My biggest issue isn't even with the constant advertisements for it, although those really annoy me as well: it's the effect it's had on analysis. At this point broadcast companies have decided that it isn't important to have smart and thoughtful analysts, when it's cheaper and easier to just have someone young and cheap talk about the betting lines (offloading all of the actual analysis to the casinos/sportsbooks). Instead of hearing what knowledgeable people think will or should happen, you get people saying that they like the over or under with minimal actual analysis, or that the line changed because X. It's not a good replacement.
100% and while this feels like the inevitable endpoint of wringing the absolute maximum blood out of the stone - which is why we live in a hellscape where Sports Illustrated is trialling paying third parties to use LLMs and other tools to 'generate' articles that essentially exist to say nothing as an alternative to paying writers and editors a living wage - an awful lot of it is driven by demand.
That is to say, every mainline sports media entity from the bait-iest of content farms to the most prestigious stuff has a decade-plus worth of metrics feeding into evaluating whether viewers want this (largely they do) and that viewers/readers/consumers/ are happy with this (largely they are). We live in a golden era of high-quality information, it just turns out a majority of people don't particularly rate that access.
In a way it's just another variation of a concept that's been given a name that the swear filter doesn't like ( essentially 'to become poo') but this concept has been bleeding into sports media - and other media, of course - for a long time.
I would like it if this was even close to an endpoint. It's scary to think were it will go after this. What will this be like in ten years?
NBABet is on NBA TV right now. A show about betting.
Yeah - I have no real idea, but the thoughts I do have are depressing.
1) Even if the NBA TV/ESPN audience is not the whole audience (there are loads of us who don't care for gambling content), it's very difficult to tell broadcasters to pay more for good content when they can get away with paying less for this content. So I think good analysis
on TV in a before and after every game fashion is probably gone for good.
2) Because live sport is essentially holding TV up on it's own, broadcasters have to pay out the nose for live sport access - since the leagues all want to increase revenue year after year. Gambling companies pay tons of money to broadcasters, which helps them afford the contracts.
This seems grim. But the good news is, there's loads of good content out there. It just won't be coming from ESPN or NBA TV.
Topic: The NBA is too all in on gambling. (Read 7901 times)