I had a pleasant surprise yesterday morning when I was watching the highlights of Liverpool’s 4-0 victory at Leicester. The picture quality suddenly looked better. The production aesthetics in the first few seconds (before coverage of the actual match began) looked “American”. I doubted myself for a minute if this was actually English football I was watching.
And then I remembered that the pictures for this game came from Amazon Prime. The streaming service had got rights to broadcast two full rounds of Premier League games this season, making a small chink in the duopoly of Sky Sports and BT Sport.
Traditional media wasn’t too impressed by it. Streaming necessarily meant a small delay in broadcast, and that made it less exciting for some viewers. The Guardian predictably made a noise about the “corporate takeover” with Amazon’s entry. From all the reports I read (mostly across the Guardian and the Athletic), commentators seemed intent on picking holes in Amazon’s performance.
That said, the new broadcaster also brought a fresh production aesthetic. While there were the inevitable teething problems (I must confess I didn’t watch these games live – being midweek evening games, they were very late night in India), Amazon for sure brought some new ideas into the broadcast.
Just like Fox Sports had done when it had done a big launch into NFL broadcasting in the early 90s. Read this oral history of that episode. It’s rather fantastic. Among the “innovations” that Fox Sports brought into American broadcasting (based on its sports broadcast in Australia, primarily) was this box at the corner showing the time and the live score. The thing wasn’t initially well received, but is now a fixture.
For evolution to happen, you need sex. And that means mixing things up, in ways they weren’t mixed before. If we were all the children of a super-god and a super-goddess, we would all be pretty much the same since the amount of “innovation” that could happen would be limited. And things would be boring, and static. Complex forms such as human beings could have never happened.
It is similar in business, and sports broadcasting, as well. When you have the same channels covering the same sports, they get into well-set local optima, and nothing new is tried. There is no necessity for improvement in that sense.
When new players comes in, preferably from another market, however, they see the need to differentiate themselves, and bring in ideas from their former market. And this leads to a crossover of ideas. In their efforts to stand out and make an impact, they might also bring in some ideas never seen anywhere – “mutations” in the evolutionary sense.
A lot of them don’t make sense and they die out. Others score unexpected hits and catch on. And that way, this memetic evolution leads to better business.
The great thing about memetic evolution is that while bad ideas come along much more often than good ideas, they get discarded fairly quickly, while the good ideas live on. And that leads to overall better products.
Right now in India we have a duopoly in sports broadcasting, controlled by the Star family and the Sony family. I’ve ranted several times about how the latter is absolutely atrocious and does nothing to improve the game. Hopefully a new player getting rights of some sport here will shake things up and bring in fresh ideas. Even if some of the ideas turn out to be bad, there will be plenty of good ideas.
Check out the highlights of the Leicester-Liverpool game, and you’ll get an idea.