Cowboys Versus Packers, Jerry Jones Versus Time-Warner
So the ‘Boys beat the Pack 37-27.
From what I saw of the game –stuttering, flickering, stalling on Richard’s super Mac computer– it looked like a pretty fair contest. Two 10-1 teams colliding late in the season (the 3/4 mark, actually). That’s a tv producer’s dream — or should I amend that and say video producer’s dream. This is the era of convergence media.
Now, my friend Richard has a wall-sized high definition screen down in his basement. His basement is the multi-couch lair where once a week we get together and drink scotch or pinot noir —and watch football. Thirty years ago both of us drank a lot of brew but we’re no longer a beer crowd. Trust me– good scotch goes well with good football games. (Actually, it goes well with bad football games. And mediocre games.)
Richard’s high definition screen is a real spoiler. At times it’s a press box view — and often even better.
But, alas, wait a sec– our local cable company didn’t carry the Cowboy-Packers game nor was it carried on a broadcast channel. The NFL Channel had the game and Richard didn’t have the NFL Channel (nor did Austin). So bye-bye hi-def.
Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar — Third Base, on Sixth Street near MoPac. Sounded fine to me, I’d never been there but I told him the place’ll be packed. We need an infiltration plan with a seize and hold objective. Richard said he’d get there at 6:30 pm. I said I could get there about 7:15 because I had to meet my wife downtown at a Rice University graduate get-together in our favorite Austin, Texas coffee shop, Halcyon. Cool deal.
Except Richard called me on my cell at 6:20 and said the line at Third Base already extended into the parking lot. Nix on Third Base (…a vague suggestion of Abbott and Costello…). My wife suggested I walk around the corner from Halcyon to a bar on Lavaca Street and see if that establishment had the NFL Channel. Indeed the bar did have the channel, but it also had a not-quite elbow to elbow crowd and no open seats or tables to seize and hold.
I phoned Richard and laid out a Yeats’ allusion: “This is no place for old men…who can’t stand up for three hours.”
Richard said to come by his house and we’d watch the game on his super Mac. I trundled in about 7:45 PM and we sat down to watch the game on the computer.
Internet stutter galore, occasionally interrupted by total freeze. Richard decided that NFL.com’s server was overloaded. We followed the game for a quarter-plus via the “game tracker” screen. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small football field where the line of scrimmage moves across the screen as the game progresses. You also get written commentary on the plays.
Well, you get what you pay for, or in this case don’t pay for.
The Cowboys versus the Packers was entertainment. The bigger contest — pitting the NFL against cable systems like Time-Warner– that’s business, and tough business at that.
For the past week the local talk radio and sports radio stations have been battlegrounds between Time-Warner (”we want to carry the game on our terms”) and the NFL’s unsympathetic pitchman, Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones (”we want to sell the game on our terms”).
Behind their collision is an even bigger issue: control of content. As Richard said last night, content is king, which is why two men in the last half of their fifth decades twist schedules so they can watch highly-paid super athletes play a brutal, exciting, and sometimes elegant (eg., New England) game. The NFL owns this content.
It is also a content that cannot survive without a popular base — which ironically requires the billionaires who own the teams to engage in what amounts to populist politics. Oh, they want money, and they want the bigshots in skyboxes. but to pay for the enterprise they have to sell cars and sell beer and sell lots and lots of both. They need ticket sales but in this day and age they need viewers.
But how to reach those viewers? And who controls the distribution of content?
That was the big game this past Thursday night.
And Richard’s Mac? The digital monitor is the point of convergence.
