Sport: How to Score on The Small Screen

• Share

(2 of 2)

Innovations, from PVI's range rainbow to computerized plays etched on the screens to ever more intimate camera angles, are only enriching the NFL's small-screen legacy. Television thrust football, more than any other pro-sports league, into the national psyche when in the 1960s NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated deals with the networks to beam his game, just once a week, into living rooms across the country on fall and winter Sunday afternoons. The sport has maintained its allure ever since: Fox and CBS each average more than 19 million viewers a week for their Sunday games, placing football in the Top 10 highest-rated regularly scheduled shows or series. ABC's Monday Night Football usually cracks the Top 10 as well. No regular-season baseball or basketball game even comes close to drawing those numbers.

Football seems to have been made for making TV money. There are plenty of breaks, allowing for commercials to be aired without interfering with the game. After every change of possession, players shuffle on and off the field: commercial time! After every score, again: commercial time! The ads fit into the flow instead of disrupting it, unlike, say, basketball, in which "TV" time-outs crop up out of nowhere, or hockey and soccer, in which every minute-long stoppage is artificial.

To keep all those eyeballs on the game--and on those commercials--the networks are constantly experimenting to make the TV football experience even better. The new frontier: high-definition broadcasts. Fox already shows six games a week in high def, CBS three, and both ESPN's Sunday-night game and ABC's Monday Night Football are available at higher resolutions. The difference between standard and high definition is striking. With high def, you can recognize faces in the crowd, and the wider screen lets you see that safety backing up into coverage.

Also, as more fans become stats junkies (some 14 million people currently play fantasy football), the demand for on-screen information will increase. "I'm not sure that anyone has figured out what interactive means," says Gary Hartley, Fox's senior vice president for graphic design. But rest assured: with so much money riding on TV football, producers will keep investing to make the game-watching experience cooler and cooler.