Posted On: February 8, 2010
Where is it Illegal to Watch Sports?
What did you do last night? You watched the Super Bowl, of course. Where did you watch it? Unless you were in attendance at Sun Life Stadium in South Florida, you did not watch it at an NFL stadium.
This article makes the case that the NFL should allow telecasts of major games such as the Super Bowl in the participating team’s stadiums. The reason this is not done is as follows:
As the NFL has explained in the past, it prohibits mass out-of-home broadcasts of games because fans watching games in public places (as opposed to on their home televisions) do not count for the Nielsen ratings, so more fans watching outside of their homes means lower ratings, which means lower revenue for the NFL through it television deals. But the NFL has accounted for fans watching games on cell phones and laptops, so why not in stadiums?
Still, as the writer notes, wouldn’t it be a wonderful opportunity for fans to share a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” of “watching” the Super Bowl together? After all, being a football fan is about being a member of a community, and what better place to watch a game than with like-minded fans?
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