The Chinese Super League and the NBA Are Turning Into Short Video. Where Will Toutiao and Weibo Take Sports?

Everything is fragmented now. Short video was always going to change sports, sooner or later.

There is one more way to watch sports. Whether that is good news for the sports we know is another matter.

On the evening of March 5, Jiangsu Suning played Shanghai Shenhua in the first round of the Chinese Super League. Soon after, a video titled "Tevez Sparks the Counterattack, Moreno Scores a Brace" showed up on Toutiao. The 34-second clip came from a Toutiao account called CSL 24 Hours, opened by Ti'ao Power, the company that holds the league's broadcast rights.

"What we want to do is use the news feed, in the form of real-time short video, to give users a fragmented, interest-based, alternative kind of personalized sports broadcast," Toutiao said in a written reply to QDaily, describing how it works with Ti'ao Power on carrying the Chinese Super League.

Weibo thinks along much the same lines. The week after the Chinese Super League kicked off, Weibo announced a deal with the NBA: real-time short videos of NBA games would appear on Weibo too. According to Zhang Zhe, Weibo's sports director, the clips run under about a minute and are also pushed out to other basketball accounts on Weibo.

Short video is one of the most fashionable things going right now, and the newest product of a society that keeps breaking into smaller pieces. There are plenty of reasons for it: a faster pace of life, the arrival of phones and other mobile devices, the growth of network bandwidth. All of them have split up people's time and attention, and broken what used to be whole into fragments.

Fragmentation has seeped into every corner of the culture and entertainment business. You may never have watched a full episode of the variety show Singer (《歌手》), but you have probably seen a clip of Sandy Lam or Dimash performing. A two-hour film may bore you, while a few minutes of Gu Amo explaining one gets you going. Then there are the various paid-content services, which boil a few hundred pages of a book down to a few minutes of audio and sell it.

Now the trend has finally reached sports.

Real-time short video looks like an entirely new way to broadcast a game. It sits between the live feed and the second-hand clips that circulate afterwards. On one hand it is live: even if it cannot be perfectly synchronized, the lag is small. But it is still short video. It does not show the audience a full, ordinary game; it moves in bursts of a few dozen seconds.

Each company has its own reasons for turning sports into short video. Toutiao was founded in March 2012. It started as a news aggregator, and after four years or so it has become a big company valued at 60 billion yuan.

According to figures founder Zhang Yiming gave at the 2016 World Internet Conference last November, Toutiao then had 600 million activated users and 140 million active users, each spending 76 minutes a day in the app. "If one person tried to read everything on Toutiao today, it would take 150 days."

A user base that size brings in a great deal of advertising money. According to the magazine Chuangyejia, Toutiao had already beaten its full-year revenue target of 6 billion yuan by October 2016, and actual revenue by the end of the year may have reached 10 billion yuan. That is enough to make it one of the highest-earning advertising companies in China.

Weibo published its 2016 annual results not long ago. Daily active users came to nearly 140 million, and revenue for the year rose 37% to $655 million, beating Wall Street's earlier expectations.

Both companies are growing fast, and the next problem in front of them is how to keep growing at that rate. For Toutiao and Weibo alike, higher ad revenue means getting more users to look at more content and stay longer. The traditional text-and-picture format seems to have hit its ceiling, so both need new formats.

That is how short video got picked. A month before, according to TMTPost, Toutiao bought Yuncheng Sunshine Culture Media Co., Ltd., and with it an online audiovisual license. Earlier, Toutiao had also bought the American short-video company Flipagram, which lets users set photos and short videos to music and share them.

Weibo's thinking runs along the same lines. A month before, on the earnings call that followed Weibo's 2016 annual results, CEO Wang Gaofei said: "In terms of content, short video is currently our number-one goal."

Wang later said Weibo's short-video business is still in its investment phase and needs at least three to four years of room to run. But chairman Charles Chao said: "I believe more and more advertisers will become interested in video advertising going forward, because our video ads are already drawing huge attention in the market."

Chao is right that for any company in the business, video looks like the best way to win more users and the higher ad revenue that comes with them. In mid-2016, Ericsson published a report predicting that by 2021 video will account for 70% of global mobile traffic, and that teenagers will spend 85% or more of their phone time watching it.

Of all video formats, short video is growing fastest, which follows from the fact that fragmentation is now an almost universally accepted feature of modern life. "It is getting harder and harder for us to get users to settle down and watch content for an hour or two," Wang Gaofei told QDaily.

According to figures from Toutiao, average daily short-video views on the platform grew 605% in 2016, with daily plays topping 1.3 billion. On Weibo, short-video views peaked at 2.3 billion, average viewing time ran to 15.2 minutes per person, and 320,000 short videos went up every day. The demand is plainly there.

On the content side, sports is the new target. Not only because sports has policy support behind it, but because it reaches more people than almost anything else. The latest Statistical Report on China's Internet Development (《中国互联网络发展状况统计报告》) from the China Internet Network Information Center puts the number of live-streaming users at 325 million, or 45.8% of everyone online. Of those, 20.1% watch sports live streams — the highest share of any live-streaming category.

So sports short video looks like it has room to grow. A survey by the American sports video company Whistle Sports found that among people aged 25 to 34, 58% go first to a TV channel like ESPN for full sports coverage and game broadcasts, while among 13-to-24-year-olds, 64% go first to YouTube when they want sports — and YouTube is a paradise for short video.

Toutiao and Weibo are both scrambling for the sports short-video market. On simple supply and demand, that makes sense. They are doing what television did in its own boom years: setting their sights on sports. And if they cannot move a whole game onto their platforms, they will break it into pieces.

This has happened before. When basketball was invented, a game was split into two halves, like soccer. Even today, in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) play, a basketball game is still two 20-minute halves.

An NBA game is split into four 12-minute quarters, with two-minute breaks between the first and second and between the third and fourth, and a 15-minute halftime for the players. Going from two halves to four quarters was a change the NBA made to fit television: it needed more breaks so it could run more commercials.

The habit later spread to the International Basketball Federation (FIBA). To make its own games more watchable, and to sell them to television more easily, FIBA copied the NBA from 2000 on, replacing two halves with four 10-minute quarters.

As the inventor of the four-quarter game, the NBA was warmly received by the networks, and on television's reach it grew from an American domestic league into the most successful sports league in the world.

Even the NCAA, which has the longer history inside the United States, comes nowhere close. Its annual revenue is $900 million, less than a fifth of the NBA's, and that $900 million covers baseball, football, basketball and several other sports besides. Bending the rules of the game to the needs of television clearly made the NBA a commercial success story.

The example is a classic, because it shows how far a medium like television can go in shaping and reshaping the world. "Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication — from painting to hieroglyphs, from the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility." That is Neil Postman's summary in Amusing Ourselves to Death (《娱乐至死》).

What changes is plainly not only the shape of the game. How people consume sports has always been disturbed by whatever medium carries it. In the late 19th century, sport had only just become a way of life. Britain's middle class was starting to appear, and with spare time and spare money it slowly got into the habit of watching soccer on weekends. Out of that came the rules, the professional system, the clubs and an entire industry.

In the 1920s, the sportswriter appeared as a profession. Reporters carried the state of play out to the public through their own copy. In A People's History of Sports in the United States (《人民的历史：美国体育》), Dave Zirin argues that "writers elevated athletes to legendary status through their own writing ... further separating those who play the game from those who watch it into two distinct groups."

Television made the split sharper still. A fan may not have missed a single game, and yet the last time he played on a field himself may date back to his school days.

That may be the biggest change the media have made to sports and to how we consume it. Professional sports turned the people watching into consumers of sport rather than players of it. And that, in the end, is why over the past several decades the biggest winners have always been the television companies, not the sporting bodies.

So once short video becomes one of the ways the NBA travels, what will it do to the NBA itself? Qian Jun, chief operating officer of NBA China, did not answer that directly when QDaily asked him: "We're a traditional content provider ... how to tell stories to fans is something we still have to learn." Which seems to hint that if short video delivers the reach they expect, the NBA is willing to change.

Some changes have already started. To win more attention, the NBA is learning to make itself more broadly entertaining. At the signing event for its Weibo deal, it brought in Chen Xiao, the actor from the new version of The Return of the Condor Heroes (《神雕侠侣》), as Weibo's basketball ambassador.

"We have a particular interest in star users like Chen Xiao," said Qian Jun, who clearly approves of the approach. "He was already a fan, and now there's a chance to reach 18 million followers — that's no small scale. And this group may include people who weren't our audience before, women among them. Quite a few of the people here today who came to crowd around Chen Xiao are women. They aren't necessarily the traditional fans who watch games, but this gives us a chance to reach further into that group."

It is not an isolated case. Think back to last year's Rio Olympics: which scenes do you still remember? Probably what the swimmer Fu Yuanhui said in a post-race interview: "I'm very satisfied with myself ... I've already used all my prehistoric powers." What stroke she was swimming, how long the race was, whether it was a heat, a repechage, a semifinal or the final — none of that mattered anymore.

Turning sports into general entertainment is exactly what short video does best. Fu Yuanhui became famous because that interview clip ripped through social networks in short-video form. Short video can also throw off other entertainment products as it spreads: stickers, remix videos, GIFs and the rest.

Seen that way, Fu Yuanhui's fame is itself a sign that sports is slowly turning into entertainment. Sport is only the trigger here; what people care about is what gets spun off it.

"Most of the videos that took off during last year's Rio Olympics weren't footage of the events themselves, but things with some relation to the events — more entertaining, better suited to young people, or things like Fu Yuanhui, or the marriage-proposal videos," said Wang Gaofei, who thinks this is a good thing. "But strictly speaking, what it brings rights holders is a big jump in audience reach, and I think that's good for both sides."

Qian Jun hopes the NBA can pull off the same trick. "What we get most from Weibo is inventiveness," he said. "It's more about how to fold in the entertainment side, and I think Weibo's work there is distinctive and well worth learning from."

So in the spread of sports short video, the sport itself is no longer the only point. The short videos the NBA posts on Weibo are not just game clips; they also include halftime shows, players mixing with fans and other material on the border between sport and entertainment.

As for the Chinese Super League clips Ti'ao Power posts on Toutiao and Weibo, there is for now no indication of what minute the match is at, no score, not even a note of which two teams are playing. You have to work that out by eye, from the shirts. Videos like these can show the most thrilling moments of a game, while the team and the league — which are just as much part of the sport — fade into the background.

What happens next? To a large extent that depends on how the leagues feel about it. Soccer, the most conservative of sports, led by a FIFA famous for old-fashioned stubbornness, seems to have spent years resisting new technology.

In 1997, FIFA voted down a proposal to let referees consult video replay during a match. In 2011 it passed a ban on coaches using electronic devices such as iPads and iPhones on the touchline, again because it did not want those devices bringing slow-motion replay onto the field.

Behind this, too, is a contest between FIFA and the broadcasters. Once referees may use video replay, they need time to call up the footage and study it closely — and that is exactly where commercials go. Only with that in mind does the remark by Sepp Blatter, then FIFA's general secretary, make sense: "Television should not be allowed to control football by controlling the referees."

FIFA's ability to hold television off for the past 30 years also owes something to João Havelange, elected FIFA president in 1974. Once in office he turned the World Cup into a commodity, and national football associations, tempted by the commercial spoils, became appendages of FIFA. That is how FIFA got its grip on the sport.

The grip has slackened under the corruption scandals of recent years. The men who stood for resisting television's interference — Blatter and Michel Platini among them — have both been banned from the game. Calls for reform have started to be heard.

Marco van Basten, once the Dutch striker, is now FIFA's director of technical development. Early this year he put forward a set of proposed changes to the rules of football. Besides scrapping offside and bringing in a new system of punishments, he proposed turning football from two halves into four quarters of 22.5 minutes. Whatever van Basten had in mind, the broadcasters will certainly cheer.

If even football is ready to give ground, the outlook for other sports is worse. The NBA, the old commercial pioneer, is getting ready to move. In breaking sports video into pieces, it may go further than you expect.

Two months ago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on a panel at CES: "There'll come a day when someone will want to watch only the last five minutes of a game, and they'll click, and they'll pay for those five minutes instead of the usual two hours. So I think we still have to make good content — and we also have to let it become whatever shape the audience wants."

Hear that? Five minutes is already on the table. Toutiao, Weibo and the rest of the short-video crowd, hands itching, will be delighted to see that day come, and will run up and give it a hard shove.

Cover image: Pexels