Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game

As someone who's been analyzing video content industry trends for a few decades now, I just want to let you know you've reached some incomplete or misleading conclusions based a variety of category errors and assumptions. Traditional living room televisions are just one way of consuming video content. And "over-the-air broadcast" is just one way of distributing video content. Assuming broadcast television viewership shrinking also means less video is being created and consumed is like assuming music consumption is down because CD sales are down or the printed word is dying because fax machine sales are down.

The reality is quite the opposite. Video content creation, distribution and consumption are all growing at very high rates and have been for a long time. The industry puts a lot of effort into reproducible, audited measurement and has developed deep understanding of how viewership has shifted and multiplied across video consumption platforms, consumption modes, and distribution channels - ranging from streaming long-form to social snacking. While it's true that broadcast television is shrinking and traditional living room TV sales are down, far more video content is being created, distributed and consumed today than ever before, and not by a little - the growth trends are explosive regardless of how we count: viewers, views, hours, titles, revenue or reach. All the metrics measured across the entire video content lifecycle reflect the same incredible growth.

I suggest you focus on the myriad ways video content can be bad, is getting worse or has negative effects on kids, culture or human progress. But arguing video isn't growing is neither accurate nor necessary to support your point.

Basketball is similar as the action is very much confined to the video frame.

Non-US sports like Australian Rules or Gaelic football are an in person spectacle. They're free flowing (like ice hockey), constant action, and the ball can move 50+ metres up/down or across the field in a few seconds so you need to see the player movements off the ball. There's also something about a very large arena with 100,000+ spectators and a constant murmur of sound that can erupt in a moment.

The result is that NFL game broadcasts are generally the most technically sophisticated live, multi-camera broadcasts in existence. What they manage to do in real-time in front of a live global audience is remarkable, requiring orchestrating a complex ballet of split-second hand-offs between over a hundred production professionals each coordinating their contribution to the broadcast in perfect sync.

From a pure IT perspective, a Super Bowl broadcast relies on a terabit scale, high-reliability IP and power distribution infrastructure that would impress even the most jaded big data center architect - and it's all installed, tested and working on-site in about a week - including fail-over backup generators and multiple data feeds to off-site backup production locations. In the past two years they've even reached the level of switching the entire broadcast from an off-site backup location in the event of a catastrophic failure of the main production truck. That means every raw HD camera feed from wireless sideline handhelds, to pylon cams to multiple Skycams all arriving in sync at 60 fps hundreds of miles away (last year's game used >160 on-site cameras),

Even if you think of the Super Bowl as just some kind of weird 'sport ball thing', it can be interesting to meta-watch how the production is being composed. Every year the Super Bowl is where the best new innovations in live broadcast technology show up first. Every vendor is vying to have their latest toys strutting their new visual magic on the planet's biggest live stage. Last year an obvious standout was 3 new $150,000 Canon 122X zoom lenses (that's insane zoom) with a special new optical block allowing instant switching between normal zoom and film-like shallow depth-of-field.

Those 3 units were the only samples then in existence, hand carried by their engineers from Japan just for the Super Bowl. And I knew the instant one of them popped on the screen because it created a super telephoto zoom showing a quarterback's forehead-to-chin face so close you could see every crease and bead of sweat - from ~100 yds away(!) - all with the beautiful shallow depth of field that is, in any other live broadcast zoom lens, simply impossible. You either get the insane zoom or you get the depth-of-field but not both at once, at the same f-stop. Magic indeed. I have no idea what new, never-seen-before tricks await us in ~10 days, maybe some new Skycam motion control wizardry, or an impossibly small wireless camera giving us a new viewpoint or some new GPU-rendered live CGI incorporating real-time position data from the wireless trackers now in the shoulder pads of all 22 players - but I'm excited to find out!

It feels like what we’re shown on tv is a very narrow slice of what’s going on. We see the ball moving down the field but have no idea what the coach or quarterback is doing. Somehow it’s still an incredible watch though.