Lana Medina, an assistant professor of emerging media at the University of St. Thomas, spoke with Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal about the increasingly fragmented landscape of sports broadcasting. Medina explained that while multiple streaming subscriptions can add costs and complexity for fans, the shift also gives viewers more flexibility and creates new opportunities for teams to connect directly with their audiences.
From the article:
Lana Medina, an assistant professor of emerging media at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, noted that paying for the combination of streaming services required to watch all the sports games can cost as much or more than a cable subscription was.
“It’s tough because we come to this point that instead of just paying for one cable subscription, what we end up paying for is Netflix and Disney+, Hulu and all of these other different services to get this amalgamation of what we want,” she said.
However, streaming and new viewing models have given fans more accessibility, she said.
“We’ve gotten to this mentality where we want to watch what we want to watch anywhere, anytime. We can watch on multiple devices. We can cancel anytime. And for audiences, streaming is really flexible,” she said. “You can watch just as easily on a phone as you do on a computer or TV, so it’s nice you can access it where you want to access it.”
