Can Streaming Revolutionize Women’s Sports? In a Word: Absolutely
The argument for advancing opportunities for women in sports has too often been presented as a hypothetical experiment – or, worse, as a virtual plea. Even the names of the most prominent women’s sports advocacy groups seem designed to play on a shared sense of morality and common decency: Champion Women, Play Like a Girl, Play It Forward.
Traditionally, the same has been true of coverage for women’s sports. Viewer interest is often dismissed as minimal or passing. Investment is widely considered risky. Any push for a bigger piece of the broadcast pie for women’s sports has typically been positioned as a noble, if futile, crusade.
We’d like to offer a counterpoint: hogwash. Of course women deserve equal opportunity in sports – including the right to use their games and star power to market and grow organizations and leagues into colossal attractions. But it’s long past time to start thinking bigger: Yes, women should get the chance to build their sports and grow their viewership. Not only because they can do it – but because they will.
First, viewer demand already exists. Even without the benefit of investment and media coverage anywhere near comparable to that in men’s sports, the women have engaged viewers for years – and continue to provide evidence of an as-yet-untapped market. From Wilma Rudolph to Billie Jean King to Mary Lou Retton to Danica Patrick, Ronda Rousey and Lindsey Vonn, individual female athletes have captured imaginations (and TV ratings) for decades.
Increasingly, women’s team sports have shown similar potential. Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and their fellow Olympic-gold-medal-winning 1996 teammates carved out a permanent space on the broadcast sports landscape for the United States Women’s National Soccer Team. Today, Nike notes that women’s soccer jersey sales set records for both men or women.
That popularity was spun into the National Women’s Soccer League, which was the first American pro team sport to return to operations after the COVID lockdown. The league saw a 500 percent increase in viewership by the end of the 2020 season. The WNBA caught a similar wave, increasing viewership by 23 percent over the previous season. To prove that was more than a pandemic-fueled fluke, the league’s viewership numbers for the 2021 Finals leapt 42 percent over 2019.
As Jane McManus, director of the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College and a former ESPN writer, recently told Northjersey.com. “You have an audience that is agitating for more coverage of women in sports, and women’s sports – and you have now platforms that are developing that allow those voices to be heard.”
McManus is talking, of course, about streaming. Television executives have always been skittish about any content that lacks precedent, which means new successes on TV typically must be stumbled into by accident. But because the infrastructure investment in over-the-top media is marginal, there is now an enormous opportunity for women’s sports – and those willing to put their marketing muscle behind them – to thrive on the streaming landscape.
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According to Deloitte: “We predict that women’s sports will grow to be worth a great deal more than a billion dollars in the years ahead. Its ability to generate substantial TV audiences, deliver value to sponsors and draw tens of thousands of fans per event has been demonstrated on multiple occasions over the past decade. The fan interest is there: A recent multicountry study found that 66 percent of people were interested in at least one women’s sport, and among sports fans (of whom 49 percent are female), that figure rises to 84 percent. And the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed fundamental reappraisals of many aspects of society, one of which is how women’s sports should be perceived, promoted and commercialized.”
We’re in the midst of an active rethinking of women’s sports – including how they are delivered to those who love them (and, importantly, those who soon will). The opportunities these athletes and organizations have deserved all along are no longer hypothetical, or on the horizon. They are here. And they’re ready to be turned into lasting, respected and profit-producing fandoms.
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2 年Great article. Looking forward to further growth for our business in this sector. The limitations of TV have been highlighted in the past couple of years. As always, they cherry pick women’s sport once it’s successful.