James writes about fantasy football leagues, as well as The League.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n I had a dream. No, a fantasy. A fantasy about the freedom to live on my schedule and not to be restricted by the tyrannical force of time when it comes to consuming television. Luckily, online streaming, DVDs, downloads, PVRs and timeshifting have all changed the way we watch television. Specifically it changes when we watch television from whenever our show’s on to whenever the fuck we want, and my fantasy is a reality. To think that there was a time our time when we scheduled our social lives around when our favourite shows were on seems a little sad….and anti-social. And while there are still times I’m sure some of us still head home early from bad parties with that excuse, we have to follow the airing schedule less and less. As a result, we don’t experience a lot of our programming at the same time and this decline in simultaneous consumption this has contributed to audience fragmentation. Besides a greater control of the time we watch, another contributing factor is the sheer number of choices we have of what to watch. Most people have access to hundreds of channels on their television now, and this does not include all the time spent on web series, YouTube videos, the million other things to watch on the Internet, or the low cost to create and distribute feature films, or Netflix. People have literally millions of choices as to what to watch and an extreme level of control over when to watch it. The audience isn’t just fragmented, it’s blown apart.<\/p>\n While this is having a pretty big impact on lots of forms of visual entertainment, one form appears less susceptible to this fragmentation: professional sports. Relatively speaking, niche sports aren’t as big of a deal as the wide variety of television shows to watch. Creating even a relatively cheap television show is less expensive than the risk and overhead involved in creating a spectator sport to air. While you may have some weird friend who keeps up with\u00a0sepak tekraw<\/a>,\u00a0most people want to see sports being played by the most athletic, well-trained people in the world, and these people most often flock to lucrative, established professional sports. Other than variety of choices, the other contributing factor to fragmentation, control over the timing of consumption, is not as easily applied to sports.<\/p>\n