Facebook Just Ate TV’s Lunch
On Saturday night, the media world experienced a seismic shift. While Bey was ethering Jay on HBO with Lemonade, the future of live sports was unearthing itself on Facebook. The Orlando Pride vs. Houston Dash National Women’s Soccer League match was streamed live in HD on superstar Alex Morgan’s Facebook page. This marked the first time a professional sports game has ever been live streamed on Facebook, let alone from an athlete’s social media channel.
Each half of the match reached almost 2 million viewers and saw a live broadcast audience of 554,000 people. Do you know what that means? It means Alex Morgan’s Facebook live stream outreached most pro soccer matches that have been “broadcast” on TV in 2016. It also had more live viewers than all the nationally televised MLB games, the NHL Playoff game between Nashville and Anaheim, several Premiere League games on NBC and the weekend’s PGA tour event on the Golf channel. While the way TV viewership is calculated is a little different to Facebook, it’s a major sign of things to come.
And what is life in 2016 without conversing on the internet with outspoken people you don’t know? Alex Morgan’s live streams received over 40,000 comments and reactions, turning Facebook into a big sports bar for those 90 minutes. As we saw with Buzzfeed’s watermelon science experiment, Facebook live is a game-changing product because (a) it quickly brings people together around live content they all care about, and (b) it allows all of these viewers to talk to each other.
Never in the history of television could you connect to every single audience member, including your friends, and communicate with them in real-time while watching the show. The smartphone is the new living room.
Legacy media companies tout the reach of live TV audiences as something special, something unmatched on the internet. On Saturday night, this was proven to be very, very wrong. Live sports was TV’s last crown jewel, and Facebook just gobbled it up
We are right in the middle of a media revolution.
(Full disclosure: Cycle, which owns this publication, produced this live stream in partnership with Alex Morgan and NWSL)
