The big screen is competing with the game it is showing

In-bowl entertainment was designed to fill dead time and has started filling time that was never dead.

Something changed when the scoreboard learned to talk.

For decades the screen in a stadium did two jobs: it told you the score, and between periods it showed an advertisement. Now it runs a continuous production. Kiss cams, noise meters, a sponsored dance segment, a prompt telling twenty thousand people when to make noise, and highlights of a play that happened forty seconds ago while a different play is happening on the field.

Some of this is defensible and I will say so plainly. There is genuine dead time in most sports, and a stadium that leaves an eight-minute innings break in silence is wasting the goodwill of people who paid to be there. Filling it is a service.

The problem is scope creep. The engagement department is measured on engagement, so it produces more content, and the only place to put more content is time that was previously occupied by the match. So the noise meter appears during live play. The sponsored replay overlaps a restart. The crowd is instructed to chant during a passage where they were already chanting, which is the specific failure that infuriates the people who actually generate the atmosphere, because a chant that starts on the terrace is a different object from a chant issued by a public address system.

There is a measurable side to this. Look at where a crowd's eyes go when the screen plays a replay. A meaningful share of the building misses the next thirty seconds of live action, and in a low-scoring sport, thirty seconds can be the whole match. Broadcasters solved this problem decades ago by never cutting to replay while the ball is live. In-stadium production has no equivalent discipline because there is no equivalent tradition.

My position, which a marketing director would call naive: the screen should go dark during play. Score, clock, nothing else. Everything the engagement team wants to do can be done in the breaks, and it will land harder in a break than it does competing with the thing people came for.

The best atmosphere I have experienced in the last five years happened when a screen failed at half time and stayed off. Nobody organised the singing. It was louder anyway.