Ben Thompson on sports as the lynchpin of television as we know it.
…I would argue sports are the linchpin holding the entire post-war economic order together. Because sports are consumed live, with significantly higher advertising load and viewer retention, sports are increasingly the only viable place for mass-market consumer companies to reach customers at scale and fight off niche e-commerce companies slicing off their customer base. That in turn helps preserve retailers, themselves both big advertisers and big targets for internet-based companies, particularly Amazon, and so on down the line. This effect is magnified by sports role in preserving the cable bundle, which keeps more channels and thus more inventory viable (not to mention that some of TVs biggest advertisers entertainment companies also own the cable channels).