SportsCenter and the internet

I don't often watch ESPN's SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight. In theory, watching either program sounds like a great idea. In practice, I don't have time for it. I'm a busy guy, and so much experience with the Internet makes me too impatient to sit for an hour to learn what I can learn with three minutes and any of the major online papers. My impatience is such that I prefer USAToday's quick-loading scoreboard to the prettier and more overloaded ESPN scoreboard, though the ESPN page is the way to go sometimes for sure. I have a killer broadband connection except when I'm on the road, too, so we're talking about some serious impatience - half-seconds of delay will cause me to look for more immediate gratification on another site.

To be sure, I'm not ADD or anything like it. I have the attention span of a tortoise. What I want is efficiency, not speed. Why turn on the TV to sit through an hour of commercials and random (but predictable) highlights when I can get what I want in a few minutes on the Internet? You can only watch so many diving catches (and if someone is going to report to me about a diving catch, I'd rather see it re-enacted live than watch a tape of what it looked like from the TV booth).

When radio was king in the WWII era few people thought it would ever be marginalized to the extent that it is today. Television immediately gripped viewers and clearly offered something more than radio. It's not going away, but the internet is going to change it and what it does the same way that TV changed radio and what it does. The nature of these changes is such that I don't think there's much of a future for shows like Baseball Tonight. The internet will provide what that show offers in a much more tailored and efficient form.

I've never used TiVo, and if that becomes commonplace, maybe shows like Baseball Tonight will continue to thrive if they index themselves in some more predictable fashion. If they always spent two minutes on the Buccos, and if those two minutes were easy to find - say within ten seconds - I'd be hooked. Otherwise, I'm not going to sit around for forty minutes to see a video replay of Tike Redman's diving catch.

All that said, I did tune into SportsCenter early Saturday morning and I was tremendously pleased to see Rob Mackowiak and our two huge wins as the lead item. That did provide a kind of satisfaction I didn't expect and rarely get from television, and it does incline me to watch again some time soon. National media is pretty cool when your team is the center of national attention.