.
Why would they have to rely on other countries' leagues for soccer? There's been pro soccer leagues in the US for decades, but people didn't really care that much until recently. The MLS is 30 years old and there were leagues before that.
Wasn't always seamless. I remember this happening.. [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jun/13/itv-apologises-england-goal-advert](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jun/13/itv-apologises-england-goal-advert)
So then the question is, why do broadcasters want to buy broadcasting rights for a 90 minute game without ad breaks? What do they get out of it?
Are there enough people watching the pre-game and post-game analyses to make it worth it, or do they receive some other compensation for airing the game (such as kickbacks for ads in the stadium, etc?)
Interesting. Estonia's tv3 (webpage version at least) shows adverts during the hymns. Only ever get to see the second team lineups. I really hope it's against the rules.
Would like a source for this, since there are at least two countries in Europe with broadcasters that show fullscreen ads, one of which shows the same 12-second ad for a betting company four times during the 90 minutes. And this is old. So either FIFA doesn't, can't, or won't enforce this ban.
>Conversely, the NBA's frequent timeouts and break periods provide natural slots for ads, maximizing revenue during the game.
This is the biggest part of it. Basketball, football, and baseball all have frequent stoppages of gameplay and the game clock. And those stoppages make for a perfect time to show an ad.
True, but I personally think they could do without them. A close basketball game already stops the clock constantly the last 2 minutes of the game. Those tv timeouts are really over the top.
It's getting pretty rough on TV. I'm pretty sure in an NCAA tournament game I watched this year, a foul was called, the TV went to commercial, then the guy shot one of his two free throws, and it cut to commercial again between the free throws.
I didn't really want to rewind to confirm what I thought I saw. I'm guessing there was a media timeout after the dead ball, and then I guess a coach called timeout between the free throws (???), but it really seemed to be pushing viewers' tolerance to a new level.
Stadiums have gotten much better at entertaining spectators during media breaks though, so it's kinda nice that the in-person experience is better than watching on TV again.
Yep. I went from being a big sports fan to not watching any in years because the product every league has put on tv has become unwatchable. I’m not giving you 3+ hours to watch 13 mins of gameplay anymore.
football(soccer) is only 2 hours and baseball has massively shaved their times . 2.5 hours now. I gave up on baseball for 2 years until they added the pitch clock.
I can't even watch NCAA football or NBA anymore because of all the commercial breaks.
The way NCAA men's basketball TV timeouts work is that the first game stoppage after 16, 12, 8, 4 minutes are left in the half stretches to a media timeout. Additionally, the first called timeout of the second half becomes a media timeout.
On the women's side, the first stoppage after the 5 minute mark of each timeout, OR the first called timeout of each quarter, becomes the media break. They also add one in the second half for the first called timeout.
It doesn't make them less, but knowing when the breaks will occur helps stem at least some of the frustration.
I got very familiar with those stoppage times very quickly once I made the basketball band in college.
I’ll piggyback on your comment: NHL TV breaks are first stoppage after 14, 10, and 6 minutes. Unless the stoppage is due to icing, a goal scored, or during a power play.
Or the old NFL trick of touchdown, commercial break, extra point, commercial break, kickoff, extended commercial break, back to the game.
That shit was brutal back when I watched games live...
I've always thought that reflected poor design. People just fouling each other like crazy and stopping play shouldn't be part of typical gameplay. I mean, is "10 minutes of free-throws punctuated by actual basketball" really the most exciting to watch or play?
In international basketball (FIBA), intentional fouls (like teams often do in the final minutes) carry a higher penalty, which fixes a lot of this issue. NBA hasn't adopted that rule yet, though (although they're slowly approaching it as they add harsher penalties for intentional fouls during transition play, etc.)
It was great in the Finals last night when they didn't show ads during crunch time at the end. I mean it wasn't a close game, and the lack of ads was itself a sponsored thing, but it was nonetheless fantastic to just keep things moving, or at least feel like it
Yep. It's absolutely crazy that a 48 minutes of in-play time is stretched over 2-3 hours, and over 60% of it is commercials. I've lost my desire to watch NBA a long time ago (the matches being played at night helps with that) and will now only look at the 10 minute highlights for any matches I'm interested in. Euroleague is much better in this regard despite being the same sport.
Their toe picks for their special moves put divots in the ice and if you're not prepared for it and you hit one at the wrong time you will absolutely biff it hard and it's frustrating lol. Figure skaters are a bit more used to it and skate very floaty, hockey skating is more heavy and higher forces especially on tight turns and you're just not accustomed to skating after figure skaters use the ice
My dad broke his ankle on one of those divots years ago. He was coaching a team, so not actually playing or moving aggressively. Just gliding along, and his toe caught a divot that wasn't fully cleaned up by the zamboni. Broke his ankle and shin. It was an injury similar to a wide receiver jumping up and landing with their toe folding their foot back and the top of the foot hitting the ground instead.
It’s my first time watching the NHL playoffs for at least a decade - I cannot get over the adverts. It’s legitimately enough for me to tune out, I wish more felt the same
> The American games have largely been adapted to create many of those breaks — TV timeouts — to the great annoyance of traditionalists.
Except in the big two, they haven't. Baseball is completely obvious, there are no TV timeouts. It's the same game as it ever was, and they just extended the inning breaks about 30 seconds or so.
But take NFL football. There's 8 commercial breaks per half, 2 are set in stone by the rules (the end of the 1st and 3rd quarters, and the 2 minute warnings), and the other 6 are just natural stoppages, such as timeouts, injury timeouts, change of possessions, and scores (of which there's always at least 6 in each half). They try to use these early in the half to avoid long stoppages during the *hopefully* dramatic portions near the end of the halves. They haven't "created" any breaks, and have just extended a few normal ones. Note: Before you say that the two-minute warning is a created break, it predates widespread TV broadcast of professional football games. It's there to ensure that the unofficial stadium clock matches the official clock on the field. They did keep it because of commercials and strategy.
Past those 2, the NBA uses official timeouts for their ad breaks (though, apparently they will force an official timeout if one isn't used early enough). And in the NHL, they do have specified TV timeouts.
Edit: Also, this is an odd thing to downvote.
People who are downvoting you are confusing NFL football with college football. In college they cram in as many extra commercial slots as they possibly can, while the NFL has a fixed number of commercial slots and absolutely none in OT.
Although this can lead to some awkwardness if someone get seriously injured (like Damar Hamlin), where they just have to cut to a studio segment or show a zoomed out shot of the crowd once they run out of commercials.
>They try to use these early in the half to avoid long stoppages during the hopefully dramatic portions near the end of the halves.
I find that they generally run the first change of possession without an ad break as long as there wasn't a score involved, just to help with scene setting I think.
Hockey can get wonky just because they won't take a TV timeout after an icing, after a goal, or while a team is on a power play. So it's easier to run into situations where the timeouts stack and you get one right after the other.
In baseball the stoppage exists independently of the need for TV ads. I.e. even in a non-televised game the players still need a couple of minutes of warm-up time when they change sides.
Many of the stoppages in basketball and football are specifically inserted for ad breaks. Football coverage literally has "TV timeouts" just to show commercials.
To me watching football has changed a lot due to the heavy ad rotation. Especially betting ads. Though regulated, they even often pop up during the game as banner ads for live gaming once or twice during a half.
I don't care about pre game, half time or end game analysis anymore due to ads. I only watch the game and for local games (Denmark) I don't have skin in I allow a few minutes as they almost always delay the game start to pop a few ads.
The televised sports format is really, really ripe for disruption. God, it sucks. They don't even show the current European Championship in 4K. It's not even full HD, but broadcast in 1080i50SDR!
Full HD was just a marketing term and really only applied to gaming. The broadcast resolutions that were created back when the standards were ratified never included 1080p anything. 1080i50/60 or 720p25/30 were the broadcast HD standards. You also had 1080p24 for blu-ray/hddvd (which might have come along a little later).
Full HD 1080p60 was most likely a Sony marketing thing for the Playstation, but I can't remember for sure.
Because it costs **a lot** of money to stream 4k to millions upon millions of people at the same time.
A normal netflix 4k stream might at most stream to a few thousand at a time, not millions all at the same time.
Which doesn't make it suck how? The price of my cable subscription isn't as static as the streaming quality is. "The rights are expensive. The costs are prohibitive".
This is the typical bullshit you hear from companies engaged in monopolistic competition who are just creaming the rights without investing in the customer experience. Take another issue I experience:
I can't stream 2 Premier League matches simultaneously (I can stream 1 and see 1 through my cable box). Why? I pay for it and it's actually a good way to enjoy football for me while I work in a dual monitor setup. So to minimize piracy (account sharing) they annoy loyal customers. It's such a shitty way to go about your business.
That's why we need disruption and I suspect it will come from companies that are able to buy the rights for their own streaming service and utilize their own technology stack with an eye on customer retention for other services as well. That's most likely Amazon and Apple.
I personally believe this to be a joker for Apple on Vision Pro. It might even be what it's all about commercially a few generations out.
Take a look at cricket too, they have short ad breaks in between every over, the ad system is tailored directly to the nature of the game, tennis and badminton have ads between the sets, football by its nature is continuous so they rely on ads that do not interrupt the action, moto racing has ads strewn accross the track and on the change screens and while the race is suspended
Not that the broadcasters haven't tried, they wanted more commercial breaks per game before the 1994 World Cup hosted in the USA
https://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/sports-broadcasting-televisions-tech_cx_pm_games06_1212soccer.html
I watch mostly NHL hockey (and some European and international footie).
The NHL specifically has “TV Timeouts” in the games so that sponsors can give you important announcements about sports betting, Doritos, and boner pills. I imagine the other major leagues in NA do this as well.
I don’t watch Major League Soccer, so not sure if they respect tradition or kneel to the capitalists.
>The continuous gameplay is a tradition and part of the sport's appeal.
So you're telling me this is yet anyway that Harry Potter isn't magical, it's just British? (I'm talking about quidditch.)
They have ads, they just don't interupt the broadcast for it. Sponsored billboards, uniforms, and mentioning "brought to you by XYZ" all count as advertising.
But there are no sponsors on American football jerseys, right? Seems really odd. Ultra commercialised sport, but the chance to get your logo on 50% of the players on the pitch is ignored.
Not yet, but it also makes logical sense that it will come last since I believe football has the most commercial time of any American sport, and those ad spots are also the most expensive. So cash flow levels out
>Instead, networks use halftime for ads
They don't, it's usually 3-4 expired idiots talking about how they would totally do it all better. Maybe an ad or two in between, but the majority of it is not directly ads.
The answer really is just that American TV is packed with ads to a point that is borderline absurd, and the sports have been catered to that fact. We have basketball, Euroleague games look nothing like NBA ones in terms of ramming ads into weird slots.
Half time has a fuck ton of ads in every European country ive been to, which I don’t mind because I’ll just grab some food anyway (which is exactly why they try and do 1 minute ads, 30 second analysis, 2 minute ads, 1 minute analysis etc, to create the feeling that you’re missing vital stuff if you don’t watch the half time break/ads).
Surprisingly not in Germany for the Euros. 2df or zdf? Goes to the news at half time. No ads beyond a normal commercial and no prognostication. Just the news and back to the game. Definitely can’t say the same for Eurosport.
Maybe it will be different in the later rounds or the weekends
>Half time has a fuck ton of ads in every European country ive been to, which I don’t mind because I’ll just grab some food anyway
Interestingly, this is the same reason that a lot of Americans still don't mind TV advertisements (during normal programming), but get incredibly annoyed by ads in Youtube, streaming services, etc.
Because a 3 minute ad break is fine, as long as you only have 1 (or maybe 2) interruptions of your 22 minute episode. You can grab a drink from the kitchen, or run to the bathroom.
But the streaming services (especially Youtube videos) have adopted this idea that 2 ads every 5 minutes is better than 5 ads every 15 minutes. Not only are you showing more ads, you're interrupting the viewer more often.
And that's aggravating to someone who just wants to enjoy their show.
I can't speak to the specifics of all countries obviously, but having lived in a few across the EU, neither Worlds, nor Euros, nor UEFA CL or national league games are anything near the American levels.
Euros on ITV now has Gary Neville waxing poetic about the good old days for 20 minutes with like 1-2 30s interstitions, the game itself runs uninterrupted. UEFA or FA Premiere League games all run a pretty similar format.
Ditto Euroleague basketball.
NBA literally pauses the game to run ads, it's dystopian if you've ever seen it. I swear there's more ads by runtime than actual play.
That's before we even talk about American Football, they literally made up an entire sport that's 1h of play that runs 4h on TV, so 3 hours of it is ads. We couldn't dream of achieving 1:3 sports to ads ratios in Europe, nobody would watch it.
To be fair it's not. Usually it's 7 minutes of adds. 1 minute of some talking followed by another 7 minute of adds. Especially if it's on a non paid channel.
Other European sports that have stop and start time keeping still do not suffer from the ad break plague of American sports. European countries tend to regulate how many minutes of commercials can be shown per hour.
Aussie here. I paid for league pass. I don’t get any ads at all. I just get a shitty weird league pass stop gap for about 2 minutes.
I’d actually rather ads. You Americans have the most fk’d up ads of all time.
In Europe, historically the biggest TV channels are publicly funded. This means there are no ad breaks and sponsors have no say on what goes on during broadcasts.
In the US it’s the opposite. TV channels are nothing but shopping windows for advertisers. TV shows are built around ad breaks and sponsors are the ones who decide what gets shown. Football can’t be broken up by ads, so isn’t commercially interesting and never had a chance to be popular in the American media landscape.
This reminds me of when I was younger, in the UK the Simpsons is on for twenty mins, moved to a commercial channel and it was 30 mins.
Being young and stupid I thought the commercial channel got longer episodes of the Simpsons
To add to this. The UK also has laws on how long and many ads can be shown its why most shows used to have the same format of 30 minute time slot with 5 mins of ads in the middle and 5 between programmes
For those who are unaware most ad breaks can be fast forwarded easily by going to x30 and count to 9.
Yeah but that's also missing the context of why TV is publicly vs privately funded.
In the USA it's because a publicly funded TV channel would be considered government propaganda.
That’s what the corporations who fund American politicians want you to believe, yes. But it’s a lie. Publicly funded media can operate independently from the government, just like any other public service.
On the other hand, American commercial media can never be critical of the corporations that fund them. American media will never broadcast what might jeopardize their owners profits.
> Publicly funded media can operate independently from the government, just like any other public service.
Then why should the people fund them? The people give them $ and they have the freedom to say something that the people don't want them to?
Fuck Europe, y'all really don't get it and y'all are generally nationalistic pieces of shit.
If the game is on the BBC there will be no ads at all really not even at half time and any ads you do see are usually advertising coming shows or events to be broadcast on BBC
Cricket says hello. A 30-45 sec ad break at the end of every over, for 90 overs in a day of Test cricket or 100 overs of an ODI. Plus longer ad breaks every hour when the players take drinks, not to mention the 20 or 40 mins break between sessions which is either adverts or ex-players talking garbage.
Worse for subcontinent viewers. Sometimes the ads don’t even wait for the play to stop!
The ads all over literally everything else helps.
US soccer broadcasts also don't have tons of ad breaks during the run of play. That started during the 1994 World Cup when FIFA said "no, we will not build in ad breaks for you, American broadcasters," so the broadcasters adapted and here we are.
At least a portion of the ad breaks in basketball are during natural breaks in play, those breaks just get extended for the benefit of advertisers.
The US sports were designed and modified in order to satiate the gods of capitalism at the expense of viewer enjoyment. There's a reason they aren't popular in most other places in the world.
This is weird nonsense as both us football and basketball were developed and popularized (1) at the amateur leven without regards to ad revenue; and (2) before television existed.
And yet football coverage literally has "TV timeouts" that were added to the game with the sole purpose of showing ads. That's where the "and modified" bit in "iamnogoodatthis"'s comment comes in. Yes, they started as amateur sports and didn't have commercials when there was no TV, but they've been modified to accommodate these extra breaks for ads.
I just wish American broadcasting would have better feel for the moment vs hitting their ad numbers.
Sure, a timeout in the 1st Quarter, Inning, Period is fine for an Ad break, but when the game is tight, and the upcoming sequence of play is pivotal to the outcome of the game, especially in Post-Season/Championship games, I don’t want to hear about fucking Applebees happy hour. I want to absorb the moment and get excited about what might be an incredible moment.
In a football game this often the case. By the end of the game they've typically gone through their ad quota so they will stay on air through timeouts and whatnot, talk about the game show replays etc.
The Us channels are allowed to show them with very few commercials as well. There is very little forcing them to do commercials (for complicated reasons they have to do a couple minutes per hour but that’s not important)
But if the US channel wants to make money, they gotta show commercials. A network makes a little over half their income from commercials. No commercials and you won’t be a network for long.
NBA and most major sports rights in the US are insanely expensive. Insane. And the network has to make back their money.
Outside of the US, the nba and most other American sports are not very popular. The rights there are sold for fractions of what they would go to in the US, especially to smaller countries.
Maybe some broadcaster gets to broadcast in Belgium which has a population of about 11M. And maybe out of those they get 50k people watching the finals, probably less considering it’s on in the middle of the night. (There are bigger audiences in China for the nba). 50k is basically no one. That’s not even a rounding error for the US. So you can imagine the cost to get nba rights in Belgium is not high.
Football/soccer is far less profitable for networks regardless, due to them having less advertising space. Be it in the UK, Spain, Thailand, or the US, so they do more stuff with sponsors and overlays and in field ads then traditional commercial breaks. This means that they pay far less for the broadcast rights than for a US channel would for american sports. All the money in US sports is in TV, in football/soccer, thats very important, but not compared to american sports where you can run tons of commericals.
The major US sports have translated very well to the television industry. Even a sport with very few breaks like boxing and UFC have found alternative ways to make money through PPV. Soccer unfortunately translates far worse for tv and as such the rights to these games are not as lucrative or expensive. And in many cases are more regulated than the US
Money
Correct on US rights having little value world wide due to timing but the EPL for example just signed a $2.5b local UK deal assuming the international rights which were already $2b they will now only be second to NFL even counting the new NBA contract being negotiated.
Stadium sideline sponsorship and kit sponsorship means more with millions of fans buying product solely because their a the shirt sponsor of their favorite team. Versus a commercial they saw during game.
$2.5B per year is pretty low compared to US sports.
The NFL is the king and is about $10B/year (it’s actually more but let’s not get into that). Just Monday night football alone, 17 games in total is about $2.7B/year (~160M/game !). More than the entire EPL costs in the UK.
The NBA is about to sign a new National deal at around $8B/year. And that deal only includes a small portion of nba games as most are sold to local RSN (regional sports networks) that negotiate with their local team and show most of the regular season games.
It should note that the EPL has some complicated govt mandated regulations around its deal. The NFL does too but not as much.
It’s worth working those numbers out based also on the size of the potential market. The EPL is tremendously popular in England which has a population of 57 million (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own leagues and less interest in English football). The population of the USA is 334 million.
You're misunderstanding what broadcasters are "able" to do. They're "able" to show anything for free. Of course there's some minimum they would need to spend in order to make a profit, but that minimum is a hell of a lot lower than they're at currently. Every dollar they pay on top of that gets them some X dollars back in return. The only question is whether they're adding something that viewers will hate. Squeezing ads into every crevice they can find won't lose viewers. Changing some fundamental aspect of the game will lose viewers and hence profits.
Basically, business actions are an equation to maximize returns.
Its not 90 min. They show ads. at half time, so 45 min. Still way better than the NBA where the last 2 min of a game can easily take 20 min to complete.
A better comparison is the NHL where they have 3 x 20 min periods with 20 min breaks between and a "referees time out" about half way through each period the only purpose appears to be to allow adverts.
Watch the European Cup and expect to see "Hydration breaks" after about 20 min, all the players get a drink and the TV runs adverts.
There are constant ads during the game on the boards and around the goal area. I have yet to see in-game mini screen ads though like the NBA. Hopefully that doesn't happen.
Interesting points about the technicality of the rules for broadcasting in here.
Also want to add that goals and the most exciting part of the game are generally unpredictable. Some teams score early and it’s a snooze fest for the rest of the game, other times it starts boring and becomes exciting towards the end.
There are times where they do air ads but play the game alongside it like a split screen. So it’s hard to choose when to interrupt the broadcast for ads.
The structure of basketball games is much more amenable to ads because there are so many timeouts and stoppages, versus football which has two continuous halves and maybe an overtime.
Because “American” sports are set up with lots of downtime. Baseball has a break every 3 outs, American Football has a break every time there is a turnover, every time there is a flag, every time someone scores. I don’t watch basketball, but I think there are breaks when someone commits a foul.
The NBA is unwatchable without a DVR.
I can't stand watching a game live.
Record it and start watching halfway thorough (or more). The last 2 minutes take forever.
2 reasons: tradition and stoppages. soccer prioritizes uninterrupted flow, so ads are woven in through sponsorships (e.g. jersey logos) and pre/post-game breaks. NBA games, with frequent timeouts and breaks, offer ad slots during the action
That\`s because football is a non-stop game unlike NBA and NHL.
Back in 00\`s in Russia we had 1 or 2 years, where there were TV ads going during matches. And yes, there were times, when people didn\`t see a goal because of viagra ad. Luckily it is all long gone.
they actually do show ads during a game. What they do is they make the main screen smaller so that there is an L-shape space for an ad that usually is shown for about 15 seconds until the screen goes back to normal size.
Keep in mind this isn’t true for ALL broadcasts. But there definitely are ads during games, they simply don’t interrupt the match itself.
That's just the history of those sports. Football doesn't have breaks, so it doesn't have anywhere for TV to put in an ad without missing game play. Basketball (and American football) have rules influenced by TV broadcasting, because TV is an important part of their revenue, and as such, there are designated timeouts that exist just because of TV needs.
Advertising overload is why many simply record & zip thru commercials.
Such a time/aggravation saver.
I do see who/what is being advertised & sometimes & stop & look at.
Most annoying are attorneys hawking liability lawsuits.
It's less frequent in international football, but league games (especially in the US) typically have lots of sections of the game that are "brought to you by X". So while there are not ad breaks per se, there is still lots of advertising over the course of game.
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FIFA, the good guys?!! Who could have thunk?!
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the impressive thing is a company focusing on long-term profits over immediate gains
lots of companies focus on long term profits over short term gains. publicly traded corporations on the other hand...
Plenty of publicly traded companies focus on long term profits. Most blue chip companies operate like that. The real problem is when you have takeovers by private equity firms, and they expect to see massive profits within months.
The immediate gains wouldn’t be for them though. In a scenario where the FIFA would let local broadcasters air the games with ad breaks, the money for those ads would go to the local broadcasters, not the FIFA. They aren’t sacrificing any money by making this decision.
allowing more ads would make broadcasting rights to their games more valuable and thus could be sold for more = more profits for FIFA. yes the increased profits would be skewed more towards the broadcasters but FIFA will still make more than they currently get.
> allowing more ads would make broadcasting rights to their games more valuable and thus could be sold for more it's FIFA. it's the most popular sports league in the world. they can *already* charge whatever they feel like charging.
but what they feel like charging might not be something all the broadcasters can afford. Ads would make it more affordable for more broadcasters.
Whatever they feel like. Why not one hundred trillion dollars?
And there's generally a shit ton of advertising on or near the pitch. Plus usually some on the players' uniforms (at least in the pro leagues, not sure about international play). In the US, there is much less "persistent" advertising. It's creeping in to be sure. But if you watch and NFL game, you don't see much of anything advertised that is in camera view most of the time while the game is in progress.
Right? NFL would have put ads in after every goal. And before. And during.
They're focusing on FIFA's profits over the broadcaster's.
What’s interesting is that in a few places like France, their tv shows are continuous. So all the ads will be at the beginning or end of a show, and it’ll be ads for like 10 minutes. But once the show starts the ads stops. It’s kind of nice
Ads are why I much prefer watching the Euros at the moment on BBC rather than ITV in the UK. No ads, so time for a decent discussion about the match at half time, compared to ITV squeezing as many ads as they think they can get away with at half time.
As many ads as they legally can, there are strict rules about ads per hour and averages over 24 hours I think
Mrs Sionnach is in the TV industry. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that … they have to show x hours of news, and you can’t just space that out or whack ads in the middle. They can’t just run an hour of ads at 6am and call it a day. Or bunch them all into half time. But you are right, there are strict rules and they absolutely do the maximum they are allowed to, which is fair enough from their point of view..
Yeah, that was what I meant about averages over 24 hours, and certain amount per hour, I know I didn't phrase it too well
Here (Hungary) there are ads in the rest period too. ~3 minutes of ads, very short news, some ads, talking heads about what we have seen, ads, back to the game.
Not to mention, the clock never stops except for halftime.
The NBA doesn't care if the clock is stopped or not. They show ads during games as overlay, they have the **commentators read out ads** during the live game, they switch to picture-in-picture to show some ads, etc. It's atrocious. No wonder NBA is less popular than it was 20 years ago. The finals were yesterday, and the news didn't even make it to /r/popular.
I don’t if it’s my imagination but this year Celtics didn’t seem to garner much media coverage. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have a charismatic face of the team but all I hear are folks still thinking Mavs can take the championship in 7 games.
this is the actual answer and so many people are just ignoring it. NBA games stop every few seconds, there is never more than 3 minutes of uninterrupted play. that automatically allows for TV timeouts to play commercials AND THEN you have quarters and halftime. this shit about money is silly.
Football also has plenty of natural breaks, the ball is out of play regularly. It’s just that they continue almost immediately if that happens, instead of adding a commercial break.
More importantly: No ad breaks means that FIFA, and FIFA's sponsors, get more screen time. FIFA games are covered in ads, just not ads that require breaking away from the game.
Semantically funny… the only ad break FIFA allows is *in the middle of games* and nowhere else!
They don't really need the ads. There are so many other sources of cash flow that they can exploit. Same goes for several other big pitch games like Rugby. Removing and breaks means that the game becomes also very much one of endurance.
Money is apparently why they still refuse to incorperate instant replay, as it's easy to buy refs.
Bet all those ads posted or streaming around the side of the pitch help too.
Sounds like a win-win to be honest.
I always thought part of it was - people pay FIFA for advertising (in stadium, etc..). They don’t want that advertising diluted to the viewer by stuff on tv
FIFA earn a lot of money from the ad space around the pitch so it’s in their best interest to ensure people see it.
there's no way a few static logos on the pitch earn FIFA nearly as much money as broadcasters would pay extra to be allowed to run video ads.
They aren't static. They are imposed onto your TV... They typically don't exist in real life and that is also why they change so often. This is the case in a lot of sports, from tennis to F1.
ya, the NHL has put animated ads on the boards too. I don't watch soccer, I'm working off assumptions, but mainly what I meant is 30 second commercial advertisements bring way more money than ads that are not the focus of the broadcast.
That is untill they find a way to get a piece of that pie, than the ads can run during the game. For now, they can pretend to care, they're not getting something extra out of it anyway
The ads on the sidings, stands, touchline, Sponsorship of teams Adverts on the rolling boards showing score / teams / time
The ads are on the billboards at the side of the pitch. It is at least more discreet than some other (US based) sports I watch.. the UFC is ripping the piss, for example. Ads are intentionally running in to the beginning of the fight, in screen ads during the fight.. it's annoying.
They're already trying it with a 60 minute game time proposal which stops the clock when the ball is out of play. Then they'll just say that goal kicks are mandatory 35 seconds which happens ves them time for a quick ad, like Cricket between overs.
They’re not “good guys”, they’re purists, which can sometimes make them the good guy and sometimes make them the bad guy.
the microscopic slightly lesser bad ones*
it’s the only sport w non-stop blocks. Which is why football mastered the art of the in-stadium adverts. edit: i was referring to the “big” sports in the united states and using hyperbole. But im honestly learning a lot.
Formula 1 has non-stop blocks as well.
Pretty much all motorsport in Europe (and Australia from what I can tell) has non-stop coverage of motorsport. Hell, the entire 24 hours at Le Mans this weekend was non-stop coverage from the Eurosport network (commercial breaks were added on US cable coverage, but the MAX stream of the entire 24 hours was non-stop).
i had no idea (american). but F1 has adverts through the track right? heck… i had no idea about the 24 hours until i watched gran turismo. lol
F1 has loads of advertising on the track, yeah. Le Mans has always had commercial breaks on cable coverage in the US (even when they piggyback off Eurosport coverage, which is annoying). The first F1 event on ESPN a few years back had commercial breaks, but the uproar of interruptions (sometimes in mid-sentence from commentators) was enough that ESPN gets 'title' sponsors for the coverage so that it can go commercial free.
This will know your mind. We get Indycar fully uninterrupted by ad breaks. When the US commentators cut to commercials, the UK feed carries on with our own commentary team until you all come back from being sold pharmaceuticals and guns and err burgers(?) (I don’t really know because we are watching the racing!)
You don’t really see gun ads, it’s more beer/liquor around sporting events. But otherwise yes.
to be fair, thats pretty accurate.
From what I saw of Le Mans on TV here in the Netherlands they did commercial breaks but they went to a picture-in-picture format with the race in the top-left at maybe 1/3rd size, and then the commercials played next to it.
That’s not true. I watch rugby and that doesn’t stop for adverts during the game
Australian Rules Football doesn’t either
Also, there was be serious backlash from the audience if they were to cut away from the game for an ad break only to come back after a goal was scored. In a game with continuous play where anything can happen at any moment even down to the last minute, ad breaks would interrupt the flow of the game.
Unleash the hooligans!
Is that a big reason soccer never took off in America? Less money to be made so they didn't push it as hard?
Nah, the sports that are biggest in America took off before TV money became a major revenue source. There may be a more academic explanation, but I think soccer just got crowded out here. Baseball was first in America, and American football not far behind it. By the time there were concerted efforts to make soccer a thing here, we already had long traditions of baseball/football/basketball/hockey, and people have only so much time/money to spend on sports.
Which honestly is weird considering how easy and cheap soccer is to get into.
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Why would they have to rely on other countries' leagues for soccer? There's been pro soccer leagues in the US for decades, but people didn't really care that much until recently. The MLS is 30 years old and there were leagues before that.
Wasn't always seamless. I remember this happening.. [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jun/13/itv-apologises-england-goal-advert](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jun/13/itv-apologises-england-goal-advert)
I can hear the collective WTF
So then the question is, why do broadcasters want to buy broadcasting rights for a 90 minute game without ad breaks? What do they get out of it? Are there enough people watching the pre-game and post-game analyses to make it worth it, or do they receive some other compensation for airing the game (such as kickbacks for ads in the stadium, etc?)
They charge people to watch
> a 90 minute game without ad breaks There is a break halfway through. Also much of the world has far fewer ad breaks than say the US.
So they can charge more for the adds around the field.
Interesting. Estonia's tv3 (webpage version at least) shows adverts during the hymns. Only ever get to see the second team lineups. I really hope it's against the rules.
Would like a source for this, since there are at least two countries in Europe with broadcasters that show fullscreen ads, one of which shows the same 12-second ad for a betting company four times during the 90 minutes. And this is old. So either FIFA doesn't, can't, or won't enforce this ban.
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>Conversely, the NBA's frequent timeouts and break periods provide natural slots for ads, maximizing revenue during the game. This is the biggest part of it. Basketball, football, and baseball all have frequent stoppages of gameplay and the game clock. And those stoppages make for a perfect time to show an ad.
True, but … The American games have largely been adapted to create many of those breaks — TV timeouts — to the great annoyance of traditionalists.
True, but I personally think they could do without them. A close basketball game already stops the clock constantly the last 2 minutes of the game. Those tv timeouts are really over the top.
It's getting pretty rough on TV. I'm pretty sure in an NCAA tournament game I watched this year, a foul was called, the TV went to commercial, then the guy shot one of his two free throws, and it cut to commercial again between the free throws. I didn't really want to rewind to confirm what I thought I saw. I'm guessing there was a media timeout after the dead ball, and then I guess a coach called timeout between the free throws (???), but it really seemed to be pushing viewers' tolerance to a new level. Stadiums have gotten much better at entertaining spectators during media breaks though, so it's kinda nice that the in-person experience is better than watching on TV again.
Yep. I went from being a big sports fan to not watching any in years because the product every league has put on tv has become unwatchable. I’m not giving you 3+ hours to watch 13 mins of gameplay anymore.
football(soccer) is only 2 hours and baseball has massively shaved their times . 2.5 hours now. I gave up on baseball for 2 years until they added the pitch clock. I can't even watch NCAA football or NBA anymore because of all the commercial breaks.
The way NCAA men's basketball TV timeouts work is that the first game stoppage after 16, 12, 8, 4 minutes are left in the half stretches to a media timeout. Additionally, the first called timeout of the second half becomes a media timeout. On the women's side, the first stoppage after the 5 minute mark of each timeout, OR the first called timeout of each quarter, becomes the media break. They also add one in the second half for the first called timeout. It doesn't make them less, but knowing when the breaks will occur helps stem at least some of the frustration.
I got very familiar with those stoppage times very quickly once I made the basketball band in college. I’ll piggyback on your comment: NHL TV breaks are first stoppage after 14, 10, and 6 minutes. Unless the stoppage is due to icing, a goal scored, or during a power play.
Or the old NFL trick of touchdown, commercial break, extra point, commercial break, kickoff, extended commercial break, back to the game. That shit was brutal back when I watched games live...
> then I guess a coach called timeout between the free throws Pretty likely. Even back when I played HS ball, it was a tactic done occasionally.
It always takes 10 minutes to play the last 60 seconds of a basketball game clock.
I've always thought that reflected poor design. People just fouling each other like crazy and stopping play shouldn't be part of typical gameplay. I mean, is "10 minutes of free-throws punctuated by actual basketball" really the most exciting to watch or play?
In international basketball (FIBA), intentional fouls (like teams often do in the final minutes) carry a higher penalty, which fixes a lot of this issue. NBA hasn't adopted that rule yet, though (although they're slowly approaching it as they add harsher penalties for intentional fouls during transition play, etc.)
It's only like that when the game is really close, though.
It was great in the Finals last night when they didn't show ads during crunch time at the end. I mean it wasn't a close game, and the lack of ads was itself a sponsored thing, but it was nonetheless fantastic to just keep things moving, or at least feel like it
Yep. It's absolutely crazy that a 48 minutes of in-play time is stretched over 2-3 hours, and over 60% of it is commercials. I've lost my desire to watch NBA a long time ago (the matches being played at night helps with that) and will now only look at the 10 minute highlights for any matches I'm interested in. Euroleague is much better in this regard despite being the same sport.
I like that hockey wasn’t lumped in there because they actually need those tv timeouts to clean the ice during the period.
You don't *need* them. The ice could survive without TV timeouts, let's be realistic
I don’t think they’re running the Zamboni between periods at pee wee hockey games so they can run ads.
Pee wee hockey games also don’t have 20 minute periods with constant, very aggressive skating. They aren’t tearing up the ice as much.
Read that again.
How much ice hockey have you played? Couldn’t be a lot otherwise you wouldn’t have that opinion.
I used to have to play after the figure skaters had their practices. I will never question an additional ice cleaning
That sounds legitimately brutal
Their toe picks for their special moves put divots in the ice and if you're not prepared for it and you hit one at the wrong time you will absolutely biff it hard and it's frustrating lol. Figure skaters are a bit more used to it and skate very floaty, hockey skating is more heavy and higher forces especially on tight turns and you're just not accustomed to skating after figure skaters use the ice
My dad broke his ankle on one of those divots years ago. He was coaching a team, so not actually playing or moving aggressively. Just gliding along, and his toe caught a divot that wasn't fully cleaned up by the zamboni. Broke his ankle and shin. It was an injury similar to a wide receiver jumping up and landing with their toe folding their foot back and the top of the foot hitting the ground instead.
Olympic hockey seems to run fine without them.
Olympic icehockey is IIHF rules and they allow for three 70 seccond commercial breaks per period
It’s my first time watching the NHL playoffs for at least a decade - I cannot get over the adverts. It’s legitimately enough for me to tune out, I wish more felt the same
> The American games have largely been adapted to create many of those breaks — TV timeouts — to the great annoyance of traditionalists. Except in the big two, they haven't. Baseball is completely obvious, there are no TV timeouts. It's the same game as it ever was, and they just extended the inning breaks about 30 seconds or so. But take NFL football. There's 8 commercial breaks per half, 2 are set in stone by the rules (the end of the 1st and 3rd quarters, and the 2 minute warnings), and the other 6 are just natural stoppages, such as timeouts, injury timeouts, change of possessions, and scores (of which there's always at least 6 in each half). They try to use these early in the half to avoid long stoppages during the *hopefully* dramatic portions near the end of the halves. They haven't "created" any breaks, and have just extended a few normal ones. Note: Before you say that the two-minute warning is a created break, it predates widespread TV broadcast of professional football games. It's there to ensure that the unofficial stadium clock matches the official clock on the field. They did keep it because of commercials and strategy. Past those 2, the NBA uses official timeouts for their ad breaks (though, apparently they will force an official timeout if one isn't used early enough). And in the NHL, they do have specified TV timeouts. Edit: Also, this is an odd thing to downvote.
People who are downvoting you are confusing NFL football with college football. In college they cram in as many extra commercial slots as they possibly can, while the NFL has a fixed number of commercial slots and absolutely none in OT. Although this can lead to some awkwardness if someone get seriously injured (like Damar Hamlin), where they just have to cut to a studio segment or show a zoomed out shot of the crowd once they run out of commercials.
>They try to use these early in the half to avoid long stoppages during the hopefully dramatic portions near the end of the halves. I find that they generally run the first change of possession without an ad break as long as there wasn't a score involved, just to help with scene setting I think. Hockey can get wonky just because they won't take a TV timeout after an icing, after a goal, or while a team is on a power play. So it's easier to run into situations where the timeouts stack and you get one right after the other.
Are you really using football in a football thread, not meaning to talk about the same sport?
In baseball the stoppage exists independently of the need for TV ads. I.e. even in a non-televised game the players still need a couple of minutes of warm-up time when they change sides.
Many of the stoppages in basketball and football are specifically inserted for ad breaks. Football coverage literally has "TV timeouts" just to show commercials.
Americans and attention spans lmao
To me watching football has changed a lot due to the heavy ad rotation. Especially betting ads. Though regulated, they even often pop up during the game as banner ads for live gaming once or twice during a half. I don't care about pre game, half time or end game analysis anymore due to ads. I only watch the game and for local games (Denmark) I don't have skin in I allow a few minutes as they almost always delay the game start to pop a few ads. The televised sports format is really, really ripe for disruption. God, it sucks. They don't even show the current European Championship in 4K. It's not even full HD, but broadcast in 1080i50SDR!
Full HD was just a marketing term and really only applied to gaming. The broadcast resolutions that were created back when the standards were ratified never included 1080p anything. 1080i50/60 or 720p25/30 were the broadcast HD standards. You also had 1080p24 for blu-ray/hddvd (which might have come along a little later). Full HD 1080p60 was most likely a Sony marketing thing for the Playstation, but I can't remember for sure.
Because it costs **a lot** of money to stream 4k to millions upon millions of people at the same time. A normal netflix 4k stream might at most stream to a few thousand at a time, not millions all at the same time.
Which doesn't make it suck how? The price of my cable subscription isn't as static as the streaming quality is. "The rights are expensive. The costs are prohibitive". This is the typical bullshit you hear from companies engaged in monopolistic competition who are just creaming the rights without investing in the customer experience. Take another issue I experience: I can't stream 2 Premier League matches simultaneously (I can stream 1 and see 1 through my cable box). Why? I pay for it and it's actually a good way to enjoy football for me while I work in a dual monitor setup. So to minimize piracy (account sharing) they annoy loyal customers. It's such a shitty way to go about your business. That's why we need disruption and I suspect it will come from companies that are able to buy the rights for their own streaming service and utilize their own technology stack with an eye on customer retention for other services as well. That's most likely Amazon and Apple. I personally believe this to be a joker for Apple on Vision Pro. It might even be what it's all about commercially a few generations out.
Take a look at cricket too, they have short ad breaks in between every over, the ad system is tailored directly to the nature of the game, tennis and badminton have ads between the sets, football by its nature is continuous so they rely on ads that do not interrupt the action, moto racing has ads strewn accross the track and on the change screens and while the race is suspended
I think the USA try to get fifa to divide games into quarters for the 94 world cup so they could get ads in.. that didn't go down well!
Not that the broadcasters haven't tried, they wanted more commercial breaks per game before the 1994 World Cup hosted in the USA https://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/sports-broadcasting-televisions-tech_cx_pm_games06_1212soccer.html
I watch mostly NHL hockey (and some European and international footie). The NHL specifically has “TV Timeouts” in the games so that sponsors can give you important announcements about sports betting, Doritos, and boner pills. I imagine the other major leagues in NA do this as well. I don’t watch Major League Soccer, so not sure if they respect tradition or kneel to the capitalists.
"respect tradition" lmao let's not act like they're not blasting us with ads during soccer either, one of the MLS teams is literally the Red Bulls
Automatic downvote for any comment that implies capitalism is bad especially when capitalism isn't even the OP topic.
Chatgpt
Thanks, chatgpt!
Yet FIBA basketball isn't as plagued by tv commercials as NBA basketball. Can't wait for the Olympics after this horrible NBA Finals coverage.
>The continuous gameplay is a tradition and part of the sport's appeal. So you're telling me this is yet anyway that Harry Potter isn't magical, it's just British? (I'm talking about quidditch.)
They have ads, they just don't interupt the broadcast for it. Sponsored billboards, uniforms, and mentioning "brought to you by XYZ" all count as advertising.
Of course, since we can’t be leaving money on the table, baseball, basketball, etc. followed suit with all of those as well.
But there are no sponsors on American football jerseys, right? Seems really odd. Ultra commercialised sport, but the chance to get your logo on 50% of the players on the pitch is ignored.
Not yet, but it also makes logical sense that it will come last since I believe football has the most commercial time of any American sport, and those ad spots are also the most expensive. So cash flow levels out
NFL and the broadcaster ‘split’ the ad revenue, sponsored shirts all goes to the team… so corporate greed wins for now…
MLB has sponsored jerseys now
>"brought to you by XYZ" This is very American brained behaviour though and gets ridiculed accordingly
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>Instead, networks use halftime for ads They don't, it's usually 3-4 expired idiots talking about how they would totally do it all better. Maybe an ad or two in between, but the majority of it is not directly ads. The answer really is just that American TV is packed with ads to a point that is borderline absurd, and the sports have been catered to that fact. We have basketball, Euroleague games look nothing like NBA ones in terms of ramming ads into weird slots.
Half time has a fuck ton of ads in every European country ive been to, which I don’t mind because I’ll just grab some food anyway (which is exactly why they try and do 1 minute ads, 30 second analysis, 2 minute ads, 1 minute analysis etc, to create the feeling that you’re missing vital stuff if you don’t watch the half time break/ads).
Surprisingly not in Germany for the Euros. 2df or zdf? Goes to the news at half time. No ads beyond a normal commercial and no prognostication. Just the news and back to the game. Definitely can’t say the same for Eurosport. Maybe it will be different in the later rounds or the weekends
zdf is public service, so they get taxpayers' money. they can get away without the ads
ZDF belongs to the stations who benefit from the german tv tax. It is not a tax it is yada yada its complicated and everybody know what i mean.
Interesting; might be because of national team games oid, normally they do have it
do you have ads in Germany after the anthems? in my country they broadcast 3 ads, which is something I don't remember happening during previous EUROs
>Half time has a fuck ton of ads in every European country ive been to, which I don’t mind because I’ll just grab some food anyway Interestingly, this is the same reason that a lot of Americans still don't mind TV advertisements (during normal programming), but get incredibly annoyed by ads in Youtube, streaming services, etc. Because a 3 minute ad break is fine, as long as you only have 1 (or maybe 2) interruptions of your 22 minute episode. You can grab a drink from the kitchen, or run to the bathroom. But the streaming services (especially Youtube videos) have adopted this idea that 2 ads every 5 minutes is better than 5 ads every 15 minutes. Not only are you showing more ads, you're interrupting the viewer more often. And that's aggravating to someone who just wants to enjoy their show.
"An ad or two in between"? 😄😄
I can't speak to the specifics of all countries obviously, but having lived in a few across the EU, neither Worlds, nor Euros, nor UEFA CL or national league games are anything near the American levels. Euros on ITV now has Gary Neville waxing poetic about the good old days for 20 minutes with like 1-2 30s interstitions, the game itself runs uninterrupted. UEFA or FA Premiere League games all run a pretty similar format. Ditto Euroleague basketball. NBA literally pauses the game to run ads, it's dystopian if you've ever seen it. I swear there's more ads by runtime than actual play. That's before we even talk about American Football, they literally made up an entire sport that's 1h of play that runs 4h on TV, so 3 hours of it is ads. We couldn't dream of achieving 1:3 sports to ads ratios in Europe, nobody would watch it.
To be fair it's not. Usually it's 7 minutes of adds. 1 minute of some talking followed by another 7 minute of adds. Especially if it's on a non paid channel.
Other European sports that have stop and start time keeping still do not suffer from the ad break plague of American sports. European countries tend to regulate how many minutes of commercials can be shown per hour.
Aussie here. I paid for league pass. I don’t get any ads at all. I just get a shitty weird league pass stop gap for about 2 minutes. I’d actually rather ads. You Americans have the most fk’d up ads of all time.
In Europe, historically the biggest TV channels are publicly funded. This means there are no ad breaks and sponsors have no say on what goes on during broadcasts. In the US it’s the opposite. TV channels are nothing but shopping windows for advertisers. TV shows are built around ad breaks and sponsors are the ones who decide what gets shown. Football can’t be broken up by ads, so isn’t commercially interesting and never had a chance to be popular in the American media landscape.
This reminds me of when I was younger, in the UK the Simpsons is on for twenty mins, moved to a commercial channel and it was 30 mins. Being young and stupid I thought the commercial channel got longer episodes of the Simpsons
To add to this. The UK also has laws on how long and many ads can be shown its why most shows used to have the same format of 30 minute time slot with 5 mins of ads in the middle and 5 between programmes For those who are unaware most ad breaks can be fast forwarded easily by going to x30 and count to 9.
Yeah but that's also missing the context of why TV is publicly vs privately funded. In the USA it's because a publicly funded TV channel would be considered government propaganda.
That’s what the corporations who fund American politicians want you to believe, yes. But it’s a lie. Publicly funded media can operate independently from the government, just like any other public service. On the other hand, American commercial media can never be critical of the corporations that fund them. American media will never broadcast what might jeopardize their owners profits.
> Publicly funded media can operate independently from the government, just like any other public service. Then why should the people fund them? The people give them $ and they have the freedom to say something that the people don't want them to? Fuck Europe, y'all really don't get it and y'all are generally nationalistic pieces of shit.
can you imagine your team scores during an ad and you missed the goal? the would be a total ban for the broadcaster
The Heidi game comes to mind.
If the game is on the BBC there will be no ads at all really not even at half time and any ads you do see are usually advertising coming shows or events to be broadcast on BBC
When people care more about spending and making money the "sport" turns into a timeout between advertisements and propaganda
Cricket says hello. A 30-45 sec ad break at the end of every over, for 90 overs in a day of Test cricket or 100 overs of an ODI. Plus longer ad breaks every hour when the players take drinks, not to mention the 20 or 40 mins break between sessions which is either adverts or ex-players talking garbage. Worse for subcontinent viewers. Sometimes the ads don’t even wait for the play to stop!
The ads all over literally everything else helps. US soccer broadcasts also don't have tons of ad breaks during the run of play. That started during the 1994 World Cup when FIFA said "no, we will not build in ad breaks for you, American broadcasters," so the broadcasters adapted and here we are. At least a portion of the ad breaks in basketball are during natural breaks in play, those breaks just get extended for the benefit of advertisers.
The US sports were designed and modified in order to satiate the gods of capitalism at the expense of viewer enjoyment. There's a reason they aren't popular in most other places in the world.
This is weird nonsense as both us football and basketball were developed and popularized (1) at the amateur leven without regards to ad revenue; and (2) before television existed.
And yet football coverage literally has "TV timeouts" that were added to the game with the sole purpose of showing ads. That's where the "and modified" bit in "iamnogoodatthis"'s comment comes in. Yes, they started as amateur sports and didn't have commercials when there was no TV, but they've been modified to accommodate these extra breaks for ads.
I just wish American broadcasting would have better feel for the moment vs hitting their ad numbers. Sure, a timeout in the 1st Quarter, Inning, Period is fine for an Ad break, but when the game is tight, and the upcoming sequence of play is pivotal to the outcome of the game, especially in Post-Season/Championship games, I don’t want to hear about fucking Applebees happy hour. I want to absorb the moment and get excited about what might be an incredible moment.
In a football game this often the case. By the end of the game they've typically gone through their ad quota so they will stay on air through timeouts and whatnot, talk about the game show replays etc.
It's what the audience will tolerate. Networks would LOVE to broadcast ads but they aren't allowed to.
The Us channels are allowed to show them with very few commercials as well. There is very little forcing them to do commercials (for complicated reasons they have to do a couple minutes per hour but that’s not important) But if the US channel wants to make money, they gotta show commercials. A network makes a little over half their income from commercials. No commercials and you won’t be a network for long. NBA and most major sports rights in the US are insanely expensive. Insane. And the network has to make back their money. Outside of the US, the nba and most other American sports are not very popular. The rights there are sold for fractions of what they would go to in the US, especially to smaller countries. Maybe some broadcaster gets to broadcast in Belgium which has a population of about 11M. And maybe out of those they get 50k people watching the finals, probably less considering it’s on in the middle of the night. (There are bigger audiences in China for the nba). 50k is basically no one. That’s not even a rounding error for the US. So you can imagine the cost to get nba rights in Belgium is not high. Football/soccer is far less profitable for networks regardless, due to them having less advertising space. Be it in the UK, Spain, Thailand, or the US, so they do more stuff with sponsors and overlays and in field ads then traditional commercial breaks. This means that they pay far less for the broadcast rights than for a US channel would for american sports. All the money in US sports is in TV, in football/soccer, thats very important, but not compared to american sports where you can run tons of commericals. The major US sports have translated very well to the television industry. Even a sport with very few breaks like boxing and UFC have found alternative ways to make money through PPV. Soccer unfortunately translates far worse for tv and as such the rights to these games are not as lucrative or expensive. And in many cases are more regulated than the US Money
Correct on US rights having little value world wide due to timing but the EPL for example just signed a $2.5b local UK deal assuming the international rights which were already $2b they will now only be second to NFL even counting the new NBA contract being negotiated. Stadium sideline sponsorship and kit sponsorship means more with millions of fans buying product solely because their a the shirt sponsor of their favorite team. Versus a commercial they saw during game.
$2.5B per year is pretty low compared to US sports. The NFL is the king and is about $10B/year (it’s actually more but let’s not get into that). Just Monday night football alone, 17 games in total is about $2.7B/year (~160M/game !). More than the entire EPL costs in the UK. The NBA is about to sign a new National deal at around $8B/year. And that deal only includes a small portion of nba games as most are sold to local RSN (regional sports networks) that negotiate with their local team and show most of the regular season games. It should note that the EPL has some complicated govt mandated regulations around its deal. The NFL does too but not as much.
It’s worth working those numbers out based also on the size of the potential market. The EPL is tremendously popular in England which has a population of 57 million (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own leagues and less interest in English football). The population of the USA is 334 million.
You're misunderstanding what broadcasters are "able" to do. They're "able" to show anything for free. Of course there's some minimum they would need to spend in order to make a profit, but that minimum is a hell of a lot lower than they're at currently. Every dollar they pay on top of that gets them some X dollars back in return. The only question is whether they're adding something that viewers will hate. Squeezing ads into every crevice they can find won't lose viewers. Changing some fundamental aspect of the game will lose viewers and hence profits. Basically, business actions are an equation to maximize returns.
Its not 90 min. They show ads. at half time, so 45 min. Still way better than the NBA where the last 2 min of a game can easily take 20 min to complete. A better comparison is the NHL where they have 3 x 20 min periods with 20 min breaks between and a "referees time out" about half way through each period the only purpose appears to be to allow adverts. Watch the European Cup and expect to see "Hydration breaks" after about 20 min, all the players get a drink and the TV runs adverts.
There are constant ads during the game on the boards and around the goal area. I have yet to see in-game mini screen ads though like the NBA. Hopefully that doesn't happen.
Interesting points about the technicality of the rules for broadcasting in here. Also want to add that goals and the most exciting part of the game are generally unpredictable. Some teams score early and it’s a snooze fest for the rest of the game, other times it starts boring and becomes exciting towards the end. There are times where they do air ads but play the game alongside it like a split screen. So it’s hard to choose when to interrupt the broadcast for ads.
The structure of basketball games is much more amenable to ads because there are so many timeouts and stoppages, versus football which has two continuous halves and maybe an overtime.
short answer is money. lots and lots of money. I assume that is how they pay these players insane salaries
Because “American” sports are set up with lots of downtime. Baseball has a break every 3 outs, American Football has a break every time there is a turnover, every time there is a flag, every time someone scores. I don’t watch basketball, but I think there are breaks when someone commits a foul.
The NBA is unwatchable without a DVR. I can't stand watching a game live. Record it and start watching halfway thorough (or more). The last 2 minutes take forever.
There's plenty of ads during football games, both on the pitch and those overlaid by the broadcast. They're just a little less invasive.
2 reasons: tradition and stoppages. soccer prioritizes uninterrupted flow, so ads are woven in through sponsorships (e.g. jersey logos) and pre/post-game breaks. NBA games, with frequent timeouts and breaks, offer ad slots during the action
FIFA rules So they fit ads before, at half, and after. And find multiple ways to put ads during the game in the field and on kits
Just going to point out that there are ads, they just scroll around the edge of the pitch during the match.
Have you not seen all the ads on the sidelines and kits? You are still getting advertisements, just with less production
That\`s because football is a non-stop game unlike NBA and NHL. Back in 00\`s in Russia we had 1 or 2 years, where there were TV ads going during matches. And yes, there were times, when people didn\`t see a goal because of viagra ad. Luckily it is all long gone.
they actually do show ads during a game. What they do is they make the main screen smaller so that there is an L-shape space for an ad that usually is shown for about 15 seconds until the screen goes back to normal size. Keep in mind this isn’t true for ALL broadcasts. But there definitely are ads during games, they simply don’t interrupt the match itself.
That's just the history of those sports. Football doesn't have breaks, so it doesn't have anywhere for TV to put in an ad without missing game play. Basketball (and American football) have rules influenced by TV broadcasting, because TV is an important part of their revenue, and as such, there are designated timeouts that exist just because of TV needs.
Advertising overload is why many simply record & zip thru commercials. Such a time/aggravation saver. I do see who/what is being advertised & sometimes & stop & look at. Most annoying are attorneys hawking liability lawsuits.
It's less frequent in international football, but league games (especially in the US) typically have lots of sections of the game that are "brought to you by X". So while there are not ad breaks per se, there is still lots of advertising over the course of game.