Christmas Day has come and gone, and with it, ESPN’s “Dunk the Halls” NBA altcast featuring Mickey Mouse and friends.
The effort was the latest of a seemingly endless stream of IP-driven alternate telecasts. In the past two years alone, sports fans have seen a Mickey Mouse NBA game, a Simpsons-themed Monday Night Football broadcast, a Madden-themed Sunday Night Football telecast, a Toy Story NFL game, Big City Greens NHL broadcasts, and a Super Bowl called by SpongeBob and Patrick on Nickelodeon.
And while the technical feats of these altcasts are impressive — many of which transpose live action on the court/field/ice into an animation in real-time — it’s easy to wonder who exactly these broadcasts are for.
Ask the networks and leagues, and they’ll tell you the altcasts are designed to attract a new, younger audience. And sure, anecdotally this is the case. There’s plenty of evidence on social media that people like to tune into these broadcasts with their families.
But whether the juice is worth the squeeze is another question entirely.
Altcasts have become a dime a dozen and as such, they’ve lost their luster. Look no further than the declining viewership of Nickelodeon’s alternate NFL broadcasts, the longest running IP-based altcast in sports. Its debut during a Chicago Bears-New Orleans Saints Wild Card game in 2021 drew over 2 million viewers. Viewership has been downhill ever since.
A San Francisco 49ers-Dallas Cowboys Wild Card game the following year averaged just 1.3 million viewers. Then, a Christmas Day game between the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Rams the next season averaged just 900,000 viewers. The following Christmas, Nickelodeon averaged 900,000 viewers again, this time for the Las Vegas Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs. And finally, last season’s Super Bowl thriller between the 49ers and Chiefs barely cracked the one million mark, averaging just 1.2 million viewers for the biggest game of the year.
Suffice to say, interest in these types of broadcasts have gone down as the volume of them have gone up. Figures for Wednesday’s “Dunk the Halls” altcast on ESPN2 weren’t immediately available, though it’s safe to say ESPN’s press release would’ve broken it out from the total audience number had it been a significant figure.
The other aforementioned altcasts (i.e. Simpsons, Toy Story, Big City Greens, and Madden) have all aired exclusively on streaming platforms, and therefore aren’t measured by Nielsen.
The truth of the matter is that these ventures have a limited, albeit important audience for the leagues and networks. If a Toy Story telecast helps convert a chunk of children that wouldn’t have been inclined to watch a traditional broadcast into sports fans, that’s important for the future of these leagues. But it’s difficult to imagine that there’s a positive return-on-investment for these telecasts given the presumably high cost of the production.
Developing the ability to have Homer and Bart Simpson run around a football field the same way Joe Burrow does in real-time can’t be cheap. And to create that technology just to attract an inconsequential amount of viewers seems more like a vanity project than a prudent business decision. Sure, the tech developed for these altcasts might help create some neat broadcast innovations in the future, but those applications aren’t yet apparent.
Other altcasts, like the many stat and analytics-driven broadcasts we’ve seen in every major sports league, are certainly cheaper to produce, but draw similarly low audiences. At least those come at a low cost and super-serve your most diehard fans. Animated games? Unless they start regularly accompanying every traditional telecast, the upside to attract a substantial amount of younger fans seems low.
Even the ManningCast, which most people view as a success, only drives about one million viewers per broadcast over to ESPN2. That’s a fraction of the total Monday Night Football audience every week. And for what ESPN is paying Peyton and Eli (per Andrew Marchand, they’re in the “Aikman neighborhood,” which is $18 million per year), to do a limited schedule, the network better be extracting maximum value from Peyton’s Places and whatever social media traffic the brother’s create.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the altcasts are cool. It’s just a wonder who the networks are making these for, and why they’re making them in the first place. Is it so some producers and executives can get a cool credit under their belts? Is it because these media companies have valuable IP and feel like they have to leverage it? Or is it an earnest attempt to draw in different demographics? Cost per acquisition be damned.
The likely answer is all of the above. But one thing is for sure, it doesn’t seem like the altcasts are slowing down anytime soon. And whether they accomplish what they set out to do is highly debatable.
