Competition between sports hurts TV ratings: How to shift league calendars to optimize viewership

Television is becoming an increasingly critical revenue stream in the sports industry, as media rights deals in the four major North American sports (NBA, MLB, NHL, and NFL) continue to escalate by huge rates every time they are up for renewal. Live sports certainly captivate large numbers of viewers, and according to conventional wisdom, when two live events air at the same time, they compete head-to-head for those eyeballs. It is often discussed how NFL games allegedly crush ratings for the World Series or NBA playoff games devour the audience for their NHL playoff counterparts. If ratings are so critical to franchise bottom lines and competition does in fact hurt ratings, though, why then do so many sports willingly overlap while other parts of the year are left empty, flush with fans hungering for sports programming? This overlap can easily be prevented, as there is a vast stretch of the summer from mid-June to the end of August during which the only major sport in season is regular season MLB games—among the lowest rated programming of the four major sports. Would NHL or NBA playoff TV ratings increase if either pushed its calendar back and avoided directly competing with the other from April-June? Would World Series ratings cease their downward spiral if they moved up from October before getting caught in the supposed NFL black hole? In an industry where teams hire armies of statisticians, coaches, trainers, and scouts to claw at every last inch of competitive edge and where leagues squeeze out every last drop of revenue, one would think someone would notice if that were the case—or does programming competition from other sports simply have little effect on ratings? This paper attempts to isolate the effects of overlap from each sport, examine how that competition hurts viewership in each league, and quantify the value lost due to that overlap. We find that competition can have very damaging effects for TV viewership for every sport, most notably the NHL, and these losses can significantly diminish the value of a network’s investments in sports