Streaming isnt helping pool IMO, I love it-its great i can stay at home and sweat matches, make rail bets etc. But I'm not doing room owners any favors. The rail is empty these days. I went one night with Mike Massey to watch Dip play Gabe $20,000 races to 11 1P, not streamed, Tang Hoa walked in so that made it about 6 or 7 of us sweating $20K action. I remember 15 years ago people would be standing 3 deep in every possible spot to sweat action like that,
I thought streaming would take off better than it has, JCIN & Company has done a brilliant job with TAR, The other night with Earl vs SVB on the last night they had some sort of problem and switched it over to uStream and they broke 2000 viewers-all for free, which is fine. If you have enough people watching for free you sell ads, thats how the TV and radio biz and news papers have done it forever.
But lets break down the numbers, 2000 people watching means that there were 40 people from each state watching. yes 40. Cali has the largest population of any state at last count 37,253,956. So for every million people living in Ca TAR had just over 1 person per million residents sweating a epic match. Now this isnt a knock on TAR but 1 in a million people watching is just bad numbers. 40 people per state sweating pool tells me lots of things. I understand why ESPN isnt showing much pool, people dont like to watch pool, and they put on one hell of a show.
When they started streaming it was new and the numbers were small, I figured they would have 10,000 viewers within the first year. Here we are 3 or 4 years later and were at 2000. That number is so low I dont even know where to start to promote Streaming or televised pool.
Usually is a gamble you create a event, generate a audience and then take the size of the audience and its demographic and go sell time to advertisers for less $$$ than the event costs to produce. But with the numbers this low and considering how good TAR is doing. What can be done to draw a bigger audience. And the larger the audience the less people at pool rooms.One thing could be done is charge pool rooms $100/day for a stream and not have it avaliable on home computers. A closed circut deal where you have to go to the local pool room to see the stream, UFC does that as well as home PPV, they base their pricing on the fire code occupancy of a building. Then the building owner(usually a sports bar has a cover charge). That might work.
Pool is so far gone its depressing, Dip was playing for hunderds of thousands the other night and it went largely ignored, 20 years ago before all the communication the word still would have got out. Pool is dead.
The real trick is a long slow process-get kids to play, but competing with the internet/video games/txting etc is tough action-but thats the real solution.
hell i'm 44 and still the youngest guy at the pool room more often than not, that speaks for itself
