The Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship. A sleuth of nine-year-olds hoop fans just entered hibernation mode until the fall. Yeah, I could have said pack. But sleuth is a fair alternative and it suits me better.
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Did you ever wonder how a nine-year-old who never watches a live game on TV and who abhors nearly all non-live and television and cable can tell you the backstory for players who played in the 80s and cite stats for every current star?
If you don’t have kid that age for your own media focus group, my friend Osman might be able to lend you one. I say friend, because we broke sushi together the other day and that’s where this story starts.
Apparently kids don’t watch sports on TV. They watch clips of games on YouTube narrated — sorry, no, commentated, by YouTubers. You know what? No. Narrated. I’m drawing a line here. Commentated just sounds weird to me.
These same kids watch YouTubers talk about the NBA, games, highlights, players, stats, stories, and so much more.
YouTube isn’t just TV on demand. It’s not just a multi-hour show or game compressed into a multi-minute format. It’s a massively multimedia online game kids play.
Let’s compare YouTube to ABC — the network that carried the Celts-Mavs game last night. YouTube is more lovely and more temperate. Which was, I think, the Bard’s, sorry, no the Gemini’s, point. Kids love YouTube more than TV and it’s way hotter. You know what? No. Bard. I’m drawing another line here. The Bard tells stories and Gemini just hallucinates in real-time.
ABC was showing the game in real-time when some Celtic tossed up a buzzer-beater an instant before halftime. And, in that instant, the shot went viral. Kids were sharing that shot with other kids. My focus group shared it on Snap. My friend’s focus group said it was TikTok. All of it drove kid-aged viewers back to… YouTube. Where they continued to watch videos about Jason Tatum and the last time the Celtics won and what all those squiggles in Luka Dončić’s name are.
Let’s pretend the shared video is from ABC’s YouTube channel. The ABC/ESPN combo paid north of $2B for those rights this season. But, YouTube gets the majority of eyeballs, the majority of the ad dollars, and virtually all of the word-of-mouth and rewatchability. And most of those clips weren’t ABC’s. They were from accounts that added commentary (I’ll allow it in this context) to that clip To make it fair-use and allow YouTube to monetize their channel.
None of this is new. We know kids watch YouTube. We know cable has the aged demo of expired milk. We now even know that that the Celtics won their 18th banner, 16 years to the day after they won their 17th.
Although it does surprise me that this AdWeek story calls paying the NBA $76B for media rights a “bargain,” because ABC and ESPN drew 11M viewers for game 3.
ABC-ESPN channels on YouTube got 1.3M views around the finals. Last night, Bleacher Report got twice the number of viewers for their YouTube show than ABC-ESPN. The FreeDawkins channel got 6x more than Bleacher Report. Two videos from ChazNBA got more views than the NBA’s own channel.
That’s, now, old. And you don’t come here for old. So, what’s the new part? Fast forward past middle school. Zip through high school. That nine-year-old will grow up in college, come back to your place, reclaim its childhood bedroom, borrow $320 and the voice activation code for your autonomous driving hybrid-powered vehicle to hang with friends at a bar that serves micro-brewed O’Doul’s to chew nicotine-flavored CBD gummies. And that bar won’t have 87” flat screens showing live basketball on ABC. It will be 2:37PM. Each of these now-grown kids who live the work-life balance dream will be wearing VisionPro 7 headsets and watching the YouTube video an algorithm chose uniquely for them. Collective moments will happen when one kid deems a clip lovely and temperate enough to be share-worthy.
And, when those kids get back to your home it will be June 2038 and the next NBA right’s deal will be up for renewal, do you really think they’ll watch… television? No. They’re in the wonderful world of Oz playing a massively multimedia online game.
Like a tip-off to start a game, the future of TV, cable, rights deals, sports,… all of it… is up for grabs. And planning for that change like saving for college, starts now.