Sports are important to the development of television on many grounds. They have encouraged consumers to buy television sets and services in the first place; supply network, independent, satellite, and cable TV companies with vast quantities of content and loyal, sometimes spectacularly large audiences; and have helped place television at the center of contemporary society and culture. Correspondingly, television has been instrumental in the ascendancy of sports to its current position as one of the prime forms of popular culture, providing it with enormous audience outreach well beyond the field of play and vast injections of capital. Like many new technologies, television emerged first as a capability without a clear sense of purpose, and sports have helped provide television with a powerful justification for its existence.

     The history of television sport is also characterized by competing ways of representing it. The two most influential of these can be described as the British and American modes of sports television that emerged within different national cultures and broadcast systems and as a result have provided contending reference points for debates about how sports are and should be displayed on television. Crudely, it might be argued that British sports television, through the publicly owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), pioneered the sober representation of nations in and through sport, while in the United States, the first advances toward a commercial television sports market were made. These represent the anchor points for continuing debates about the quality of televised sporting events.

The Early Days of Sports on Television

     When BBC Television was formed in 1936, sports was quickly placed on the program schedule. After successfully broadcasting radio sports in the 1920s, the BBC saw in great national sports events such as Wim­bledon (tennis), the Derby (horse racing), and the FA Cup Final (soccer) ideal opportunities to meet its charter obligation of promoting national culture through "public service broadcasting." When the BBC lost its television monopoly in the United Kingdom in 1955 with the introduction of the commercial ITV service, it was reluctantly forced to compete for sports broadcasts and against ITV's livelier, more market-oriented, American-influenced way of representing sports. In this period, broadcast sports (along with great occasions of state, such as the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II) were an important factor in consumer decisions to purchase television sets (and to pay the compulsory TV license fee to support the BBC that exists to this day), with annual new TV set ownership in­ creasing tenfold between 1946 and 1959.

     In the United States, sports television commenced in1939 with the broadcast of a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities, while in 1944 network sports broadcasting was inaugurated by the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC's) Gillette Cavalcade of Sports through its coverage of a boxing match. In the immediate post-World War II period, NBC offered sports fans the opportunity to watch, for the first time, broadcasts of baseball, football, and boxing in the comfort of their own homes. Just as subscription   television   in   the  late   20th   century saw premium sports as a major "driver" for the take-up of cable and satellite services, television networks in the middle of that century saw sports as a major lure to purchase televisual technology. Sports, along with quiz shows and soap operas, played a major role in­ inducing the spectacular increase of over 700 percent in U.S. television ownership in the period 1948-50.

The Development of Sports

     Sports, in the contemporary language of information technology, have emerged as a "killer application" for television. They have capitalized on the industrial development of sports whereby intermittent, chaotic game contests became organized into regular, rule­ bound competitions in specialist venues with restricted access funded by paying customers. Sports can effortlessly discharge both news and entertainment functions. Their "nowness," and the physical presence of often scores of thousands of passionate citizens, means that they are newsworthy, while their vivid spectacle and unfolding drama make for enjoyable, even compelling viewing, especially for men (and increasingly for women). The rudimentary camera technology of the early phase of sports television was simply required to capture the event, programming that was much cheaper (though much less easily controlled) than studio-based genres. Roone Arledge, the producer of American Broadcasting Company (ABC) programs such as Wide World of Sports and Monday Night Football, is credited both with many technical innovations, such as replays and slow motion, and with openly treating sports as a form of show business. As long as sports organizations could be persuaded that television was generating interest in sports rather than siphoning potential consumers from the stadium to the home, television received from sports inexpensive, sponsored popular programming. Sports, though, came to realize their competitive economic value and began to play television corporations against one other in the quest to expand broadcast rights revenue in return for "rediffusion."

      The position  of sports in  television  schedules  has varied considerably, sometimes heavily entrenched in prime time and at others confined mainly to less pivotal time slots. The amount of coverage of sports on television continued to expand into the late 1970s, its appeal to sponsors and advertisers undiminished. However, the cheapness of sports programming was eroded not so much by the rising cost of production (although multiple cameras and more sophisticated direction and commentary did increase broadcast budgets)  as  by  the  inflation  of  sports  broadcast rights.

     Both parties appreciated the elevated symbolic status of TV networks acquiring the rights to high-profile sports that, in turn, became even more conspicuous as a result of enhanced television coverage. Publicly funded broadcasters such as the BBC (which had first broadcast major sports events and sports magazine shows such as the long-running Grandstand) found themselves increasingly unable to compete with capital-rich commercial networks for sports broadcast rights, while, in the United States the coming of cable and, especially, dedicated sports channels such as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) meant that sports television evolved into a seller's market in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the ABC network paid U.S.$4.5 million to broadcast the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, while NBC paid U.S.$420 million for the 1992 Barcelona games. Such arrangements might have been sustainable as long as audience ratings and advertising revenues remained strong, but in the early 1980s audiences drifted away somewhat from sports television in response to greater provision of non sports TV programming and of other, nonbroadcast leisure opportunities (ranging from videocassette recorders to video games).

     The simultaneous erosion of the core sports TV audience (men ages 18-34) and of its appeal to advertisers (the "discovery" of female purchasing power) meant that advertisers were reluctant to pay television networks more money for smaller audiences to cover the cost of inflated broadcast rights. In the United States, the sports television market was artificially boosted in the 1990s by the inflationary tactics of the new FOX network, which outbid rival broadcasters of premium sports by a considerable measure in order to signal its arrival. For example, in 1994, its successful U.S.$350 million bid for the rights to football was three times that of the previous rights holder, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

     Sports on television have developed a complex structural mix of public and commercial, free-to-air and pay broadcasting, and network and independent arrangements in regional, national, and global markets. In countries where national public broadcasters pioneered and dominated television, free-to-air commercial broadcasters such as ITV in the United Kingdom and Channel 9 in Australia have been successful in gaining much premium sports TV programming by exercising their economic power, only for both public and commercial free-to-air television to be challenged by "cashed-up" pay television operators. The most famous example of this development was the 1992 capture of the rights to English Premier League soccer by the Murdoch-led satellite broadcaster

     British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), a move that turned a loss-making company into a highly profitable one. This migration of sports to restricted, pay platforms has led to considerable dispute and,  in many countries (including Australia and all the nations comprising the European Union), to the enactment of "antisiphoning" legislation to prevent the exclusive capture of major sports by  pay  television on the grounds that access to free-to-air broadcasts of sports events of major  national significance  is a right of "cultural citizenship."

     Megamedia sports events, such as the Olympic Games and soccer's World Cup, have thus far resisted the temptation to award exclusivity to pay TV in return for vastly increased broadcast rights revenue on the grounds that such a move would restrict audience reach and the claims of such events to be global spectacles. Nonetheless, the 2002 KirchMedia debacle revealed that attempts by peak sports organizations to extract maximum revenues from free-to-air television can jeopardize even the greatest of media sports spectacles. In this case, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), soccer's governing body, sold its broadcast rights to a consortium made up of the Swiss sports marketing group ISL and the German KirchMedia for an unprecedented 2.3 billion euros. The consortium sought to on-sell those rights at greatly increased prices in order to recoup its investment. When the buyers resisted, ISL folded, and KirchMedia purchased the worldwide rights in full. Faced with opposition from sports television-buying consortia such as the European Broadcasting Union (the previous rights holder), KirchMedia was forced to accept lower­ than-anticipated broadcast rights fees and went into receivership, with some states (such as Germany, the host nation of the 2006 World Cup) required to underwrite televised coverage of the world's largest single sports event and most popular sport.

     In  the early  21st century, sports on television have inherited the problem of inflated broadcast rights and the dependency of sports on those rights. In 2002, for example, the United Kingdom's ITV Digital went into administration with debts of£ 178 million, leaving several soccer clubs without crucial, promised funds. ITV also paid an excessive amount (£183 million) for three-year, free-to-air Premier League soccer highlights, while in Italy the two foreign-owned pay-TV companies carrying premium soccer games,  the French Telepiu and News Corporation's Stream, merged after both lost vast sums when competing against each other. In Australia, C7, the pay-TV sport channel specializing in Australian football coverage, also passed into history when its lost the football rights to a consortium led by Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, thereby causing hardship for many clubs.

     In 2002, annual reports, the value of American sports rights was written down by U.S.$3 billion, with the company most responsible for their inflation and for a third of the total write-down-Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation-admitting that it had overbid for them. It has been predicted that total 2002--06 major U.S. TV network losses on sports will be U.S.$1.3 billion. One way of overcoming the problem of recession in the broadcast sports industry is to be on both sides of the negotiating  table-that  is, to be simultaneously  a buyer and a seller by having common ownership of TV companies and sports teams. For example, Disney owns the ABC network, most of ESPN, and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim hockey team; News Corporation owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and has stakes in the Leeds United, Manchester City, and Sunderland soccer clubs; Granada TV has stakes in the Liverpool and Arsenal soccer clubs; and Silvio Berlusconi (the Italian prime minister) owns several television stations and leading Italian soccer club AC Milan. However, sports clubs can be a major drain on profits, and many of these holdings are currently on the market.

     There is also some official resistance to such cozy arrangements, with the British government in 1998 blocking the £623 million takeover bid by BSkyB for Manchester United, one of the world's richest sport clubs, on the grounds that it wa'i anticompetitive and against the public interest. Another coping strategy is the formation of new competitions, such as XFL, the disastrous 2001 American football tournament created by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and NBC that lost U.S.$70 million. In 2003, NBC, which had opted not to bid for the rights to the major sports leagues, adopted a more low-key strategy by television, with modest success, the Arena Football League, a hybrid sport that provides a speedier television spectacle than that offered by the National Football League (NFL).

     These problems and adjustments, however, do not prevent sports from continuing to be a key aspect of television programming. Sports can still be a highly marketable commodity and a compelling visual text. A 30-second advertisement during the Super Bowl broadcast currently costs U.S.$2.1 million, the cumulative audience of the 2002 Korea-Japan soccer World Cup was estimated to be 28.8 billion, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) estimated that nine out of ten of people in the world with access to television watched at least some of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.

The Audience and Industry Attraction of Television Sports

     Sports still retains considerable appeal for television companies and audiences alike. For television, sports consistently deliver large, loyal viewerships that are attractive to advertisers. While, as noted previously, there is a traditional bias toward young and middle-age men, sports has successfully sought female viewers (sometimes using the tactic of sexual objectification more frequently associated with the "male gaze" directed at females). Audiences for regular-season games (as opposed to playoff for championship matches) may be smaller than for many prime-time shows, but in production terms they are much cheaper to broadcast. Sports are especially good at filling the spaces in TV schedules. The live sports event is only one component of sports programming, with previews, post match appraisals, documentaries, retrospectives, quiz shows, replays, highlights, magazine programs, updates, and sports news reporting constituting a vast and flexible archive of sports content that is especially appealing to multichannel pay-television providers with extensive televisual space to fill. Pay-per-view sporting events, such as boxing matches, also represent one of few TV genres where customers are willing to pay for content on a one-off basis. Major sports television also has a highly valuable "spillover effect" whereby viewers are exposed to promotions for other shows in the hope that they will get into the habit of watching certain networks and channels. For "horizontally integrated" media and entertainment corporations with many different media functions, sports and sports merchandise can be easily cross-promoted across television channels, newspapers, magazines, radio, film, and the Internet. In countries such as Australia that impose regulatory quotas on local content and restrictions on material produced overseas, sports are also a readily available source of "indigenous" material.

     The  professional,  industrial  structure  of  sports is founded on the willingness of spectators to pay to watch, collectively, expert sportsmen and sportswomen in action. Television severs the physical, communal presence from spectatorship. In its live form, TV enables distant, dispersed, and domestic viewers to watch sports action in real time. At first, as noted previously, the technology was limited, with single, static black­ and-white cameras offering a pleasing but much diminished version of the physical, in-stadium experience. However, the development of the technology and technique of sports television enhanced the viewing experience to such a degree that watching from home now rivals the  pleasures of actually  being at the site of the game. With the development of color television, multiple cameras inside and outside the stadium, close-ups, replays, slow motion, expert description and commentary, immediate postgame athlete interviews, and, by the end of the 20th century, interactive information services and even personalized program direction, televised sports have fashioned themselves into a strong sensory spectacle. So substantial have these developments in TV been that sports stadiums have been required to install large screens and to enable amplified athlete interviews in order to match elements of the home television viewing experience.

     Spectators are drawn to sports by the aesthetic pleasure of gazing at athletic excellence, but most are also passionate supporters, identifying with athletes and teams on the basis of locality and nationality. Sports fans project onto athletes favorable and unfavorable qualities that, to a substantial degree, resemble the characterization of popular melodrama. Furthermore, sports contests (following Arledge) are fashioned by television into narratives, their "plots" unfolding under the gaze of commentators and viewers who interpret their significance through judgmental frameworks of virtue and dishonor. However, the sports script is never legally written in advance. The formal uncertainty of live sports contests (despite their frequently predictable outcomes) can create a strong sense that history is being made on screen. In the 2003 Rugby World Cup Final between England and Australia, for example, the final result was settled only by an England score 16 seconds from the end of a period of extra time before an estimated worldwide television audience of 300 million.

     Just as modernity has produced societies that are increasingly fragmented and alienated, television both symbolically unites and splinters its audience by representing sports. In the early modern period of lesser social and spatial mobility, professional sportspeople tended to be embedded in the local communities in which they originated. Television then provided the capital to create a lucrative sports market that enabled elite sportspeople to travel far from home and so to become far more affluent than most of their fans. Paradoxically, therefore, at key sporting televisual moments, elite athletes are symbolically reintegrated into the communities that sports enabled them to leave behind. Modernity also heralded the rise of the dispersed, abstract entity of the nation-state, and there are few greater opportunities for a nation to feel unified than during major sports contests.

     If sports television can be described as a genre, it has many variants arising from the different characteristics of specific sports in terms of their rhythms, tempo, rules, and spatial contexts. Individual contact sports, for example, have a gladiatorial quality. Boxing has long been a key form of televised sports. The small, square ring is easy to capture on the small screen, with two men (and now some women) "slugging it out" in near proximity to a noisy crowd. The rounds in boxing are of a fixed duration, easily enabling the insertion of advertisements between rounds. A boxing match may last no more than a few seconds or minutes (requiring a good deal of spontaneous expert discussion), but the prescribed number of rounds ensures that a bout cannot overflow the program schedule. The televised buildup to the fight itself can engender considerable anticipation for casual viewers and boxing fans alike. Indeed, in the case of the "pseudo sport" of wrestling as presented by WWF, the contest itself is a relatively small aspect of the total broadcast.

     Indoor individual and team sports, including basketball, netball, ice hockey, and indoor tennis, have the advantage of a controlled environment akin to that of the television studio but at the cost of the visual richness of the outdoor broadcast. Sports such as football (both the American and the Australian versions), soccer, rugby, field hockey, tennis, baseball, and cricket generally take place on large, open, rectangular or oval fields. The pace of different sports range from the frenetic to the stately, thereby delivering highly variable viewing experiences. In the case of non-stadium sports, such as golf and marathon running, the landscape of rural and urban courses provides television sports with an almost tourist-like quality.

     Television does more than merely represent sports. Its cultural and economic power is such that it has shaped many sports contests. Some sports may be deemed more telegenic than others and so prosper on television in a manner that is self-reproducing. It is mainly because of television that the five-day game of international cricket, with its capacity to end in a draw, spawned also a one-day game with a virtually guaranteed victor and loser. The rhythm of sports contests is dictated to varying degrees by "time-outs" for commercial breaks, penalty shoot-outs in soccer, and tiebreakers in tennis in the interests of advertisements and program schedules. The time-zone convenience demands of major TV markets can result in boxing matches at midnight, Olympic marathons in the heat of the day, and baseball games played on early winter nights. Women's sports such as tennis, golf, netball, basketball, hockey, and soccer, furthermore, have all come under pressure to improve their televisual "salability" through more overt modes of sexual address.

     Nonetheless, television alone cannot guarantee the success of sports. As noted previously, made-for-television contests using all the advantages of the medium but unsupported by a substantial fan base are rarely more than temporarily diverting novelties. Indeed, one of the characteristics of sports television is that it requires in-stadium spectators to perform for the cameras and microphones in order to supply the necessary atmosphere to turn the broadcast into a compelling spectacle. Without the atmospherics of large crowds on-screen, sports can appear unengaging, trivial or absurd. For this reason, sparse crowds are hidden by tighter camera shots, and boom microphones are turned up to maximum volume. Sometimes-as in the case of a soccer match at Arsenal's Highbury stadium while under renovation--crowds have even been digitally faked for television.

     Initially, it was believed that admitting television cameras into sporting events would lead to a reduced number of paying customers in the stadium. But television also made sports available to vastly greater numbers of viewers who could be "sold" to sponsors and advertisers than could possibly attend games. resulting not only in the astonishingly efficient promotion of sports but also in previously unimagined  broadcast rights revenue. The cost to sports, of course.  was a loss of autonomy. To return to the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup Final, the requirement of extra time disrupted the television schedule, resulting in medal presenters being instructed by television directors to speed things up. A dignified, symbolic moment of triumph thereby  became an embarrassing, fast-forwarded farce. At such unfortunate moments. viewers can simultaneously apprehend both the pleasure and the pain of the submission of sports to the embrace of television.