Another perspective

Subject: Another perspective.

Today the Bundesliga, the German football league starts to play soccer again after a two to three month break. The games will be played behind closed doors in empty stadiums with the fans told to stay away. Our own football league has been debating and wringing its hands about the loss of revenue, claiming enormous losses through wage bills and ground maintenance. It's not only football but all sporting events are effected although the Formula One cars seem set to race to an empty on-field audience at Silverstone.
Theatres and out door Pop Concerts are also left stranded for the foreseeable future  it being impossible to visualise how social distancing can work in a Theatre or a Cinema, still less in a jostling crowd in front of a live stage act.
It seems to me that the great spill over audience and revenue stream generated by television could bridge the gap temporally. The shows on stage could be televised on a pay as you watch basis much like they do to swell the audience for boxing.

People wishing to go to the theatre or watch a football match could do so on the television and whilst I admit the atmosphere is lacking of fans baying their team on, at least the show in its modified form could bring in some funds to pay the wages.
The argument that you need to be part of the crowd or at least hear the crowd as atmosphere to the match, for me can be a distraction. I'v often turned off the sound watching a rugby international or a football match because I couldn't stand the biased commentary. I always avoided listening to Brendon Foster for instance, his commentary seemed to have been written beforehand and based on the form he expected from the runners. You would watch on the screen a less fancied runner break away and start to distance themselves from the pack of favourites but Foster seem oblivious of what was unfurling before him and only much later woke up, threw away his prepared script and started to commentate on what was actually happening on the day.
Football, rugby, athletics can all be played without the fans, the game is on the pitch, not the terraces and at least if televised in this way the clubs survive and we have an viable alternative to Netflix.
Of course the revenue from the 'ground attendance' is lost but the millions earned through advertising revenue earned from the captive audience will flow once again to the football league. Other venues such as Pop Concerts and even the Theatre could come to an arrangement with subscription television companies paying a fee in line with the advertising revenue. Perhaps a system where the broadcasters subsidised these entertainment outlets as a way to assist the subsistence of this source of creative talent, namely the actors and the artists who bring their talent onto the screen to create an audience. It's the audience the advertisers are after and a bit of forward thinking might make them understand that if part of the creative entertainment industry is allowed to perish the effect will be seen later and much much wider.