Great article on the demographics of sports. NBA is the youngest fan base 45% are under 35 and PGA has the oldest fan base with a 63% are over 55 years old.
MLB has only 24% of it fans under 35 and 50% are over 55 years old.
"The NCAA demographics for football and basketball are practically identical but they are surprising old (about 40% over 55+) and surprisingly white (about 80%), which clearly has as much to do with who owns a TV rather than who follows the sports."
I say NHL will be the last great cable sport: "The NHL audience is the richest of all professional sports. One-third of its viewers make more than $100k, compared to about 19 percent of the general population."
This is because as a former hockey player in the US it was cost thousands of dollars just for the equipment not even counting the ice fees.
NBA will rule the digital distribution in the future.
I think the NBA is by far the most forward-thinking of the four major pro sports and NCAA. They did just sign a pretty massive cable package that in effect for the next nine years and slow progress with streaming, but they are also heavily invested in finding new revenue streams to help replace what will likely be lost one day with these cable deals.
It will be interesting to see how the financials of that work as cable keeps bleeding customers. I think the entire situation will be a mess as long as these long-term contracts are in place. ESPN has rights to stream their NBA games digitally but you can't stream those ESPN games through NBA League Pass digital, nor does NBA League Pass allow you to your local team because that would interfere with local television rights.
As long as you have all these different rights packages in place, it will handcuff the league from producing something centrally that appeals to the most people. However, that type of service is also less likely to bring in the money that ESPN and Turner and the local sports channels are bringing to teams, so what's happening is in the best financial interest of the league, at least in the short term.
With the DirecTV NHL ShutOut package, people can enjoy all 1,230 professional hockey games each year the way they were meant to be enjoyed: by not seeing them at all."[1]
