https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2...-sports-hbo-max-tnt-tbs-tv-rights-8-year-deal Actually the Open Cup is going to be on HBO Max but it doesn’t change your overall point. And yea I get that but it is what it is. I don’t think it’s a huge loss. Unless it’s some friendly against a European mega team (which MLS teams don’t really seem to do anymore but that’s a different discussion) those games in the “other” category don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. If regular season regional broadcasts struggled for 15,000 viewers, friendlies and preseason probably struggled to get 1,000. I’d definitely like to see preseason but I recognize that I’m in the minority of an already small group.
The more I learn about it, the more I hate this Apple deal. I get it, it's not our fault its the leagues, but it's not great for growing this sport or fanbases.
i think you're missing that what the overall picture in reality will be, is they zero out the random games, yes, which doesn't hurt your feelings i guess, but they shrink the regular broadcasts significantly too. at which point i assume you will want to talk about money or something else instead. so you're like i won't miss A but it's also taking away B and C that were less niche and it will shrink their audience a lot. i also find it odd when people self abnegate. "we" are a decent chunk of that random game hard core. it's not many people but it's buzz and interest. and it's not like apple's showing it. so when you're like, well, it was only a few people, well, a lot of them were us.**** i find it generally horrifying that with world cup hosting coming up MLS + USSF are deciding this is the great time to paywall it all. brilliant idea for bandwagon building. USSF is lucky it has a better product and i already have their streaming. but to me this is receding back towards pay walls or when the dynamo showed 1/3 or 1/2 their schedule and you needed MLS' streaming to get close to 30 or the eventual 34. *****fwiw i think every other team in town shows their preseasons. my late dad and my father in law both watch astros preseason. to me it may be a smaller audience but it's filling the tank with gas for the real thing. even under the apple deal they are going to hand the audience a couple free "tasters" at the beginning to see if they can suck you in. that's normally a preseason function. side point, while i wouldn't write myself too large i wouldn't be surprised if you had some amount of skeptics specific to our situation. they want, whatever, $15/mo? this isn't LAFC. this is nearly last place. i don't like our roster/odds and have expressed what i will likely do about it. not showing preseason throws away their chance to make the counter-argument someone posted on one of these threads. you don't know that for sure. give us a watch. i don't believe in the counter-argument, but that's on paper. i watched 2017 preseason and was immediately like this is good. but then i thought that looking at the roster before that. but anyhow, you want me to fork over then show me the goods and have me believing this is better and not a waste of my time and money. NFL channel shows practically every preseason game played for a reason similar to this. they don't show regular season, you notice. here's a free taste. see something you like? ok, we have NFL+ or sunday ticket or maybe your local team. or dallas if you are fallen.
To the point about “creating a bandwagon” prior to the World Cup, the national team probably shouldn’t have that concern as 11.7 million people on average watched the group stage games. They can easily hit 20 with prime time games in the middle of summer with little other competition. I don’t think they’re going to have any issues drawing an audience. As for MLS i agree, it is a bit less clear how they capitalize on it. I also agree outside of STH you’re not going to get a lot of people signing up in Houston for the MLS package. This deal is a big test for the future of sports broadcasting. I think a lot of the ideas behind broadcasting preseason games aren’t that noble, especially for cable TV. Imo it’s just about increasing the live event count so you can negotiate better deals with the cable company.
I guess I just don't see how this is materially different from any other league. In many ways, frankly, it is better. 40% of the games are going to be free to view without a subscription. Then there's another chunk of games that are going to be on Fox. That's a lot of free games. Pretty sure that's a higher percentage of free games than you get in any other sport these days. In the meantime, the non-match content on Apple is already far better than anything that has ever existed for MLS which helps with building fanbases (and a lot of that is free as well).
Well, you have to realize that I'm from the generation that ALL of my teams were on free, unpaid, over the air television. I didn't (and still don't) even like them moving games to Cable (like FOX Sports SW). Basically to take them off the airwaves, remove them from ESPN+ (which I already had), and put them on a streaming service that I don't have, then add another fee on top of that to watch them is bogus in my opinion. I get it, it's the cost of a good ticket to watch the whole season, but free is free. Fans will pay this, people who don't care wont, we need to get people who don't currently care to be people who do. They won't do that if they can't watch the games.
the logic hole in the Apple TV deal is that by making the product harder to find and having an incremental payment for it you are somehow growing the audience that seemed small to begin with even without those hurdles. Apple has a halo effect for sure, but how many non-STH Dynamo fans are gonna pay for it? People like me, sure. But that’s probably not typical of the broader Houston market. there are positives and negatives to the deal. Almost all of the positives in this country are from the online/Twitter community that already cut the cord. There’s still a massive amount of folks who just want to flip on AT&T SportsNet and watch the game.
So am I. I don't know about you, but I'll take modern TV entertainment options over the 3-4 over the air channels I grew up with every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Times change, you either evolve with the times or you become a cranky old man shaking your fist at the moment and going, "In my day.....". I choose to evolve with the times and whole heartedly embrace all the positives that come with it. On the point of what fans will do - if we compare MLS free to air availability of games this coming season versus last, it is significantly higher this coming season. So I still don't get the angst. If you wanted access to all of MLS last year you had to subscribe to ESPN+ and you generally got 2 free games on ESPN and Fox. Getting all MLS games free over the air has never been an option, so it is not a comparison point. If you're a fan that is unwilling to pay for the MLS package, you still have access to minimum 6 MLS games for free every week which is far more than you've had access to in the past. Locally, if you could actually pick it up (I couldn't with an HD antenna and I live like 5 steps outside the loop) and you knew it existed, you could get Dynamo games on the Kube. I don't know what kind of numbers they got, but I feel comfortable saying it was negligible. On top of that, if you subscribed to ESPN+ because you couldn't get the Kube, then Dynamo away games were blacked out (unless you stumbled across the Hulu with live TV work around as I did and told as many people as I could).
Didn't comment on this part. You're aware that you can subscribe to the MLS package without being an Apple TV+ subscriber I hope? It sounds like you're saying you have to subscribe to Apple TV and then subscribe to and pay for MLS on top of that. You can if you want (I do but only because I get Apple TV for free with T-Mobile), but you can do MLS without subscribing to Apple TV+.
I still use an HD antennae and refuse to pay for Cable, because I’m THAT guy lol. I understand why MLS did it, I just don’t think it’s helping fan bases grow. I’ll get it because I am a fan, but people who may be interested to catch something free aren’t paying for this.
To me a legitimate hurdle is having, or rather not having, a device that carries Apple TV. I think Androids are the primary area of concern here. You can still watch on those devices through a web browser but it is another hoop to jump through. Still, I’m net positive on the Apple deal. Apple really wants MLS. It’s probably the broadcast partner most invested in MLS since NBC (I really wish they would have stayed with them). I think getting that amount of care from a broadcast partner makes a huge difference. How it works out idk, but I’m interested to see it play out
I don’t want to say I’m not thankful for the apple deal. If they were still on KUBE, or FSSW I wouldn’t get to see any games. It is what it is, I still just wish these games were really very the air to the public and more accessible
https://www.houstondynamofc.com/schedule/#competition=all&date=2023-02-18 not sure where people are getting this 20% figure from. the posted schedule lists 2 -- 2 -- free games, right up front. and one thing being neglected on that front is how much the precise amount can mean to whether you bother. my wife is a cowboys fan. she can watch most of her schedule locally. i can let her on my NFL+ account for the rest. so she remains died in the wool cowboys. but in this case with most on apple you lose the casual viewer completely. i have work buddies who took their kids to dynamo games. might watch a game if they trip over it. this is the end of tripping over it. there was a point initially it was like half the games and then MLS' service, which was cheap. ok, i can follow that around and figure out where the game is that week. little more niche for even the niche folks, but hey. and even now we had to figure out which station that week. but if they're all covered and "free" assuming you had the cable, i'll figure that out. you're like, but 20%, but 2 free games, whatever that truth ends up........it's paywalled still. and then for someone like me you're asking me to follow something i have become skeptical on, for, what, the free games? half to 2/3 might do it. a couple free games is like, so what. that's a "free cookie" at the grocery bakery. i can't tune in assuming that week is likely free. i am not going to tune in 34 times or check 34 times to see if that week is free. how many fans do you think will pull up apple over and over to see if that week is the free game? how many fans do you think will "trip" over 2 free games? close to zero. to me it's either a "sop" -- "but you don't have to pay for them all, we give some away" -- or it's a "taster." enjoy that? buy the rest. it's not enough to induce you to follow the rest. last point, some of the smugness about it, you turn this niche and it's basically preaching to the choir. that misses some of the tickets they sell are people in sports bars, or casual fans with kids tripping over a game, or happenstance. you watch a game. seems fun. you buy a ticket. it grated somewhat when glenn would be selling the next match for ticket sales, but that's not an accident. you try and excite some regular watcher into finally paying. or some dad into making it a night. this way will be more binary. niche fans watch all they want, maybe even get it free if they already pay hundreds or thousands to see it live -- a paradox btw -- meanwhile casuals and skeptics go off switch. can't see it. don't want to pay until they try. in that sense watching the games on UHF or basic cable was a "grey" area being removed. so now what is prompting your dynamo ticket urge. not the game on Kube or whatever.
second point, oddly not being mentioned, is this deal with the devil is in exchange for cold hard currency. annualized i think it's like $250m/yr for the league. some portion of which divided roughly 30 ways. at least at some point. who knows if they're paying off league debt first. but anyhow, i don't see that going into our product yet. though every other team would get the same infusion -- you're still playing chase and they get the same mario kart reward you ran over -- my hope had been they would pour more payroll into the team and it'd kick up a notch. or the league allows a 4th DP or some other tools. which then justifies my interest. to me i thought this was risky and narrowcast but might keep me around if it became a fubo equivalent in terms of funding this thing. so far ain't done sh*t. and if they got ~$8m it went to the stadium work and not so much the team. last point which frightens me more, the larger and larger EPL TV deals may trickle down to each team equally but it doesn't fix the funding disparities. injecting $8m in other teams while we have other priorities might open not close competitive gaps. what EPL's deal does in practice is separate an EPL team from a championship team on finances ergo parachute payments. but we have no escape nor a relegation to cushion. we either put this cash with the rest and compete, or it just gets worse. i thought this situation was dangerous for the dynamo because you take a bad team and turn awareness of it into a niche exercise.
free to air on kube is on TV and i can flip across it. free to air on an app takes purposeful action. that's not the same. and let's be real, give or take some odd freak who hunts down the free games, if you have Apple's TV app hmmmm do you think maybe you have the service? next to no one regularly visits service websites they don't have looking for free streams. personally i think this whole argument is cable vs streaming spin. when it was on kube a much much higher percentage was free. and that's years it was there. if you're really encouraging free, hmmm, how about more games that way. or have apple and local. maybe an amazon game of the week type thing. or some %. this is like somewhere between 6-16% free, 84-94% niche pay.
also, the "free" analysis fudges that a lot of people have basic cable or the first sports package for various reasons anyway. you're implying it's bought for the dynamo. some poorer families are f*cked by kube vs regional sports network. maybe some cord cutter die hard has to weigh whether to buy cable afresh. but you have plenty of casual fans and regulars who have already forked over for the cable. it's not literally "free" but i am not paying much/any "extra" past my wife wanting to see real housewives or HBO anyway. to be real, i wouldn't mind if it was a supplement/alternative access point. TV deal is UHF or cable but you can pay $10/mo for streaming. end the local game blackouts. that to me is legitimately concerned with access. that being said, i think kube was peak dynamo tv. regular location, free, no cable needed, no secondary channel stuff. but i don't think we're really saying that's end all be all, we're tossing out that option and making an awkward comparison with cable. like i said, a lot of people already have the cable. are we treating them as "free?" if we're really comparing difficulty of access and how "nice" they are being tossing the fans 2-6 freebies. that most of houston won't know exist. that you'd almost have to have the package already to know to look for. in which case can we talk what % of fans already had the needed cable anyway.
I cut the cord like 10 years ago (seems that long ago anyway) and bounced around different streaming services combining with an HD antenna until I settled on the Hulu live tv bundle. You might be right on the growth thing, but I don't think a fanbase is growing on the Kube and two games of the week on Fox/ESPN. I think you're far more likely to grow with 6 free games a week on Apple and however many games on Fox.
Let's face it, though, the core soccer fanbase that Apple is aiming for is likely to have Roku, Fire or an Apple TV device or to have a smart tv.
https://www.insiderintelligence.com...age-groups-prefer-streaming-services-cable-tv I think a part of the equation is realizing how the target demographics consume media. Channel surfing is fading out as a practice. We’re more in an age where content is targeted to the viewer rather than just out there for people to stumble upon. I’m not saying anyone is wrong in their viewing habits (also I’m not trying to call anyone a boomer) but it’s just a product of your environment type thing. That being said I don’t think these viewing habits translate 1:1 to people that watch sports primarily, so this is still a risk for MLS. Part of me wonders how much they’re going to try the F1 strategy of going after people that aren’t necessarily sports fans and bring them into the sport.
I am going to give Apple and the league a year at this new way of packaging MLS to us American soccer fans and then pass judgment. One other note, I thought back in 2006 that certainly by the mid 2020's pro soccer would be way more better presented and packaged on all fronts. TV, interwebs and game day enthusiasm inside each MLS market's own local media. It appears this has barely happened in 17 MLS seasons thus far. I mean match this expectation with well earned fan bases. This all combines to reflect a significant growth in mainstream popularity. For sure us fans across the league have done our part, putting our money down for MLS. Yet the powers in charge still find ways to paywall the games and more specifically not sell the sport for what it is over what it is not when watching it on a screen, not a NBA or NFL commercial fest.
Press release in my inbox this morning. Not sure any of this is new, but highlights some of the positives of the Apple deal: - More camera angles than in the past - 1080p video and Dolby 5.1 audio - Enhanced data and graphics in live match coverage - Prior to each match, an MLS Countdown pregame show - MLS 360 - a whip-around show with live look-ins at each match - Full recap of day's action via "MLS Wrap-Up" show Plus, all matches will have English and Spanish commentary available while the matches involving Canadian teams will also have French commentary available. That's all on top of the mandatory weekly content production requirement placed on every team. So, basically we're getting more pregame analysis, more postgame wrap-up, more content, etc, etc than has ever existed for MLS.
whelp, the new kit is certainly.....orange Though it does appear that they've shoehorned in not only the continued increase in the use of the spanish language but now also Mexican land marks in the promo video. One day that Mexican Yeti will show up and flood the FO coffers. PS what is a better word for "underwhelmed"?
The @HoustonDynamo unveiled the El Sol kit, the new primary jersey for the 2023 & 2024 seasons. Fans can see El Sol in person & meet their favorite Dynamo players at 6p on Tues., Feb. 21 as part of the season kickoff festivities at Buffalo Bayou Park. #HoldItDown pic.twitter.com/MUtDi9ZvNC— Adam Wexler (@AdamJWexler) February 15, 2023 I think it’s pretty good. I think the pattern is just pronounced enough. I’m actually glad they’re not going with the black shorts like we saw HH wear during MLS media day. I think the video is fine too. They were in Mexico City for preseason after all. And aside from that they hit some Houston landmarks too including the inside of the Astrodome. In the tweet I linked I don’t like HH sitting on the fancy chair but I LOVE the shot of the academy products in the historic jerseys.
hmmm i liked the snippets off the email, i like the black elements and how they interact with the logo and sponsor, but the color design, sh*t, can't they leave well enough alone. it looks pre-sweat-stained. are those supposed to be soccer-ball patches? or the hexagon from the logo? so i grade it down to ok. it'll probably sell fine. it's not that bad. i wish for simple but then i remember this started out team swirl.
again, this sounds all well and good, as does vaguely saying more free games, but of how many dynamo people is this true, and are they the core audience. i think you set out their mindset on all these. but this isn't netflix or paramount plus. the sole attraction is us. and we are down on atractiveness. this isn't watch yellowstone and you also get the spinoffs and the mayor of dogstown. you are either into us that much or not. we are down on attendance for several years except the HH blip last year. is that when to test how eager the fans really are? and i think you're missing that STH by definition will be sitting at most of the games. the ones being handed this free. the fans you are chasing to pay are precisely the ones who don't routinely pay to watch. surely you see the difficulty here. and you want to chase the ones who haven't even been interesting. daring. and you're also overlooking how many STH will go home with their free game access and use it. i just watched the game live. why am i watching a replay. so there will be a discrepancy between free and paid, and also how many of which actually watch. to be fair, i will say that pat made comments last fall during the coaching search which sounded like they are chasing casual fans just like you say. i think it sounds MBA, sounds clever. but i think paywalling the games then going off in search of casual fans is going to be an exercise in structural frustration. you go after casual fans on the kube or ESPN. this is turning hide and go seek into a marketing strategy. last point, as a racing fan F1 is overpriced overrated crap. motogp is real f*cking racing. indycar has plenty of actual passing. F1 is watching the best car that year drive off into the sunset in a parade race that finishes a lot how it qualified. oh, no doubt, they market the heck out of it, and in theory it has the best drivers, but they don't actually race much. a good day there's tire or brake issues on that course and people quitting or having to pit changes the race order. and then to me outside of an older core who remembers when it was real racing, it's a lot of status conscious folks. it's car people but like i have a porsche look at my car people. not the sort of people who grew up go cart rracing or off road biking. if you follow. if you track that across to soccer, you're after casual fans trying to make them the hipster in all the latest merch type fan. i was always from the torn-tee shirt at practice because i am here to work on my game, type school. or your old select jersey. i always thought the ones in the shiny new gear sucked at soccer and didn't know the first thing. or were show offs if they did know anything. in the wrong cleats, too. and i still wonder how the heck you reach that type of fan behind a paywall. but anyhow surely the soccer fans get what i am getting at in terms of best case scenario here. and this isn't austin. i am not sure what the soccer hipster possible pool is here. we have other sports. we have more competitive teams. i mean, the recent surge of F1 interest here parallels it switching from speed to ESPN. the snobs bewailed the loss of old boring commentators and niche broadcasting but it took off on "trip across" channel cable. that's when it got popular, that and i think they're up to like 3 US races including austin, going to the fans where they live. similarly indycar's one big hit race is always the network TV Indy 500. to me narrowcasting is about the worst time to go casual fan hunting. precisely backwards. let me make this hard to access then chase fans with no connection rather than actual soccer fans. brilliant.