Quote:
Originally Posted by powderjunkie
Largely a holdover from pre-cable/internet days. The league/teams/networks could easily adapt. Maybe the official HNIC broadcast cuts some non-eventful action from the 1st period and catches up to live in the 2nd. Just make the local CBC cut to the new game.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the eastern audience isn't the biggest concern here...it was about not pissing off westerners by missing the start of their games. It doesn't need to be an issue any more.
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LOL, a "holdover from pre-cable/internet days"?!?
Our Saturday night games are scheduled at 8 pm MT precisely because the broadcasters want as many people possible watching the games. They
could start our games at 7 pm MT and have the Alberta stations kick over to the Flames/Oilers game instead of the third period of the early game, while the rest of the network catches up after the end of that early game to the Flames/Oilers game in progress, but they would NEVER want to do that. That's just silly, you're alienating fans from the eastern side of the country who wanted to watch the entire late game, and you're alienating the Leafs/Habs/Sens fans out west who wanted to watch the entire early game. I know the point you're trying to make is that there are technical solutions that could allow people to pick and choose which they'd prefer, but you're missing the point that having the games staggered such that they won't overlap maximizes viewership. If we go to year-round CST our Saturday games will absolutely shift to 9 pm starts; Rogers/CBC couldn't care less about whether it inconveniences 20,000 local attendees, they only care about making it easier for an order of magnitude more viewers on TV.
The NFL is a perfect example of prioritizing this. They have many games being played simultaneously on Sundays, but they all start at 11:00 am or 2:00-2:30 pm, with one late game at 6:20 pm MT. It doesn't matter what the local time is for those 11:00 am and 2:00-2:30 pm games: they will always be played at those times, such that there's 3:00-3:30 for the early games to be broadcast without overlapping the afternoon games, and 3:50-4:20 for the afternoon games to be broadcast without overlapping the game in the evening. That late afternoon/early evening gap between the end of the afternoon games and beginning of the evening game is very, very carefully timed to allow people across North America to eat dinner before the evening game.
Now of course there's no way to watch them all, and there are ways to pick and choose which games you want to watch over the course of the day, but they are never, ever scheduled such that the beginning of one game will overlap the end of another. They want you to pick your 11:00 am and 2:00 pm games and stick with 'em, keeping your ass glued to the TV all day. They don't want to start games at 11:00 am, then another at noon, then another at 1:00, because chances are if you can only watch portions of them
you won't watch at all.