The slow, but increasingly inevitable, demise of the RSN model is forcing sports franchises and leagues to think about how they reach (and engage) with their fans.

I don’t blame them for wanting the tried and tested way of doing things to continue — who wouldn’t. A cheque from a TV station is simpler than spending time (and money) getting fans to watch every game. Just like an old-school TV distribution monopoly that guarantees a Nielsen rating, is a lot easier than making sure the game is actually available to watch in every home.

What used to be somebody else’s problem is quickly becoming a large problem that every franchise needs to solve for themselves.

So, getting a fan to pay a subscription (ala the recently launched Gotham Sports Streaming Service or the embattled Venu) is a page lifted out of a book that’s sold well, been read many times, and is (the teams hope) a simple answer that makes their lives easier.

That’s not how the world works any longer. And it’s all because of remote controls.

Bear with me for a minute here.

Subscriptions and remote controls have a deep relationship.

Remote controls are a child of the cable era.

The subscription model was born when a house had a single television set with a cable connection promising more than what was available on network TV. Back then, the remote control had a well defined ownership structure — there were times when you HAD to watch what Dad was watching, or give up the remote to Mom and sit through whatever she wanted to watch. Except for, maybe, Saturday mornings.

Most of us (by that, I mean my fellow forty-year-olds) fell in love with sports watching incredibly long games, featuring mustachioed men who often seemed like they weren’t doing too much, till someone else in the room made a sound that told me a lot had JUST happened.

I would argue that we always enjoyed a victory and mourned a loss — those are universal emotions — but the well played tennis rally, the beautifully hit cover drive in cricket, that sublime moment of magic in soccer where the magnetic connection between ball and foot defies the standard model of physics, the impossible pass and catch between a quarterback and wide receiver that required their souls to be connected in a way that would have them burned at the stake in a different era — these were things we learned to appreciate seeing the person with the remote control react in a way that would have us grounded for weeks if we did the EXACT same thing in any other situation.

That universal remote control, with its many buttons, is dead. Because every house has more than one screen and that well defined ownership structure is dead.

Whether it’s the TV in every bedroom of the well-heeled, and the phones and the tablets and the laptops that we are now attached to by invisible threads (wifi?) where being without a device, our very own personal device, can feel like we have gone through a lobotomy and an amputation rolled into one.

Quick aside: Writing that last bit makes me appreciate the people who go on digital detoxes even more. I should plan one for the Victory+ off-season — maybe even club it with that rarest of human experiences — a device-free vacation, as anxiety inducing as it may sound to go to a foreign land without access to a phone, a maps app, Uber, Yelp, Instagram …

Getting back to our regular scheduled programming:

The pride of place that the remote control once occupied (I remember special plastic covers being bought to protect it, and a well defined cubby that it had to be kept in — and woe betide the person who left it buried inside the couch) is a historical artifact. We should speak about it in the same way we speak about the pyramids in Egypt: Interesting, and good for a picture.

The remote control now moves focus across a screen and allows you to select a video to watch. And it sells its buttons to streaming services so you can launch an app without having to navigate through multiple menus (and potentially get distracted)

And that’s why the catch-all subscription model isn’t coming back. And I would argue that the specific subscription — one for every service died in 2018. Come back next week for that essay :)

It’s time to move on.

May I recommend you download the Victory+ app and have a quick look at what we think the future looks like.