Color me skeptical, but I have a feeling that it all comes down to money.
We’re less than a week away from the start of college football season, with UNC and TCU facing off in Dublin, Ireland for the first game of the season this coming Saturday. But it’s going to be harder to follow the scores of multiple games this season – at least on the ESPN family of networks – thanks to a controversial change they’re making to their broadcasts.
According to a report from FOS, ESPN will be eliminating their “BottomLine ticker” that shows scores and news at the bottom of the screen during all college football games, a change that will apply to all games on ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPNU, ESPNews, SEC Network, ACC Network and ABC. It’s a move that ESPN had already made for college football playoff games, but until now the ticker has remained throughout the regular season.
The network claims the move is to provide a better viewing experience for fans:
“We’re always looking for ways to better serve sports fans. By removing the BottomLine during live action, we’re creating a cleaner presentation that keeps the focus where it belongs — on the field.”
Sounds like a noble goal, right? I mean, surely ESPN is only worried about providing the best experience for fans and not increasing their bottom line.
Oh wait, what’s that? The network announced a price increase for their streaming services this week? As it turns out, right as college football season starts the network will be increasing the price of their ESPN Unlimited streaming plan from $29.99 to $31.99 per month, while also increasing the price of ESPN Select from $12.99 to $13.99 month.
But what’s that have to do with removing the ticker? Well not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, or question the benevolent motives of ESPN, but I suspect that removing the ticker may have nothing to do with improving the viewing experience and instead is a move to drive traffic to their app to check scores instead.
Of course not having a ticker at the bottom to highlight scores from other games may also be ESPN’s attempt to keep people from changing the channel to other networks when they see a close game going on. But whatever the reason, people aren’t buying the network’s official explanation that the move is a win for fans:
Now, maybe I’m just old and the ticker really is outdated. There are plenty of fans of the move too, pointing out that we have access to all the scores on our phones anyway. And eliminating the ticker will leave more room on the screen to watch actual football, without any distraction (although checking scores will now be MORE of a distraction because you’ll have to pull out your phone instead of glancing at the bottom of the screen).
But I grew up watching games with a ticker on the screen and I much prefer having the scores of games on the bottom of the screen rather than having to go search for them while I’m watching a game.
Unfortunately, that won’t be an option anymore – and I have a sneaky feeling it has everything to do with money.
