Page 107 - Sport Culture and the Media

88 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

commercial clout of that country’s television audience. Avid sports fans have
been lured over time in respectable numbers to subscribe to pay TV, especially
when the siphoning of their favourite live sports from free-to-air television
means that they have no other home viewing option (as has occurred with
rugby union in New Zealand). What is intriguing about much of the content
of satellite and other pay TV delivered sport, however, is that there is no dis-
cernibly strong demand for it. Multiple 24-hour pay TV sports channels are
as subject to the scarcity of ‘good’ (in the sense of ‘good enough to pay for’)
content as are those devoted to film, comedy or drama. Apart from blue chip
and some emerging sports (with what in the industry is called a cult following),
the content of pay TV sport outside its core markets is often simply ‘channel
filler’ – an alternative to the test pattern. In such cases, pay sports TV resembles
what Raymond Williams (1974) describes in Television: Technology and
Cultural Form as the prevailing conditions existing during the invention of
television (and radio) in the first place – a technology looking for a use.

Sport as screen filler

In addressing questions of the uses and abuses of television sport, it is worth
quoting the following well-known passage from Williams’s book, not least
because of the central place it gives to sport:

Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television
were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract
processes, with little or no definition of preceding content. When the
question of content was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically.
There were state occasions, public sporting events, theatres and so on,
which would be communicatively distributed by these new technical
means. It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the
demand: it is that the means of communication preceded their content.
(Williams 1974: 25, original emphasis)

When viewers, then, in one country switch on a 24-hour TV sports channel
and encounter an obscure (to them) sport from another country (receiving the
same broadcast, including commentary, as the citizens of that country), it is
unlikely that they are receiving a service which they urgently demand. In
such instances, it is not so much, as Cunningham and Jacka (1996) suggested
earlier, a question of pay sports television growing to fill an emerging demand,
but, somewhat curiously in economic terms, to supply the filler for what would
otherwise be a newly created but empty space. Where sports are hoping to
cultivate a new audience (and sometimes paying or subsidizing the broadcasters