Alternative telecasts are the next big thing for sports viewing

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest TV moments of the year. If fans can choose from multiple productions, will it get even bigger?

CBS Sports certainly hopes so. When the biggest advertising (and, OK, football) event of the year airs on CBS in February, viewers looking for something a little different will be in luck with an alternative broadcast of the game on Nickelodeon airing at the same time as the network broadcast on CBS. The goal, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus told reporters last month, is to create “a slime-filled festival that will bring a new and younger and even more diverse audience to the NFL.”

Running an alt cast or alt stream isn’t exactly a new idea in the sports world—since 2021, ESPN has aired Manningcast, an alternate broadcast of Monday Night Football with famous football brothers Peyton and Eli Manning serving as commentators, and CBS Sports has produced alt casts of several NFL games on Nickelodeon in the past.

But the move marks the first alternative telecast in Super Bowl history and one of the biggest examples yet of the growing trend—a trend that could end up paying off both for the sports leagues looking for fans and the advertisers looking to court them.

“More content is always a good thing,” Jeff Gagne, SVP of Havas Media, told Marketing Brew. “You’re adding new perspectives and booths and new guests and people that will appeal to a wider audience, which ultimately, is what every sports league wants.”

Two-ne in

While alt casts generally attract smaller audiences than the main event, the numbers can be considerable. The Nickelodeon alt cast of a 2021 NFC wild-card game, for example, accounted for a little more than 2 million viewers of the total 30 million-viewer audience.

For CBS, the Nickelodeon alt cast presents an opportunity to win over new viewers who might not otherwise be watching. As McManus explained it: “If you create NFL programming that is really appealing to the younger audience, I think that over time that can have a positive effect.”

That positive effect could extend to advertisers, Gagne told us. So far, the plan is that advertisers who bought ad inventory in the Super Bowl get access to both the CBS feed and the Nickelodeon feed, with options to run different creative on Nickelodeon if they choose, John Bogusz, EVP of CBS Sports sales at Paramount Advertising, said last month. (That doesn’t extend to all advertisers, like beer and gambling brands, who will be replaced with other ads or game programming.)

CBS Sports’s view, according to executives, is that the alt cast will help bolster the broadcast’s overall audience, rather than fragment it. “Nickelodeon in many ways is additive and an incremental audience as opposed to an audience that’s being taken away from CBS,” McManus said last month.

One step forward, two steps back

But some marketers aren’t convinced. “You’re fragmenting an audience on what really was the draw of the Super Bowl in the first place,” a media buyer who requested anonymity in order to speak freely about CBS Sports’s plans told us. “So I don’t love it.”

With different viewing environments, different pieces of creative may be the best option, presenting a potentially costly additional factor for brands whose buys ended up being part of the alt cast, the buyer said.

“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Let’s take what we deemed to be our Super Bowl creative and let’s move it over to another environment,’” the buyer said.

Like it or not, though, alt casts are on the rise—particularly kid-centric ones. ESPN and the NFL recently announced Toy Story Funday Football, a fully animated, real-time version of the Atlanta Falcons-Jacksonville Jaguars matchup taking place in London on October 1 that will stream on Disney+ and ESPN+.

With that said, don’t expect every sports broadcast to have alternative telecasts—at least not just yet.

“You’re not going to see every week an alternate broadcast, because our affiliate model and our traditional pay TV bundle is still really where we make our bones,” McManus said.