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Industries in the entertainment field are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon,
and thus it is no surprise that the casino industry initially reacted to Internet gaming in such a
fashion.
SIGHT is grounded in history, noting that the tension between land-based gaming and
Internet gaming is not the first time that private industries in the entertainment field have
wrestled with the challenges created by new technologies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s,
professional baseball — then in its heyday as the national pastime — was faced with the new
technology of radio, which was viewed as a threat to the game’s primary source of revenue:
ticket sales.
In their book, Baseball, authors Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns quote pioneer
broadcaster Red Barber:
When radio came along and began to broadcast some baseball games, some of the entrenched
conservative owners said, ‘Wait a minute. Why give away something that you’re trying to sell for
your living, to try and keep your enterprise afloat? And especially on days of threatening
weather when people would say, ‘Well, it looks like it may rain. I’ll just listen to the radio. I
won’t go.’ They did not realize at the time the beneficial effect of radio, that it would be making
families of fans. 7
A similar pattern emerged in the 1950s, and later in the 1970s and 1980s. Hollywood
film studios viewed television, and later electronic recording, as threats to their primary source
of revenue: ticket sales. Television quickly became a new market for the studios’ archives of
older films, and studios became the leading source of new programming for the new medium.
Additionally, television became the primary marketing vehicle to develop awareness of new
films. The same pattern emerged with tapes and DVDs: They became a new market, and a new
marketing opportunity.
It is no coincidence that baseball’s greatest years of attendance — when top teams
could draw 3 million or more fans a season — happened long after the advent of radio and
television. Those potential threats ultimately generated new interest, which laid the
groundwork that encouraged that live attendance. The same phenomenon happened in
Hollywood, in which the highest-grossing films emerged long after those perceived threats had
turned into marketing opportunities.
These examples demonstrate the continuum that online gaming will travel along, as it
moves from its rejection phase to full embrace. Note, however, that two major potholes along
this path have been identified and addressed. In 2012, Spectrum noted the two potential
stumbling blocks:
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Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, “Baseball,” Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1994, p. 236.
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