Page 103 - Sport Culture and the Media

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domestic sphere rather than participating within the factory walls. Watching, in
this sense, is essential to complete the production cycle of relayed movement,
meaning and imagery.
The constant availability of sport on television, though, is not necessarily
coterminous with its popularity, even for some major sports events. This is
because, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, even sports fans have
to work, sleep, go to the supermarket, clean the toilet and offer emotional
support to their families and friends. In other words, they have to make choices
about when and what to view, in real time (‘live’) or otherwise. For this reason,
the concept of prime time may have been stretched, but it has not been rendered
meaningless. Grant Farred (2001: 3) makes this point about the Sydney 2000
Olympics, which he judges ‘will be remembered as the Olympics that weren’t’
by East Coast American viewers at least. This comment would be something of
a disappointment to the host broadcaster, the Sydney Olympic Broadcasting
Organization (SOBO), which required some 3400 personnel, more people than
were then (and since) ‘employed by all the TV networks currently operating
in Australia’ (Gratton 1999: 122). Despite then IOC President Juan Antonio
Samaranch declaring these to be ‘the best Games ever’ at its Closing Ceremony,
various factors made it for Farred and others ‘turn-off television’. These
included: ‘the fact that 15-hour tape delay (if you’re on the East Coast) pro-
duces bad Nielsen ratings tells us not only that time-zone is everything, but
that the old North–South economic paradigm is pivotal to culture’ (Farred
2001: 3). It is suggested here that US TV sport viewers are accustomed to
watching at convenient times and discomfited by too much distance from a
land that, it should be recalled, describes its national domestic baseball com-
petition as the World Series. Significantly, Farred argues that many viewers
preferred the Internet’s instantaneous provision of the ‘pleasure of information’
to the delayed ‘pleasure of spectacle’ (p. 4) offered by television. In such
circumstances, television may attempt to be ‘plausibly live’, simulating
events as if they are happening and shaping them into smoothly assimilated
live narratives that are, in fact, recordings (Rivenburgh 2003). The Internet’s
developing capacity to marry informational and spectacular forms of pleasure
threatens to reconfigure the economic structure of media sport, and is a strong
motivation for the merging of media and Internet service providers, most
spectacularly the (so far disastrous) 2000 merger of Time Warner and AOL
(Hesmondhalgh 2002). The exciting prospect of radical vertical and horizontal
integration of the Internet, media, sport and entertainment has faded some-
what, with AOL Time Warner reporting a US$98.7 billion loss for 2002, having
a group debt in 2003 of US$26 billion (Sydney Morning Herald 2003: 33) and
attempting to sell off various assets including its sports teams and events, which
include: