While the television industry continues its shift from cable to streaming, live game viewership and sports talk show viewership are way up. It’s a trend that may seem counterintuitive, but to Colin Cowherd, it’s just a sign of what sells.
On The Colin Cowherd Podcast on Wednesday with guest Nick Wright, Cowherd explained why cable television is not dying, it just will be dominated by sports for the foreseeable future.
“Everybody said cable is dead,” Cowherd said. “If TikTok suddenly lost 40 percent of their audience, but it was only a platform for recipes, food videos, restaurant videos. It would be an incredible powerful platform for the culinary industry. [Sports] always shared television with soap operas, sitcoms, dramas. We no longer share it. It is singularly ours.”
Cowherd argued that people have the same amount of time on their hands as ever, but certain types of content are less relevant than before. Sports talk, though, still feeds a hunger for the tens of millions watching sports every day.
“Cable TV is all sports and occasionally politics. So people say cable TV is dying, f*** it is. My ratings are up 40 percent,” Cowherd continued. “It is now singularly a platform for games, opinions on games … this idea that everything’s down, no it’s not. We don’t share the platform anymore. That’s why, and I have 10 years left in this business, TV is going nowhere.”
However, Cowherd also explained why he believes certain sports could fall down a peg. As the world gets more connected, every American league besides the NFL gets more globalized. That can work to their detriment from an awareness perspective of the everyday sports fan, while the NFL has a built-in feeder system that helps its popularity stay massive.
“Everything in sports now is niche, except the NFL,” Cowherd said. “It is a harder ask for busy Americans to say, ‘Hey, do you follow the European leagues?’ … People are busy. College football makes it so easy to follow the NFL.”
Certainly, the way people consume sports and sports content is changing. Cowherd and Wright’s conversation actually began focusing on the conspiracy of the NFL “script” and the league being rigged. The two Fox Sports 1 hosts discussed how truth and fact are harder to find because traditional local journalism is in financial ruin.
Rising to the top are a select few, like Cowherd and Wright, who have risen to the top of one of the only fields with content that people still consistently watch live.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.