As of this writing, I haven’t yet watched the 2014 CrossFit Invitational that aired last night. The events were streamed live on CrossFit’s YouTube page, & a few hours later on ESPN3, so my lack of viewing was choice & not based on availability. In the case of the Grid playoffs & finals, though, their deal with NBC & the schedule shifting that occurred due to their financial troubles precluded anybody but those in the actual arena from watching the event live. The rest of us had to wait a few days to see what happened.

I haven’t been on social media yet this morning, so I have no idea who won last night. Whenever I do flick it on, my guess is it’ll take less than two minutes before I unwittingly stumble across the final tally or a telling image. That’s the price to pay for going to the movies last night instead of sitting in front of the computer — the price to pay for not accommodating one of the only remaining time-dependent media entities left: live sport.

For the Grid finals in October, I didn’t want to know who won until I was able to watch the broadcast. Because I don’t have cable, I had to wait four days until the match on NBC-proper (it aired two nights prior on NBC SportsNetwork). I spent those four days on a pretty strict social media diet & actually managed to get through the week without knowing the outcome.

On the morning of the 5th, the day of the broadcast, I woke up, flicked open Instagram unthinkingly, & immediately saw a picture of Justin Cotler holding up the championship trophy.

I was hours away from a pure viewing experience, & I ruined it. I enjoyed watching the match, but knowing the outcome meant I was far less emotionally invested in it.

It’s called time-shifted in the business, when the event & the viewing of the event don’t coincide. For pretty obvious reasons, it’s a less than ideal way to watch sports, & with the ever-presence of cell phones & social media, it’s becoming even harder to take much pleasure watching a time-shifted event with an outcome you care about. (The Olympics survive because — really — most people care less about the individual results than they do the spectacle of it all. Same for the CrossFit Invitational, I’d argue.)

In Sports Beyond Television, authors Brett Hutchins & David Rowe write:

The value of media sport resides in the attractive unscripted drama of live competition, & the demand for up-to-the-moment match & event results by fans. Sport is a ‘perishable product’, making the purchase of exclusive rights to first-run sporting events an attractive proposition for broadcasters. Live sports, which features regular intervals in play, is well suited to the placement of extensive advertising at a time when on-demand consumption is seeing viewers skip advertisements & promotional messages in other program genres with the help of personal video recorders & online viewing platforms.

In other words, in a world of on-demand media, where we watch/read/listen to whatever we want on our own individual schedules, sports are the last vestige of the classic broadcasting methodology: eyeballs equal advertising equals money. Despite a radically shifting landscape (Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc), the networks & advertisers still rely heavily on “overnight ratings” to determine value. It’s why Tony Budding, meeting with the newly drafted Grid athletes this summer, said the October 5th “championship encore” would have the “single greatest impact on [their] future salary.”

According to a few people I’ve spoken with, the numbers that came in for the D.C. versus San Francisco championship rebroadcast satisfied NBC, & there’s talk (if not agreement) to add a few more hours to their overall broadcast schedule next season.

This matters because the sport of Grid has been built from conception as a television entity — “We succeed if we work on television,” said broadcast director Mike Roth during that same meeting with athletes — but in order to take advantage of the kind of revenue brought by television advertising, the league has to prove there’s an audience for it.

Every time a match is time-shifted, every time the visceral experience of anticipation & drama is diluted, the risk increases that a casual fan will not be converted to a passionate fan.

The advantage the league has going into this next year is that it has experience & time, both of which were in short supply this year. The disadvantage is that they’re not where they anticipated they’d be & must scale back their ambition to keep it in line with budgetary constraints. That means, perhaps, instead of individual home matches every couple nights, we have multiple matches per night in neutral cities (like they did with the playoffs in Charlotte), which are decidedly cheaper to produce but necessarily provide a lesser fan experience. Is the broadcast of one game time-shifted? If not, does the first match start at 5pm, when most people are at work or in the car? Can a team build a loyal, hometown following if potential fans can never watch them compete in person?

It’ll be interesting to see whether the compromises in the 2015 season benefit the league or the fans more. If there was a problem this year (& clearly there was), it was that few compromises were made in favor of the league & the teams, with the default position being that the fan experience was paramount. Will it swing too far the other way? Will the league become so conservative they forget they’re trying to build a spectator sport & not a sport with spectators?

Here’s where the CrossFit Games have a distinct advantage, able to serve the diehard fan with hours & hours of live streaming in July, & the casual fans truncated, viewer-friendly versions months later on ESPN.

Despite being the newer sport, despite being built from the ground up for the 21st century, Grid is still playing by some very traditional rules of classic sports broadcasting. Because the CrossFit Games never cared to play by those rules, because they’ve been making things up as they go along, they’ve been able to build something unique — a hybrid sport that takes advantage of the benefits of both the Internet & television.

As with anything, the degree to which either approach is “right” comes entirely in the execution.