TV

Live sports winning kick for TV ratings

If it ain’t live — it’s dead.

The power of live sports TV programming — on display as the US soccer team played its way into the second round of the World Cup on Thursday — is nearly the only force available to drive large ratings, according to one influential media analyst.

While that may not be news to some, it was never more clear to all this week after some 25 million Americans watched the USA-Portugal match, making it the country’s most watched soccer game ever.

(Ratings for Thursday’s US-Germany match, expected to top 25 million, won’t be available until Friday afternoon.)

Compare America’s still- nascent soccer audience to the relatively puny 5.8 million who watched TNT’s “Rizzoli & Isles” — the week’s top non-soccer cable show — and the drawing power of sports is undeniable.

“There are millions upon millions glued to the television watching the World Cup,” the analyst, BTIG’s Richard Greenfield, said, “and the reality is there’s very little else out there that can drive viewing.”

There’s so little else, in fact, Greenfield has just put his money shot where his eyeballs have been: He reduced his ratings on cable-channel conglomerates Viacom and Discovery Communications principally because those media giants lack “must-watch-now content.”

“Less and less content needs to be watched live, outside of sports/news/special events,” Greenfield wrote in his downgrade report, “and [non-live] content creators are competing against vast libraries of great [non-live] content that most consumers have never seen, all available at the click of a button without any or limited advertising.”

For those media properties with live programming — like World Cup media partners ESPN and Univision — the ad dollars are as robust as the ratings.

Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s sales and marketing boss, and Keith Turner, who does the same at Univision, both said they withheld up to 20 percent of their World Cup ad inventory and couldn’t be happier with the premiums being commanded by their available time.

Much of their ratings gain has to do with the “increasing popularity of soccer,” said Turner — but there’s also upside due to the proliferation of platforms media companies have to show the live content.

“Nobody is saying, ‘Hey, you got any avails?’ Instead it’s a multi-screen, multi-access play,” Erhardt explained.