how are international broadcasters able to show 90 minutes of football without ads, yet NBA games are broadcast with a total of more than one hour of ads?
In: R2 (Business/Group/Individual Motivation)
International broadcasters for football (soccer) rely heavily on sponsorships, in-game ads, and post-game commercials to make up for the lack of mid-game ad breaks. The continuous gameplay is a tradition and part of the sport’s appeal. Conversely, the NBA’s frequent timeouts and break periods provide natural slots for ads, maximizing revenue during the game.
Football (soccer) has continuous play and only stops for halftime, making ad breaks difficult. Instead, networks use halftime for ads and sponsors during the game. NBA games have more frequent natural stops for timeouts, quarters, and fouls, providing plenty of opportunities for broadcasters to insert commercials and maximize advertising revenue.
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
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.
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