Three years or so ago, pay-per-view (PPV) television was the wave of the future, and the big media conglomerates were dribbling at the chops. Sport would provide the main paylode. Each season would be divided into big, hugely hyped events and the customer would be weaned off the diet of free sport on TV which he/she had grown up with. Of course it hasn't quite happened like that. Television culture and viewing habits are quite ingrained in the popular psyche, and being asked by absurdly rich media and sports organisations to pay for events which were formerly freely available has been a step too far, a year or so too soon for most people.
The only successes have been in the arenas where there are no regular seasons, just a series of puffed-up events: boxing and wrestling make money for sure. Everyone else gambles on the pay-per-view racket. Boxing, of course, has long been the most progressive (or avaricious) sport when it comes to squeezing dollars out of an event; America's two cable giants, Showtime and HBO, continue (with BSkyB in Britain) to tamper with the medium. While boxing experiments, the rest of the sports-media world keeps watch.
Even boxing has had its struggles. Last autumn, in a fight that was a barber's nightmare, Lennox Lewis defeated the shock-haired David Tua in an unremarkable bout of fisticuffs which nevertheless revived hopes among its backers that PPV could yet be the future. Prior to the Lewis/Tua fight, revenues from pay per view in the US had dropped 50 per cent in the previous year, and the successes were almost all wrestling. Nine WWF events, plus one boxing night, had accounted for 96 per cent of the PPV revenue in the previous 12 months. Lewis's win, however, opened up the prospect, still being negotiated, of a bout with Mike Tyson this year. The idea of the serene, lumbering Lewis rumbling with the feral, half-demented Tyson is apparently a PPV dream. In real life however, Lewis and Tyson are signed to different cable networks (Showtime and HBO), causing a difficulty that has been compared to making a match between an Orthodox Jew and a Shi'ite militia member. Thus the delay in getting a deal for the fight which both sides say "the whole world is waiting for": the biggest pay-per-view event in television history! Take that Stone Cold Steve Austin!
Elsewhere, the anticipated pay-per view bonanza has been slow in coming. Italian Serie A soccer was among the first leagues to sign up for the experiment. The faithful were encouraged to pursue their devotion by buying "season ticket" PPV packages whereby they could pick a selection of games which they would watch. The offer was pitched at a relatively low cost to get the idea off the ground.
Take-up has been severely disappointing nevertheless.
In Spain, the experience has been similar - except for games involving Real Madrid and Barcelona. Before Christmas a game between the two clubs took $5.1 million in PPV revenue, a Spanish record, and Barca recently signed a £245 million five-year deal with Via Digital for PPV options starting in 2003.
In Britain, however progress has been cautious. Last summer, the English Premiership concluded a massive deal with US cable giant NTL: the Americans coughed up $472 million over three years for the rights to 40 PPV games. From the outset, the deal seemed too good to be true: analysts reckoned NTL had paid considerably too much - especially since Sky Sports retained first choice of games to be broadcast on its own network, with NTL left to pick through the rest. Before Christmas, NTL pulled out of the deal, complaining that it contained too many barriers to them making a profit.
The cause of PPV in Europe wasn't helped when, again before Christmas, the Finnish FA sold the rights to Finland's home World Cup game with England to UDirect TV for $4 million - thus creating the first English soccer international to be confined to the PPV market. As happenstance would have it, sales were helped by the fact that four days before the match, Kevin Keegan resigned as manager of England. With interest at an unexpectedly high level, it was a chance to showcase PPV; instead, many customers ended up complaining about missing large chunks of the action due to signal failure. The event was generally seen as a disaster for PPV.
Therein lies the problem. Viewing habits are fixed. In the US, In-Demand - a cable company which began life selling PPV movies - has begun looking at traditional American sports and selling PPV packages of multiple games. But its offers, like NBA League Pass and NHL Centre Ice, have struggled to find a large audience.
And that seems to be the state of play elsewhere: PPV TV will have to work a little harder if it is to land the windfall it once promised. BBC television recently stepped into the fray and beat Sky to the rights to Lennox Lewis's next fight against Hasim Rahman; soccer's authorities have had to guarantee that the next World Cup will be available primarily on non-pay TV; while Formula One, which was thought to be a natural PPV sport, has resisted the notion. Formula One has realised that PPV represents a conflict for any sport which already makes a lot of money out of presenting advertising and sponsors' names to a mass audience. Suddenly switching to a smaller, more select audience who pay for the experience has an obvious downside for the sponsors. Sport is beginning to realise that PPV has subtleties and trade-offs which were unimagined a few years ago, and that the audience appetite for televised sport is suprisingly limited. Will sport change to suit television, or vice versa?
