Sport, Information, and the Attention Economy

Professional sport in North American remains a valuable form of content for media providers. However, the emergence of new media brings challenges to the industry; to further evolve and develop it must acknowledge and abide by two fundamental premises: (1) the more openly and widely sport is distributed as content, the higher its value will be; and (2) the more liberally sport, as content, is allowed to flow, the more difficult it will be to control by its producers (the sports leagues); however, ultimately the greater its value will be to them. These are discussed in terms of a shift from an information economy to an attention economy perspective, which reveals the need for the industry to integrate both multisided market and platform ecosystem perspectives.