Long gone are the days when, if you missed a great play, you had to wait hours to catch it during News at 11 on your local station or hope ESPN shows it on SportsCenter.
Things got better when ESPN launched ESPN2, which was mainly focused on extreme sports but also offered more frequent news and sports-specific shows like NBA2Night.
Then, as cable became more popular, every news channel started releasing a sports show.
By 2000, the NBA started putting out top plays on NBA.com, and "pirates" like me were capping and posting clips on forums and self-hosted websites. These forums, like Mixmakers, were the prime place to go to get a copy of a dunk of the year candidate until the rise of YouTube.
Although the NBA was anti-YouTube for a bit and David Stern was having his suit and tie henchman try to shut down every account doing free promotion for the NBA, the public eventually won, and now YouTube is flooded with hours, make that years, of copyrighted footage.
Due to the rise in smartphone popularity, social media and other tools of the give-it-to-me-now generation, you can expect to see the best plays literally minutes after they happened, whether it's from an iPhone video or a rip from NBA.com that was posted on YouTube, which was embedded on a blog, then shared on our Facebook page.
The emergence of apps and sites that let everyone create animated GIFs, memes, and digitally enhanced pics has also made these instant finds more interesting.
Let's look at the murder of Brandon Knight by DeAndre Jordan last night. Within 30 minutes of the crime, people were uploading the clip, shot with their phones, to YouTube and then sharing it across their social networks. Thousands of tweets referenced the clip, driving demand to see the dunk. This hype led people to find stills, add funny sayings to them, or apply their favorite filter. Within an hour, the dunk-of-the-year candidate turned into viral gold, and since we are gold diggers, let me share the wealth.
REACTIONS ON TV
MORE MURDERS
HBD @DeAndre Jordan, one of the nastiest poster makers in NBA history!
◾ 2nd round pick
◾ All-NBA 1st Team
◾ 2 x All-NBA 3rd Team
◾ 2 x All-Defense 1st Team
◾ 2 x Rebounding Leader
◾ Too many murders to count pic.twitter.com/ldN0ywGKqy— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) July 21, 2020
