I like stop and go sports better than continuous action sports. With continuous action, nothing interesting is happening 95% of the time but you have to pay attention even though it's boring and hypnotic because if you look away for 30 seconds one of the three interesting plays will happen and you will miss it.
Soccer is particularly egregious for this since it's an hour of people running back and forth and there will only end up being one scoring play the whole time, so 30 seconds of action that affect the outcome of the game in 3600 seconds of playtime. Would honestly rather watch track, where it's the same premise (people running around accomplishing nothing) but since it's linear you can tell when something interesting is about to happen and focus on it more.
Discontinuous sports are much more watchable because you're guaranteed that something is going to happen every time a play starts. Then you get a little back where you can process what just happened and think about what's going to happen next.
Ad breaks suck, but that's a Capitalism problem and not a sports problem.
I think you've nailed it, that a structure where you have distinct plays with explosions of important action makes for good TV watching. Baseball and olympic type events also work well with that formula. Other games are more continually action-packed, which is fun for players, but there's too much continuity for TV watchers.
I like stop and go sports better than continuous action sports. With continuous action, nothing interesting is happening 95% of the time but you have to pay attention even though it's boring and hypnotic because if you look away for 30 seconds one of the three interesting plays will happen and you will miss it.
Soccer is particularly egregious for this since it's an hour of people running back and forth and there will only end up being one scoring play the whole time, so 30 seconds of action that affect the outcome of the game in 3600 seconds of playtime. Would honestly rather watch track, where it's the same premise (people running around accomplishing nothing) but since it's linear you can tell when something interesting is about to happen and focus on it more.
Discontinuous sports are much more watchable because you're guaranteed that something is going to happen every time a play starts. Then you get a little back where you can process what just happened and think about what's going to happen next.
Ad breaks suck, but that's a Capitalism problem and not a sports problem.
I think you've nailed it, that a structure where you have distinct plays with explosions of important action makes for good TV watching. Baseball and olympic type events also work well with that formula. Other games are more continually action-packed, which is fun for players, but there's too much continuity for TV watchers.