Badminton’s biggest Asiad detractor - Poor broadcast, no streams, too many ads

India’s low broadcasting standards

In India, the broadcasters maintained their standards. Ads to annoy, ads to infuriate, ads when switching streams and streams with sports that didn’t look like badminton but were labelled so. So the benchmark remained consistent (Read: low), and then in the first week of badminton, some matches simply were on Court 3 — so, no stream altogether.

Technology and OTT platforms and streaming abilities ought to have made watching sport simpler. But that fragmented viewership is in a mess, and unbeknownst to the federation, athletes and broadcasters (some wannabes), sport has lost its entertainment value, and become a stressful Pokémon search of streams and VPNs and snuck in videos. In other words, stressful. If money is actually made by somebody by airing sport, they haven’t exactly grinned a Mona Lisa smile to the bank, let alone laugh their way to it.

The saving grace – though there’s immense potential in the next 4 days – the badminton medal wasn’t entirely missed like the Table Tennis mixed doubles one. Tiny mercies.

But the more every sport has tried to rustle up excitement by trying too hard and making far too many unnecessary changes, the more painful watching sport gets.

The Asian Games is lucky to have the best countries playing badminton, take it incredibly seriously, be amazingly dialled in, and offer drama and all that’s glorious about sport, on a platter. Badminton did well to call in Oma Gill Clark. There’s familiarity – even to her biases, and she’s generally excellent in pronouncing player names accurately, which cannot be said of many other commentators. But the sport that should be looking at top-notch broadcast innovations, just continues to be taken for granted across a very high populous region of its popularity.

India and China ofcourse. But add Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand to it. And hosts Japan who are treating Akane Yamaguchi like an absolute darling of Nippon, and who had one of their main TV stations hype up the sport even as other things are in shambles, and the significance of Badminton on TV cannot be stressed enough. Clips showing Taufik Hidayat pumping his fists as Ubaidillah and Alwi Farhan guided Indonesia into the next epoch after Jojo Christie and Anthony Ginting, have re-lit a fire in Indonesia.

The Delhi World Championships were a massive success in-stadia. But the host broadcaster took their own saccharine time to realise they were in possession of a very popular sports property’s airing rights. Downplaying it was an infinitely foolish idea, but the Asiad, despite its glitches in going out to audiences around Asia, did place badminton on a pedestal.

The 15-point format will ensure more matches get beamed out. But Japan had interesting revelations. The two biggest TV numbers in Week 1 within Japan went to cricket and kabaddi. Though the sports production was like any other game. But badminton and these two sports reinvigorated the idea of viewing sports in groups in front of TV screens.

Mobile screens make for terrible viewing / squinting into sport. And complaints of stream-hunting went from Korea to India in a Mexican wave of complaints. The numbers in Asia are ginormous. And despite its best attempts to self-sabotage, Asia is smitten by badminton. Stars are growing organically, and fan bases boast impressive numbers. If only, a TV brain could piece it all together.

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