World Cup football and the future of TV

Its interesting to see that over 30 billion people (cumulative) are likely to watch the World Cup tournament that starts next week. This seems to go against some of the fevered predictions about the decline of broadcast TV that hypers like Steve Rubel and Cameron Riley promote, as well as Bill Gates and others who should know better. If you were cynical you might think some of this rhetoric is just the slightest bit self-serving. And its worth noting that two of the biggest and most successful online plays in Australia to date are the result of deals between web companies and TV broadcasters in the form of ninemsn and yahoo7; another highly successful experiment with long-term consequences, I think, is ABC podcasting. With Big Brother, Channel Ten is also showing that broadcast TV can readily extend its reach by delivering content across a range of platforms, including mobile phones.
The World Cup shows us two important things about our media evironment 1) most people love TV and plan to go on watching it, especially on swish new screens 2) they particularly love it for watching sport (and created events like Big Brother, Biggest Loser and Idol)
That's why this quote from this morning's Australian caught my attention:

In Australia, soccer fever has been building. Joe Marruso, the franchisee for the Adelaide City Cross Harvey Norman store, said May had been his biggest month for plasma TV sales.

"I think people wanted an excuse to go out and buy this stuff, and the World Cup gives them an excuse," he said.

SBS, which holds World Cup broadcasting rights, is also preparing for the soccer.

SBS director of commercial affairs Richard Finlayson said yesterday the station had increased advertising rates by 25 per cent when the Socceroos qualified.

No doubt broadcast and subscription TV faces many challenges (and opportunities) in a rapidly changing media environment, but you have to be truly delusional to think its not going to be with us for some decades yet.

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