Paying for The Sports- Viewing Habit   

Pay-per-view eventually may dominate TV sports programming.

Selling sporting events to television and then to the public is big business and getting bigger.

Much of the sports programming now saturating TV has been available free to anyone who can pick up the signal on an antenna or – for a small monthly charge – by cable. But that could change soon.

Pay-per-view (PPV), whereby a viewer pays to watch a sporting event on television, is taking root and gaining strength. And if some of the executives in professional and amateur sports have their way, PPV may dominate sports programming in the future.

That would undoubtedly mean a severe cutback of the volume of game highlights that now permeate most local TV newscasts. Some communications gurus predict sports PPV is a precursor for PPV newscasts – which may not be so farfetched when one considers that CNN and C-SPAN cannot be seen unless one pays for cable.

PPV for sports is not new. Boxing has been selling championship fights to the home audience through cable TV for some time. But over the last few years the soaring cost of operating a sports franchise and the escalating fees paid to broadcast sports events have encouraged talk of expanding PPV.

Such talk worries Congress. Federal lawmakers are concerned that PPV could mean the end of free telecasts of the Super Bowl, the World Series and other major sporting events. That's not political bluster. For example, last winter Cable's Home Shopping Network offered the NCAA $33 million for the rights to broadcast a college football championship game on PPV. The NCAA rejected the proposal, but some observers say that only the timing was wrong, not the concept.

Several bills have been introduced in Congress to limit PPV sports, including one that could end the antitrust exemptions professional sports teams enjoy. Another would ban PPV of an event from any public facility financed by taxpayers.

The financial promise of PPV has some owners and sports executives salivating. Others see it as a matter of survival. Those startling multimillion dollar salaries paid to major league baseball players may not continue unless the teams receive an increase in TV revenue. Both CBS and ESPN are losing millions of dollars on their national baseball contracts. Yet baseball commissioner Fay Vincent says he wants more money in the future. He had considered diverting more games to cable but backed away from PPV because of congressional pressure.

What makes PPV so enticing to sports fans willing to pay for it is the freedom of choice and the opportunity of seeing teams they cheer for no matter where they reside. The Pittsburgh Pirate fan living in Los Angeles might fork out $10 or $15 to see a Pirates game on PPV rather than watch the Dodgers for free on regular TV or the Cubs or Braves on national cable.

Yet some sports officials whose teams might benefit from PPV are unsure.

"If you start pay-per-view on a regular basis at an affordable price, it could have a direct effect on your attendance at the stadium... You could make a small amount on pay-per-view and lose big at the gate," says Budd Thalman, Penn State's associate athletic director.

That's what officials at Louisiana State University wanted to find out. For several years, most of LSU's football and men's basketball games not carried by the broadcast or cable networks have been distributed in the state via a PPV system called "TigerVision."

"Attendance at the stadium and the number of people who watch TigerVision depends primarily on whether the team is winning or losing," says Treva Tidwell, LSU's coordinator of electronic media. "Our research clearly shows that a significant portion of our TV viewers would not go to the stadium regardless of whether the game was on TV or not."

It's doubtful sports will be eliminated totally from free TV – which is not actually free but supported by advertising. But as TigerVision demonstrates, the integration of free TV with PPV on a national and local basis is already a reality.

NBC's unprecedented attempt to mix PPV with telecasts of the Summer Olympics in Barcelona this summer may be a barometer for the future. Although NBC will air 161 hours of the summer games over 15 days, it is offering 540 hours through PPV.

Digital compression technology, which soon will allow cable operators to offer customers 150 channels or more, also will help promote PPV sports. With that many channels, any number of events could be offered on PPV simultaneously.

Digitalized Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), in which small home satellite dishes are used to select and view programs, has even greater potential for PPV if it is ever developed fully. One could envision a PPV system so fragmented and localized on DBS that millions of fans could routinely watch their teams on PPV no matter where they lived.

Viewers may balk at paying for the nightly news. But $10 for a Penn State football game? Bring on digital technology and DBS.l