From Media Rights and Content to Mobile Data and Infrastructures: The Impact of Mobile Technologies on Global Media Sports Markets

• In Event: Sports Communication Scholarship on the Move: Building a New Research Agenda on Mobile Media and Technologies

Abstract

This contribution highlights a pressing need to re-evaluate what is captured by the term “media” in media sports. The continuing legacies of the mass media paradigm in the presentation and conduct of sports need to be acknowledged, but so must the fact that media are now constituted by a more open-ended and dispersed series of mobile devices, interfaces, platforms, data, networks and practices. For instance, high-profile sporting events are now key sites for the development and promotion of new mobile technologies and telecommunications services, including advanced cellular networks labelled as “5G” (e.g. the 2018 winter Olympics and Paralympics in South Korea and the 2020 summer Olympics and Paralympics in Japan). Understood as media, mobile technologies are therefore doubly-commodified at the familiar level of content, advertising and audiences and the less familiar level of competing devices, telecommunications networks, data repositories and mobile user practices.

Author

• Brett Hutchins, Monash University