I'd be interested in seeing a study about how having many timezones in a region affects sleep. For example in the US there are activities that are geared towards the west coast that keeps the east coast up later. Some that come to mind are sports. Between NFL games, UFC events and esports matches I have stayed up many nights for two or three hours later than someone on the west coast would have to for the same purposes.
Europe is also interesting, but the other way around.
Most of mainland Europe is on the Central European Timezone (UTC+1), despite the difference in solar time between western Spain and eastern Poland being about 2 hours. Solar time wise western spain should be at ~UTC-0:40, and eastern poland at ~UTC+1:30
Why couldn't you just watch it the next day? I haven't watch "live TV" in years, get all my content from the internet, it actually feels weird that in 2017people still let events and TV programs dictate their schedules.
Watching a live event during it's original broadcast provides a shared experience with others who also watched at the time. If your friends or family are watching, they may discuss the event with you as it happens. The results will be available in multiple mediums after the event. It is often not as entertaining to watch a sporting event when you already know what happened.
For TV shows, some of the same things apply. If your friends and co-workers watch the show the night of, they may talk about it all day. In that case you either find out what happened, or spend the day avoiding contact with other people who watched it already.
Shared experience provides a lot of value for some people, so apparently it's worth the costs for them.
Edit to add: recording TV broadcasts requires some amount of technical ability and expense beyond that to receive a live broadcast. Sporting events often don't have a hard end time, which can confuse some recording software. Usually if a game takes extra time, the end is more exciting.
1. For unimportant regular season games, the reason is that there are new games the next day. The league goes on. It doesn’t make much sense to watch yesterday’s match.
2. For important postseason games, the experience is communal. I’m either watching with friends or virtually watching with them via group chat. And we’re commenting on literally every play as they happen. It’s a big deal if my live stream is seconds behind theirs.
3. Such postseason games are imbued with urgency, anticipation, and excitement. A serious fan derives a lot of pleasure from the immediacy this requires. It’s nothing like deciding when to watch an episode of Bojack Horseman. When the St. Louis Cardinals are in the postseason, for example, the entire city reflects it. It’s a moment in time, a cultural event. The whole town is talking about it. You can’t decide you’d rather have that experience next month when your schedule is less busy. It’s not up to you.
It can only be experienced real-time.
On the original comment: none of this has anything to do with time zones. Even without time zones, there would be a “time” difference because of the geographical differences. A good “time” to watch on one coast is likely to be a bad one on the other, just because most human beings like to sleep when it’s dark where they are.
If you have the discipline not to peek at the scores...
My neighbour watches soccer from his home country at odd hours of the night, going to work a couple of hours later. Says he'd otherwise only watch a replay knowing his team had won and then it takes away the suspense.
His wife makes him sleep in the guest room!
I'm not sure of the details but there was something recently saying knowing the ending, I think it was focused on movies, actually leads to greater enjoyment (or possibly excitement). It was surprising to me, I go a long way to avoid spoilers -- I'd imagine the same would happen with sports matches.
I don't generally watch sport, nor follow a team, but when I do it's good sport whether I know the result or not.
Some people like to know there's 'twist' ending and the thrill is figuring out who did it. I avoided spoilers for Blade Runner 2049; Harrison Ford was in it and if you've seen the first movie that's all you need know!
I remember as a kid, you had to listen to the radio or watch TV at a certain specific time if you wanted to know what happened in the world. It's weird to think about it now, how radio and tv stations had so much power over people schedules and lives.
