I’m 5 hours ahead of the Eastern Standard Time. Which can be very annoying. Especially when there’s a good game out West going on. But according to SLAMonline, Adam Silver might be considering to have games at 10AM to cater for the growing audience in China.
“I think the biggest challenge (to growing the game internationally) is the time zone differences. I mean, for example, in China, roughly 12 hours different from the East Coast. So prime time games are on early in the morning, so you have to figure out whether we need to create new products, condensed games that are shown later, whether it becomes a business of highlights, whether it’s equivalent of tweets and other forms of social media.
“I think that’s sort of — part of the biggest challenge. I mean, ultimately, whether we should consider time-shifting some of our games. Once the audience becomes big enough, maybe it’s not so crazy to ask a team once every two months to play a Saturday morning game….
“Yes, maybe when the audience gets big enough China and you’re reaching 100 million people in China to say so maybe once in a while a team will play at 10:00 on Saturday morning.”
I tell you this. If I could watch games at 3PM. I’d be jumping for joy. The NBA would have to battle with the Premier League (Football, or soccer). And China are a great, untapped sports audience that gravitate to basketball.
