ABSTRACT
Sports have been integral to United States television (TV) from the medium’s introduction to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York where demonstrations featured live telecasts of college baseball and professional football—to contemporary mobile apps such as ESPN plus, which provide streaming sports “TV everywhere.” The present television landscape challenges people to continue to recognize those audiences and practices that appear resistant to niche TV, economically, technologically, and in racial, generational, and geographic terms. Everyday life is now infused so thoroughly with sports media that even when one is not a sports fan, it has become imperative to understand this ecosystem. Henry Jenkins has opened up a critical conversation regarding such presumptions and absences, reflecting on ways in which fan and audience studies developed within television studies to share “blind spots” that “reflect the field’s starting points.”.
