Other sports watched with interest at how today’s tools were used for a fight with narrative, hype, personalities and jeopardySome food for thought. Last week, the Guardian’s report on the “special exhibition” between the Hall of Fame boxer Floyd Mayweather and the celebrity YouTuber Logan Paul, was the second most-read story on our entire website. Millions read it, shared it, devoured it. A million Americans also paid $49.99 to watch on pay-per-view. Beforehand Mayweather had described it as “legalised bank robbery”. And it was. Yet people still willingly stuck their hands in the air and handed over their cash. Related: Logan Paul v Floyd Mayweather ends in boos as each fighter makes millions Continue reading...
Channel 4’s broadcast was reminiscent of the way the BBC used to do it but that didn’t matter – the cricket spoke for itself‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this is …” Test cricket, finally back on free-to-air TV at the godawful hour of one, two, 3.35 in the morning. For 15 years, four months, and 22 days now the game has been going back-and-forth about whether or not people ought to be able to watch it live on terrestrial television, and here it was at last – for the first time since the end of the 2005 Ashes. Sky, which has held the rights for most of that time, has done so much for the sport, but those opening notes of Lou...
Two untaxing wins meant the corporate behemoth arrived quietly – but the smart money says it’s here to stayIf Amazon Prime Video was hopeful its maiden foray into rugby coverage would be the main talking point of the weekend’s international Test match action, its thunder was unceremoniously stolen mere hours before its first broadcast by Sky Sports. After Sky’s viewers were spoiled by the unprecedented sight of Argentina beating the All Blacks in the Tri-Nations, a laboured Scotland win over Italy and routine England rout of Georgia in our own comparatively mundane autumnal jamboree, the Nations Cup, could never hope to compete.“Amazon delivers the rugby,” it told us, the pre-match graphic featuring rampaging and hulking household names carrying brown parcels...
Condensing the action works better for some sports than others, but it feels crucial as viewing options keep expandingApparently, the US Open men’s final on Sunday night was incredible. I wouldn’t know; I only saw the highlights. Which, as everyone knows, is by far the least satisfying way of watching a tennis match: inferior in many ways to watching nothing. For some reason tennis has always been strangely resistant to the highlights treatment: a game of infinite pivots and infinite crises, where every apparent turning point merely heralds the next, where its most epic passages feel like the world is ending again and again and again. Abridging all this feels somehow wrong, faithless: like trying to sum up Like a...
The coverage of Sunday’s England v Pakistan T20, the first match on the BBC in two decades, will be very different to the days of Peter West and Tony LewisNostalgia is the comfort blanket of our times. The BBC knows this, which is why it spent lockdown pacifying or existential angst with golden replays of the Olympics, Wimbledon and West Indies tours. When it shows Sunday’s England v Pakistan T20, the corporation’s first live cricket TV broadcast in two decades, there will be a quiet sigh from older viewers, of something finally being put right with the world.Cricket and the Beeb used to be wedded to each other. For 60 years – it first showed the game on TV in...