Here's what on the ESPN family during the draft: ESPN - SportsCenter. ESPN 2 - First Take followed by the 2013 Australian Open. ESPNews - Mike & Mike In The Morning followed by with SVP & Russillo. ESPN Classic - Boxing matches from the 60s and 70s. ESPN U - The Herd followed by ESPN U Road Trip followed by College Football practice.
What do you use to do that, and how is the quality. My TV has a usb input that I've never used, wonder if that can be used for it? Does it get pixelated going from 15" to 50"?
I go from iPad to HDMI TV input. (I'm sure different people have other means and suggestions of getting an online/computer signal to their biggest (TV) monitor -- perhaps others might be able to chime in on the usb input option, or your tv's owner's manual may have some info.) The video/audio quality is excellent from espn3/watchespn (and many other apps on the iPad).
How many people were actually watching them? I think Open Cup matches streamed in the evenings usually get a few thousand viewers...not sure how many people were watching a stream of a combine match during the work day. It's technically a step back, I just think it's a pretty small step.
Much better ratings than the draft. Better ratings than the draft. Better ratings than the draft. Carriage agreements limit how much "live" coverage ESPN can air on Classic, why waste some of that time for the draft? I could see it maybe fitting here, since its college kids being drafted, but those things probably get better ratings than the draft.
I thought this as well, but it can't be cheap to set up all the equipment to properly stream the event. Greg Lalas said on twitter that the numbers (I'm assuming people actually watching the stream) didn't justify the resources that it takes to stream the games. I'm not happy about it but I can honestly see where they are coming from on this.
There will be twitter coverage. As much as I would like to watch the draft on TV, I don't have a problem relying on a soccer supporter's best friend, the internet, for the draft.
The Mike &Mike broadcast is an afternoon replay of a morning radio show that they point a camera at. If MLS can't out draw that, we probably ought to just shut the thing down.
Or move the draft coverage to espn3, which seems like the appropriate use of the available technology. (The real key here might be to see if Mike&Mike might have something to say Thursday morning, or earlier in the week about the exciting MLS Combine and upcoming SuperDraft on 1/17. got to grow the audience for MLS and expose those Mike&Mike fans to the inner workings of MLS's player acquisition methods.)
Exactly. The popular drafts are the NFL draft and the NBA draft, because people follow college football and basketball. I watch those drafts, but I wouldn't watch the NHL or MLB drafts. Not because I don't like or follow those sports, but because it wouldn't mean anything to me! So I see this as less an indictment of the popularity of MLS than of the popularity of college soccer.
I think this is a great point, but only up to a point. You have to be quite the college football fanatic to have much of an idea who half the players in the first round of the NFL draft are, and in most cases it's more that you've heard their names more than you followed the career of Right Tackle Moose Buttkowski of Wisconsin. I think there are a lot of things involved with the popularity of the NBA and NFL drafts, not least of which is that in both cases the early round picks (and the NBA only has two anyway) will very soon be making big money and playing. In baseball and hockey, mostly those guys are going to disappear into the minors where in many cases you'll never hear of them again. So if my NFL team is sorely in need of a wideout who doesn't drop the ball all the time and can outrun your Mom, you tune in to see who they get to try and solve the problem next season. If your baseball team has a desperate need for a left handed reliever, they can pick two or three of them and you won't likely hear their names for another couple of years, and even then it'll probably be because your team traded him, along with a couple other prospects, to the Marlins for an outfielder. Point being that to some extent at least the NBA and NFL drafts are about immediate returns, and seeing better results next season. But in most cases you still need Mel Kiper to tell you who the hell this kid from Rice or Cal you've never seen actually play really is and how he's going to fill a need. In soccer, I have a hard time thinking of many guys who came straight out of the draft and had a major impact. Indeed, take a look at the Waiver draft list for MLS last month and then compare it to the first round picks in the 2010 MLS Superdraft. It's like Old Home Week. But the other half ot the equation is, as you rightly point out, that fans of Enormous State University tune in to see how high their kids go and to whom. That part of the deal is very much lacking with the lack of college soccer fans.
http://www.mlssoccer.com/superdraft...nnounces-2013-superdraft-be-streamed-globally If this draft were really Super, it would be streamed intergalactically.
I'm glad it's not being shown intergalactically. Could you imagine all the galaxy-snobs coming in and shitting up our forums?
In addition to (US) soccer's current place in the US sports market, there are three reasons why the MLS draft is unlikely to create much interest: Many, perhaps most, of the league's best players don't enter the league via the draft. That includes all the players who have already proven themselves as pros and maybe even built a name that makes them interesting to the average US soccer fan. Drafts are inherently anticlimactic. The most important picks come at the beginning, and by the second half nobody cares. Even if some player who goes late in the draft goes on to surprise everybody and become a star, it's not like anybody watching at the time--even the team that drafted him--actually knows this is gonna happen. More likely than not, anybody watching deep into the draft is watching Mr. Cut From Roster or Mr. Ended Up in USL, and we all know it. Would anybody bother sitting through the Oscars if the first five minutes of the broadcast featured all the interesting awards, and the rest was three hours of handing out Best Personal Assistant Responsible for a Catering Table and Best Make-Up Artist in a Children's Movie about Dogs? Drafts are largely about information rather than drama. The information about who goes where is interesting and important, but watching it develop in real time is pretty pointless. And once one gets past the suspense associated with the first few picks, that's especially true. It's the exact opposite of an actual game, where the real fascination is usually in watching it happen and hearing it live. In the draft, the important thing can be put into a neatly formatted list, maybe annotated, and posted to a website, where it'll take 10 minutes to read rather than 3 hours to watch. The NFL and NBA drafts are sort of interesting to people mostly because those leagues are already dominant cultural forces. The fascination exerted on the general population of the leagues lends a bit of interest to otherwise slow, undramatic, and anticlimactic television. Add to that that the MLS draft is far less important to the league itself than the NFL and the NBA drafts are to those leagues, and you can understand why ESPN wouldn't want to put it on the air. Hell, it's probably better for MLS not to have it on the air until even the casual fan has an interest in it. Until then, watching a bunch of dudes in suits whisper across a table each other is more likely to drive casual fans away than to draw them in.
They pull a weekly audience of 2.4 million on TV. 1.6 million TV only, another 800,000k that listen to radio and the TV show. (also another 2.3 million per week on radio only). http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Cross...osure+to+ESPN's+Mike+&+Mike+in...-a0298904866
Good info, but it seems to be specific to the simulcast, which is on from 6AM to 10AM daily and would not interfere with the MLS Superdraft which begins at noon. Rather, as I specified, the program which the MLS Superdraft would prempt (for only an hour, as in the past, not for all four hours) is the replay which they run on ESPN News when they don't have anything better to do with the time. So the info you link either does not include the tape replay (it's not made clear) or, if it does, it doesn't break out that showing specifically but rather lumps it in with the live morning show which unarguably is responsible for the bulk of the audience. (For the simple reason that the previous night's sports news is pretty stale by noon the next day) Furthermore, as noted, we'd only be talking about preempting one hour of a four hour replay of a show which, I'm sorry, can't draw 100,000 viewers an hour if that. Surely ESPN can spare that massive audience of late-morning layabouts and barflies for 60 minutes without suffering a massive monetary shortfall.. Put another way, nobody is arguing that they should preempt a single precious hour of the 20 hours a week Mike @ Mike is on TV. (I would point out though that "1.6 million viewers a week" is not even remotely the same thing as "each hour has 1.6 million viewers and thus dropping one hour of it in order to air the MLS draft would cost ESPN 1.6 million pairs of eyeballs.") We're only talking about one lousy hour of the 20 ADDITIONAL hours they toss it up there simply because it's cheap to do. So instead of four hours of reruns that day they only show three. Arguing that it's an audience decision is beside the point. I only brought it up as a way contrasting the M&M replay with the actual show itself. It's entirely a cost issue. They can rerun Mike & Mike for free. It's over, done and in the can. All they have to do is hit the reset button. But sending a truck and a production crew to the MLS draft costs money. Even if it only cost them ten bucks, that's ten bucks that replaying M&M doesn't cost them. So the question is not "How many people watch a taped replay of a radio show?" but rather "can ESPN broadcast the MLS draft without losing money on the deal?"
Not really a big deal. They don't televise the MLB draft either do they? Not many ppl even realize that that exists.
MLB Network televise that draft. They've tried to make it similar to the NFL/NBA model and the production is quite good (not a surprise because MLBN is the best of the league specific channels), but only the most hardcore of fans (Baseball America subscriber types) closely follow the draft.
I've never been able to watch the draft on TV and never felt like I've lost out at all. Surely it is the least visually interesting MLS event imaginable and the analysis on bigsoccer is better than whatever ESPN/FSC can throw up.