By: DJ DeSpain

On January 13^th, ESPN announced that it would televise 14 NASCAR races during the upcoming season. ABC would only televise 3 races as opposed to the 11 shown on the network during the 2009 season. This means that ESPN will get to televise 9 of the 10 Chase races.

ESPN and ABC are both owned by the parent company of Walt Disney Corporation. ESPN executive vice president John Skipper attributes the move to higher ratings during the ESPN broadcasts compared to the ABC broadcasts.

Fox Network is the only other non-cable network to televise NASCAR races, the first 13 this coming season. Combined with ABC, network broadcasting drops from 66% to 44% of the total races. After the announcement, social media chatter began regarding whether or not this move would be a blow to NASCAR in terms of television viewership. The irony here is that the people creating the chatter are not part of the demographic that would be affected by the change.

It is not a real stretch to say that if you are reading this article or participating in online social media groups discussing the issue, you are probably paying for cable or satellite TV.

As of June 12^th last year, television stations across the country began transmitting in a digital format. If a television was not equipped with a digital tuner and relied on antennas to receive a broadcast signal, then a digital converter box was required to view over-the-air transmissions. But how many television viewers did that affect overall?

Prior to the digital transition, the FCC released a study in 2005 (study link) to aid Congress on who would be affected by the changeover from analog to digital transmission. According to the study, less than 15% of all households did not have some form of paid television – be it through cable, satellite, or internet downloads. Within that 15%, it was determined that approximately 9% of all households had a lack of interest in television and the remaining 6% was due to either low-income reasons or other factors.

The Nielsen Company estimated for the 2008 season that 115 million households had televisions. So if the FCC study still holds, and you disregard the 9% who don’t care about TV, then approximately 7 million rely on over-the-air broadcasts of local stations that carry network programming.

It was not all that long ago NASCAR races got enough attention to warrant television coverage. NASCAR did generate enough interest to the point that the broadcast rights are divided among multiple distributors instead of just one. However, the interest may be shrinking, and soon it might come to pass that the broadcast rights reduce to fewer outlets, if not awarded to a single provider.

Some of those 7 million households might have NASCAR fans, but NASCAR has to realistically focus on how much of the other 108 million potential households they can attract. Remember, this is households, not total number of viewers.

Consider that for whatever reasons those 7 million homes do not pay for television, they might have bigger priorities than watching NASCAR races.

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