From television to YouTube: digitalised sport mega-events in the platform society

Abstract

Technological changes have dramatically transformed the ways in which contemporary sport mega-events are produced and consumed worldwide. As the production and consumption of these global spectacles have moved beyond the traditional television and radio broadcast, this article examines and reflects on the hyper-digitalisation of sport mega-events. More specifically, we explore how one emerging platform presents a window for examining questions of power and inequality; social integration and identity; social change and development, and finally, the experience of time and space related to sport mega-events in the present-day. By employing video-sharing platform YouTube as a paradigmatic case study of the Olympic Games’ digital shift, the paper contributes towards an enhanced understanding of mega-events, technologies and digital platforms. We argue that systematic efforts to understand the digital manifestations of mega-events in a ‘platform society’ remain extremely crucial when situated against the emerging but overlapping fields of digital sociology, digital leisure studies and digital football studies in which mega-events feature.