Sport Before Pay TV

[Rollo]

Particularly about the state of sport in America I ask this:

What did sport on telly look like before Cable TV. Have the cable companies as I suspect really added nothing in real terms to televised sport?

They haven't in most motor racing classes, nor football in most countries but what about the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball? Did cable TV improve anything and/or what did they all look like before Cable TV reared its head?

[D-Type]

Since these will have been low budget operations, I doubt there has been the scope for innovation - simply the most film footage with the minimum number of cameras and the cheapest cameramen.

But on the other hand any coverage of a sport is infinitely better than no coverage! World Tiddleywinks Championship, anyone?

[Rollo]

Since these will have been low budget operations, I doubt there has been the scope for innovation - simply the most film footage with the minimum number of cameras and the cheapest cameramen.


I dunno.

Cricket went through a revolution in the late 1970s because of free-to-air television.
The first in-car cameras appeared in 1979, first in the Daytona 500 and then at the Bathurst 1000 because of Australia's Channel 7.
I imagine that the NFL changed all sorts of rules to fit with television in the late 1960s.

[Starter]

Particularly about the state of sport in America I ask this:

What did sport on telly look like before Cable TV. Have the cable companies as I suspect really added nothing in real terms to televised sport?

They haven't in most motor racing classes, nor football in most countries but what about the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball? Did cable TV improve anything and/or what did they all look like before Cable TV reared its head?
Before cable in America there was much less sport and much less variety of sport. The old ABC network show 'Wide World of Sports' was the first to really show auto racing, especially F1, as well as other sports not considered "mainstream" (by that I mean American popularity) baseball, football, basketball, golf and a few others). Olympic type sport was only shown during Olympic years, etc.

The advent of cable dramatically increased the amount of sport in general and fringe sports in particular available to American viewers. Not because the cable companies wanted to show those sports, but more because they needed to fill air time and the fringe sports were cheap. Now on any given day I could watch (American) football and basketball, both amateur & pro, golf, sking, ice skating, motorsports, baseball, soccer (football to most of you), curling and a bunch of other stuff. As a result the quality of the competitions is, ahh, compromised.

[D-Type]

A while ago, when they made one of their attempts to get the USA interested in football (the soccer sort), they changed the rules to play in quarters so they could fit in three commercial breaks not just half time.
When F1 moved to ITV, all hell was let loose when there was a lead change during a commercial break and the producer didn't have the sense to switch to 'replay' immediately.