Bios James Meese is a lecturer in Communications at the University of Technology

Abstract Media sport has a long history as a significant site of media innovation and existing work in media and cultural studies has explored how media sport, technological innovation and regulatory frameworks interact. However, this work tends to often focus on how major actors such as broadcasting organisations, sporting bodies and telecommunications companies mediate sport. As a complementary strategy to this 'top-down' analysis, we approach media sport through the lens of practice, which allows us to understand everyday forms of engagement with and consumption of media sport in a clearer fashion. The paper analyses existing policy discourses and social commentaries centred on the targeted 'high-quality' or 'high-tech technological innovation', and argues that users of sports media are also motivated by series of cultural rewards and varied trade-offs that do not map neatly onto industrial categories of quality or media consumption trends.