@bacon said in NBA on ProSieben MAXX:
Okay, you have to give it a little time. But such weak ratings? I just don’t understand why basketball is so incredibly difficult in Germany. Even the Rugby World Cup was quite successful on ProSieben Maxx. RUGBY!
What’s so bad about basketball?
First of all, I would say that you can’t compare a World Cup with league games in terms of ratings. National team tournaments are always attractive, and basketball easily reaches an audience of millions.
Secondly, speaking specifically to basketball and the NBA, I would say that the NBA, by its very design, is simply not designed to draw crowds to television screens. I thought about it and came up with two main reasons why, for example, the NFL is much more suitable for TV than the NBA.
On the one hand, there are the 82 regular season games in the NBA (compared to 17 in the NFL) and the best of seven mode in the NBA playoffs (compared to individual knockout games in the NFL). With 17 regular season games, where each game day only takes place once a week (instead of a team having a game every two days) and “do or die” games in the playoffs, a completely different relevance/importance of the individual games can be created, so that many more people tune in.
Secondly, football looks much more spectacular than basketball, which is due to its size. In football, there are sometimes over 100 people on the field or on the sidelines at the same time (the players on the field, the substitutes, coaches, supervisors, referees, stewards, etc.), the field is large and you have stadiums with 70,000 spectators. Because of its entire staging, it all seems much bigger and more spectacular than a basketball game in a small hall where there are just 5 vs 5 players on the field. And therefore it is much more suitable as a TV product – which gives the viewer a feeling of “spectacle”, of a “major event” that you as a sofa viewer cannot miss.
This is no different in the USA. Although basketball is very popular in the US (more people play basketball than football in the US, and 42% of sports fans there say they follow the NBA, compared to 52% who say they follow the NFL). Nevertheless, the NBA in the USA has an average audience rating of only 1.59 million in the regular season, while the NFL there has an audience rating of 17.5 million in the regular season – i.e. more than 10x as many TV viewers!
Football is not 10x more popular than basketball in the USA (see my numbers above that more people in the USA play basketball than football, and 42% are interested in the NBA compared to 52% in the NFL). It’s just that basketball and the NBA are consumed differently than the NFL. With the NFL you watch the live games on television, with the NBA I think it will be the case that the main consumption (especially in the regular season) is to watch highlight clips or that you Simply find out about the results and box scores instead of watching entire games in full length on TV.
Long story short: the NBA simply isn’t designed to draw crowds to the television the way the NFL or European soccer can. Therefore, you shouldn’t expect any miracles with these ProSieben Maxx transmissions. I would see it as a clear success if the NBA managed to reach the broadcaster average in terms of ratings in the long term (i.e. just under 1%). This would be a success for basketball in Germany.
By the way, so far they’ve mostly had bad luck with the broadcasts because the games weren’t very exciting and were often already decided at halftime.
2023-11-20 19:32:13
#NBA #ProSieben #MAXX #Nice #dunk
