If You Can’t Watch Final Four Games on TV, See Them Live

The 2016 NCAA men’s championship game, which is scheduled to be played on Monday, April 4, is not expected to beat last year’s 28.3 million viewers. This is not because of lack of interest in the game or the teams playing, but rather because of deals the NCAA has reached with cable networks.

This year will be the first time in decades that the two Final Four games and the championship game will not be broadcast on a free TV network. The NCAA has reached a lucrative deal that gives Turner Broadcasting System’s pay TV channels, TBS, TNT, and TruTV, the exclusive rights to broadcast these pivotal games. This means that only viewers who pay for cable subscriptions will be able to watch the games on TV. Viewers who do not subscribe to cable will be out of luck.

The sports industry in general has been changing in recent years, signing deals that restrict viewership for competitions. Sports organizations reach deals with pay TV channels to increase revenue. However, this comes at the expense of relationships with fans who are unable to watch and leads to declining TV viewership of sports in general. With more and more customers canceling their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming TV online, the problem may only get worse.

TBS and its sister channels broadcast the Final Four games for the first time in 2014. The ratings were significantly lower than they were when fans could watch the games on CBS. The Duke-Oregon game that was shown on TBS on March 24, 2016 had the highest ratings of any show on cable, but it had less than half the number of viewers who tuned in for NCAA games broadcast on CBS on other days.

When boxing adopted pay-per-view, its fan base declined significantly. Ratings for the recent NFL Pro Bowl game, which was shown on ESPN, were the lowest ever. With pay TV channels assuming the rights to many local baseball teams’ games, TV viewership of the sport has been declining.

In some cases, fans who want to watch games are unable to do so because their cable providers have not been able to reach deals with sports organizations. Comcast customers may not be able to watch Yankees games this year if the cable company does not reach an agreement with the YES Network soon. Disagreements among several TV providers in California may prevent fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers from watching them play on TV.

In-person attendance at NCAA basketball games has been increasing in recent years. In the 2014-2015 season,
32.5 million fans watched student athletes compete in Division I, II, and III games. If you are an NCAA basketball fan, you can still get last-minute tickets to games from CapitalCityTickets.com.