We’re In The Money – Old Events, New Reveues

We’re in the money!

The game of baseball was being played for a long time before networks started to put it on TV.

It was something that was simply ‘there’, and the ability to see it was limited to the number of seats in the stadium.

As there were not that many seats in the stadium, ball teams were not worth so much and players didn’t get paid all that much.

Those were the days.

Today, baseball has become a multi-billion dollar industry, players get paid a fortune – and a great deal of that (if not all of it) is due to the marriage of TV and television.

OK

This is not that hard to figure out.

People like to be entertained and here is something entertaining that is ‘already happening’.

Put in a few TV cameras, put it on the air, and presto – a billion dollars miraculously appears where once there was nothing.

Every industry carries with it an institutional memory that was forged when that industry was founded.

For television, the institutional memory is that creating television is complex and expensive – and that there are only a limited number of network who can put that expensive content into people’s homes

The double-whammy of the video revolution and the web have made both of those basic assumptions wrong – yet the institutional memory lingers.

Television has made its fortune by creating events ‘for television’ – (ie, you need a controlled studio – game shows; you need a created event -reality shows and so on).

Yet when we look around us, the world is filled with entertaining events being created every day – like Major League Baseball before TV, yet the ‘viewership’ is limited to the size of the stadium or the theater or the concert hall.

Why should a baseball game only be seen by the people in the stands? (question, circa 1952).

Why should a Broadway Show only be seen by the people in the theater? (question, circa 2011)

How many events are going on now, live events, quite good events, that are currently only seen by a few hundred people when these same events could be seen by a few hundred million people?

Last month we went to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway.

Fantastic show.

We paid $350 per ticket.  That’s what they cost.

There were perhaps 500 people in the theater?  Maybe 1,000. I have no idea. But not so many.

Not so many when compared with the 2 billion people online around the world.

For a relatively small investment, it would be very easy to put 5 or 6 robotic cameras in the theater that could capture The Book of Mormon for live streaming and also for VOD.

Suppose you charged 99¢ for access to The Book of Mormon (like iTunes does).  And suppose you got 100 million views from all over the world. (This is not an unreasonable number when you look at the number of hits a popular video on Youtube gets).  That’s $100 million in revenue for a very small investment.

Now, I know, the people who produce the show will say ‘Why would anyone pay $350 for an orchestra ticket to Book of Mormon when they can see the same thing for 99¢”?

OK

Back to Major League Baseball.

The cost of a ticket to the No 1 Inside Circle in the original Yankee Stadium as $1.10 in 1939

The cost of a ticket to the new Yankee Stadium Legends Seating costs $2625.  For one seat. For one game.

I don’t think televison has done much to hurt seating sales. On the contrary.

And of course, this idea is not just limited to Broadway shows.  There are innumerable events happening all over the country, in every nightclub, in every live theater, in every concert, in every lecture hall for that matter – all of which provides instant and quite good content ready for webcasting and all for free.

Of course, there are those venues who will resist going live online.

And there are those who won’t.

The few who are willing to take the risk will find themsevles a lot richer

Like the people who own a major league sports team, for example.