The Game to Show the Games

The Mountain West Conference comes crawling back to ESPN

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Let me tell you a story of hubris, tribalism, monopoly, and karma.

In 2005, fed up with constantly getting shifted to timeslots that didn’t work for the time zones its teams played in, the Mountain West Conference decided to completely sever ties with ESPN. They signed a long-term contract with CBS to put its games on what was then CBS College Sports, and also agreed with Comcast to start the very first conference-specific network, the mtn., and put games on Versus.

And lo, it was good. Utah, BYU, and TCU were as good as any team from a BCS conference, and while games between them were never on Versus (the network more people got of any of them) in any years when they were the most important, their presence was quite fruitful for Versus, CBS CS, and the mtn. CBS CS and the mtn. got keystone programming, and Versus got some of its biggest ratings outside NHL games. And lo, when realignment hit college football in 2010, the Mountain West looked to solidify its place as a conference on par with any major conference, adding the other team as good as any from a BCS conference, Boise State, and looked to be one of the beneficiaries of the Pac-10’s proposed gutting of the Big 12, picking off incredibly valuable teams – Kansas, Kansas State – from the carcass.

But alas, that is when things turned for the Mountain West. The proposed Pac-16 deal fell through, but Colorado had already jumped ship. The conference was desiring of putting the conference’s size at a stable level, so they added Utah. And suddenly the Mountain West’s fortunes spiraled into a pit of despair. With its Holy War partner gone, BYU decided to become an independent. With Utah and BYU gone, TCU smelled greener pastures and left for the Big East, and later the Big 12. The Mountain West added Fresno State and Nevada, and later Hawaii for football, to compensate for these defections, but Boise was left with a conference not too different from the WAC they’d just left behind.

But that was just the beginning. For the realignment wheel was not done turning, as Boise State and San Diego State would leave for the paradoxically-named Big East. Suddenly the Mountain West was left with a football conference actually worse than what the WAC had, with Air Force and Nevada probably the class of the conference, and in fact were having trouble fielding enough teams to even be a viable conference. They were not alone: the Big East had also poached SMU, Houston, and UCF from Conference USA, and would eventually poach their star school, Memphis. So the Mountain West and Conference USA started talks for some sort of alliance that eventually grew into a proposed merger of the two conferences.

The TV rights for such a conference would prove to be a challenge: the Mountain West with their contract with CBS and what was now NBC, and Conference USA with its own CBS Sports Network presence and a fairly-recently-signed contract with Fox. One of the bigger complications was the mtn., as Conference USA had no similar network; would the mtn. expand to include all of Conference USA, stick to Mountain West territory, or go away entirely? By and large, the network had not been very successful, with much of its thunder stolen by far more successful networks launched by BCS conferences stealing the idea. The mtn. itself had been plagued by carriage disputes, resented by conference schools who saw all their games put there, and lost its best programming with realignment. The Mountain West and Conference USA would eventually realize that a merger would prevent them from collecting exit fees from departing conference members and would lose credits from past NCAA tournaments and softened it back to an “alliance”, but not before the Mountain West had already decided to pull the plug on the mtn.

Now, fast forward to today: the Mountain West has announced that CBS has sublicenced some of their games to ESPN. Oh, there may be only four of them, all but one of which is on a Thursday or Friday with the remaining game likely to be the biggest of the year between Boise State and Nevada, but the move is unmistakable.

Fox Sports Takes Over Saturday Nights

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I’ve figured Saturday night, so abandoned by the broadcast networks, was an ideal sports night for some time. Way back in 2005, I believe it was, I wondered why a college football game between Virginia Tech and Miami (FL) with massive BCS implications was airing on ESPN. It made so much sense for ABC to air college football in primetime, and this was a perfect example of a game that would easily have aired there under the circumstances. In other words, I had the idea for “Saturday Night Football” before ESPN did. (If I’d only known how ESPN would treat ABC in subsequent years…)

When “Saturday Night Football” was announced, I wondered if other sports would colonize Saturday primetime, perhaps even to the point of it becoming as sports-saturated as weekend afternoons. It happened in bits and pieces here and there, but I have to admit I didn’t initially have much of a reaction to Fox revealing they would be giving virtually their entire Saturday slate to sports. I guess I just figured it was inevitable at some point.

The surprise is that it is Fox taking this step. Up until recently, Fox seemed to be the network that still cared about Saturday the most; while ABC and NBC aired movies and CBS aired reruns, burned-off shows, and “48 Hours”, Fox had a consistent, ratings-producing lineup of “COPS” and “America’s Most Wanted”. But “AMW” was all but cancelled, turned into a series of occasional specials, this past fall, and now Fox is cutting back on its “COPS” order to give the night over to the sports division, which will fill it up with baseball, NASCAR, UFC, NFL preseason games, and in the fall, regular-season college football for the first time in Fox’s history (and potentially one NFL divisional-round game come January).

I expect that by the end of the decade, all four major networks will have largely turned their Saturday nights over to sports. A key could be the upcoming Major League Baseball contract renegotiations. Fox has already greatly increased their inventory of primetime baseball games, to be branded “Baseball Night in America”; I expect baseball will, with whatever network they shack up with, make primetime the core of the main broadcast package (certainly only the holder of the baseball contract can reasonably expect to reliably fill Saturday nights with anything worth showing for much of the summer), possibly even to the point of inverting Saturdays. Right now most games not airing on Fox are in primetime, partly due to Fox’s exclusivity preventing Extra Innings from carrying any game in their window. I could see a situation develop where most games are played during the daytime on Saturdays with only those games picked to air on the network playing in primetime.

Options abound for the other three networks for optimizing their Saturday primetime, though some of them depend on picking up more contracts and renegotiating existing ones. ABC already airs some NBA playoff games in primetime; they could experiment with airing a few high-profile regular season games there as well. The SEC’s contract with CBS and ESPN restricts CBS’ ability to air more than one primetime game (it took a lot of hoop-jumping to get LSU-Alabama aired there this year), but that contract may have been reopened as a result of realignment, and CBS could air some college basketball games in primetime on a regular basis. NBC is probably the least well-equipped of the networks to fill out Saturday nights due to their lack of suitable contracts, but they could air more Stanley Cup Playoff games in primetime on their main network on Saturdays if Canada’s CBC (for which Saturday has always been “Hockey Night in Canada”) would rather have them there, and have Notre Dame put more and better games in primetime.

One interesting side effect could be a potential bright spot for people like me who bemoan the march of sports events off broadcast. If broadcast networks decide they would like to get the higher ratings for sports events on Saturdays at all costs, they could nab sports events that might have aired on cable otherwise. Obviously there’s a limit to how low-profile you can go before it makes more sense to stick with what they were doing before, but you could see events that would otherwise have aired on ESPN show up on ABC, NBC Sports Network events airing on NBC, and so forth. Reports of the death of sports on broadcast appear to be greatly exaggerated.

Could the BCS Save the Bowl System – by Destroying It?

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USA Today recently revealed a document that basically lays out what the conference commissioners are looking at with regards to changes to the BCS. I’ll take a look at the playoff proposals contained therein at a later date, but for the moment I want to take a look at the other thing the document reveals: proposed changes to the bowls that wouldn’t be part of a playoff.

Although much has been made of the possibility of the BCS managing only the national championship game, if, as seems likely, the BCS commissioners go to some form of plus-one, the current five-bowl BCS would ultimately go in the opposite direction and be expanded to, in addition to the national championship game, five, six or even ten games, including the semi-finals. Rather than having bowls draft teams as happens now under the BCS, or having convoluted tie-in structures determine nearly random matchups as happens now for the non-BCS bowls, a committee would determine which teams would go to these bowls, with an aim of creating “evenly matched and attractive” games in geographically appropriate locations.

This gets to the heart of why the BCS, for so long adamant that they would never institute a playoff of any sort, is now almost certain to institute the plus-one. It’s not declining ratings for the BCS itself – that’s a predictable result of the BCS’ move to cable. It’s the increasing triviality of the bowls, where more than half the teams in FBS are going to a bunch of meaningless games no one cares about. This option where the BCS would create eight non-semifinal bowls smacks of the BCS taking over the entire bowl system by monopolizing most of the Top 25, unifying it under a single banner and creating more interest, while having the BCS committee take over the setting of bowl matchups could result in the best slate of games we’ve ever had, largely helping to justify the bowls’ continued existence and in part restoring what the lesser bowls looked like before the maze of conference tie-ins took hold. It could conceivably even be seen as setting the stage for a later expansion of the playoff to eight or sixteen teams.

It also occurs to me that by trying to make these bowls “evenly matched”, the most likely result is going to be similar to what the bowl system would look like if there were only two conferences on the top level of a promotion-relegation system. Maybe, in the long run, that dream isn’t so crazy after all.

The local sports television wars

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Part of the reason why Fox may be considering launching a national general sports network and competing more head-on with ESPN may be because they know all too well what ESPN could go through if they, or anyone else, succeed.

One of the more underreported stories of recent years has been the slippage of Fox’s hegemony over the regional sports network landscape. Fox locked down regional sports networks to cover just about every NBA, MLB, and NHL team in the country in the mid-90s, but in recent years competitors, especially Comcast SportsNet and cable providers in general, have slowly made inroads on their turf – to say nothing of teams increasingly starting their own networks. This is especially the case in big markets, while Fox’s hegemony largely still holds in smaller, mid-size markets, but we could see this change as competitors make more money and turn their attention to those smaller markets. Here’s a rundown of how the regional sports network market has changed in the last decade, at Fox’s expense:

  • New York: New York City’s FSN affiliate was always owned by Cablevision with no Fox involvement; in 2008, it was rebranded to MSG Plus. In addition to the well-known YES Network, in 2006 the Mets left MSG and teamed up with Comcast and Time Warner Cable to start their own regional sports network, SportsNet New York.
  • Los Angeles: Starting next season, Lakers games will be leaving Fox Sports West in favor of a new network started by Time Warner Cable. With the launch of Time Warner Cable’s sports network, the largest market in which Fox enjoys something resembling a monopoly will be Dallas. If you count the Longhorn Network, you have to go to Atlanta, and then if you count CSS, you have to leave the top ten entirely and end up in Detroit. The launch of the network has also raised the stakes considerably in the nation’s second-largest media market; Fox gave the Angels such a payday, including equity in FS West, that they could be said to have funded the team’s winning of the Albert Pujols sweepstakes and contributed to the Dodgers selling for $2 billion.
  • Chicago, Philadelphia: Comcast, by contrast, has a complete monopoly in these two markets. CSN Chicago is partially owned by the teams in that market; the Phillies used to own part of CSN Philadelphia but now only control its advertising.
  • Texas: ESPN started the Longhorn Network last year, and unsuccessfully tried to convince the NCAA to allow it to air high school sports on it.
  • Bay Area: Comcast SportsNet started a network in the region when it won rights to show Sacramento Kings games in 2004. In 2008, FSN Bay Area was rebranded as a Comcast SportsNet station, and the previous CSN station became essentially “CSN Bay Area 2”, changing branding from CSN West to CSN California. Fox still owns a quarter of CSN Bay Area, but Comcast owns 45%, with the remaining 30% owned by the Giants.
  • Boston/New England: Cablevision sold Boston’s FSN network to Comcast in 2007, resulting in it being rebranded as a Comcast SportsNet station. NESN has been owned by the Red Sox and Bruins for ages.
  • Washington DC: Fox has never had a presence in this market, with Comcast SportsNet ruling the roost. Thus, it was Comcast’s problem when the move of the Expos to Washington resulted in a new regional sports network, MASN, stealing both Washington’s and Baltimore’s baseball teams (who also co-own the network).
  • Atlanta and the South: The South is where Fox’s hegemony is strongest, purchasing two different networks from Turner and turning them into FS South and SportsSouth. CSS’s programming is substantially weaker, with its highest-profile programming probably being college sports.
  • Houston: In 2010 the Astros and Rockets announced they were joining with Comcast to launch a new CSN station this fall. The impending announcement of that network forced Fox to do something it had never done before: give a stake in the network to a team it covers, in this case the Rangers, a pattern that may soon become the norm for Fox. I do not know if Fox will maintain a presence in the Houston area (they do still hold the rights to Houston Dynamo games), but if not Fox will only even have a network in three of the top ten markets representing 31% of the population in the top ten, mostly LA. CSN, by contrast, will have a network in six of the top ten (representing 47%), not even counting SNY and CSS.
  • Seattle, Denver, Portland, Pittsburgh, Utah: In 2008 Fox sold FSN Northwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pittsburgh to Liberty Media, who re-branded them as “Root Sports” in 2011. Altitude Sports and Entertainment also maintains a presence in the Rocky Mountains, showing Nuggets and Avalanche games (with Root Sports keeping the Rockies and Jazz), and Comcast SportsNet started a Northwest branch in 2007 to show Portland Trailblazers games, which expanded into Seattle the following year when the Sonics were stolen, er, moved to Oklahoma City.
  • Cleveland: In 2006 the Cleveland Indians left FSN Ohio to start the SportsTime Ohio network.
  • San Diego: In a possible preview of the future for smaller markets, the Padres have left Cox-owned 4SD and started a new FSN network. But even where Fox is growing its regional sports networks, it’s not as lucrative as it used to be, with the Padres owning a full fifth of the network.
  • New Orleans: While to my knowledge the same RSNs as the rest of the South have a presence in Louisiana, Hornets games and preseason Saints games are aired on the Cox Sports Television network launched in 2002.

Add all this up and it suggests a fairly bleak future for Fox’s regional sports networks. Fox still rules the roost, but the Houston defection may signal a tipping point – because if Fox doesn’t maintain a Houston presence, less than half the population in the top 35 markets will live in a market with an FSN-branded RSN. By contrast, not counting SNY or CSS (but counting Seattle as a CSN market), Comcast SportsNet will move to over a third of the population in the top 35 markets – and SNY alone brings that total to 45%, almost as much as FSN. At that point, Comcast, not Fox, could conceivably get into the business of producing national programming for RSNs, and might not even have to resort to FSN stations in that many markets. Throw in just those markets where CSS’ competition is FS South, SportSouth, and their variants, and CSN goes over the top to 54%. Now you know why the unified FSN branding is no more.

At least in markets where Comcast is the dominant (or even a significant) cable provider, CSN has to be considered a full-fledged competitor to FSN for local sports rights – and that’s before the possibility of Time Warner Cable wanting to expand its sports-network brand, or teams starting their own networks. To this point, Fox has been in retreat in the biggest markets as CSN has taken over and teams have started their own networks. Fox’s move to start offering stakes in their networks may help stem the tide and keep its hegemony in smaller mid-sized markets, but may cost Fox too much money in the long run, especially if the market for local teams is starting to enter a bubble similar to that which has enveloped national sports rights. At best, Fox and Comcast are likely to compete on equal terms from here on out, with Fox’s only advantage being inertia and its lack of ties to cable distribution systems.

Despite the failure of its attempt to compete with ESPN, FSN has proven to be just as much of a cash cow for Fox. But they could be forgiven for wondering how long it will stay that way. Suddenly the idea of launching a general national sports network to compete with ESPN starts to look a lot more attractive.

Say hello to the Fox Sports Network?

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ESPN has been doing everything in its power to keep NBC from becoming a competitor for their sports hegemony, and they haven’t been above making enemy-of-my-enemy arrangements with Fox to do so. They tag-teamed with Fox last year to keep the rights to the Pac-12 out of NBC’s hands, and they recently signed a joint extention with the Big 12 with Fox as well.

That may prove to be a mistake, as Fox has done as well as anyone since NBC fired the opening shots in the sports TV wars, picking up rights to the UFC and World Cup without ESPN’s help and even stealing the latter from ESPN. All these sports contracts have been made primarily with an aim to improving the presence of sports on its FX cable network, hoping to follow the blueprint of TBS and TNT in using sports to attract eyeballs to their general purpose cable network. Beyond that, Fox has an established infrastructure of cable networks, eschewing a single all-sports network in favor of attracting eyeballs to their sports brand through a wide variety of special networks – their dominant collection of regional sports networks for local sports, Big Ten Network for college sports in the Midwest, Speed Channel for NASCAR fans, Fox Soccer for soccer fans, and Fuel for “action sports” and recently UFC fans.

Given this, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that Fox is considering launching its own all-sports network to compete with ESPN, which, yea back in the days of yore, Fox Sports Net was supposed to be. It’s worth wondering what Fox is thinking here, and how it affects their efforts to put more sports on FX – and color me skeptical that converting Fuel to be such a network is going to create something much bigger than Fox College Sports, let alone CBS Sports Network. But if Fox comes into this with a plan and puts enough emphasis on this all-sports network, and converts a network with a big enough reach like Speed to do it? They, not NBC, immediately become the best-positioned competitor to ESPN.

NBC’s biggest advantage over Fox was always the presence of an all-sports network. Take that away, and Fox has three things that NBC doesn’t but ESPN does: a sport-specific Spanish-language network, a national radio network that Fox has taken to start adding live sports to recently, and an international distribution arm. Fox can match NBC in other areas as well – most obviously its regional sports networks, but Fox can also match Telemundo as a Spanish-language broadcast network with the pending launch of its MundoFox network.

Now consider what Fox can put on such a network without adding a single new contract. From FX and Fuel it can show college sports from major conferences and UFC programming. From Speed it can show NASCAR truck series races, Formula 1 races, and the NASCAR All-Star Race. From Fox Soccer it can show marquee English Premier League games, the UEFA Champions League, and World Cup competition. If Fox was serious about this, I’d argue that right off the bat they can create a network that’s at least as much of a draw as the NBC Sports Network, and if they can add just one major-league contract, they can actually legitimately claim to challenge ESPN.

This is a potential game changer in the sports television wars, one that could ripple across all of this year’s big contract showdowns, especially the ones over Major League Baseball and NASCAR, which could affect whether or not Fox actually decides to go forward with this network, as well as Thursday Night Football if the NFL ever decides to put that back on the market. The fight for TV sports supremacy may officially be a three-way fight.

The Sports TV Wars: Looking to Canada and the America’s Cup

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Good for them, I guess? I’m happy the America’s Cup is back on television, but I don’t have much to say about it other than what I said in my CAA post. Well, that, and that I guess NBC isn’t entirely losing the battle for smaller events to ESPN.

There may be bigger news brewing north of the border, where there are three major media companies; one decided to opt out of the bidding for the Olympics, while the other two, CBC and Bell (which owns the broadcast network CTV and works with ESPN on TSN), have joined forces and repeatedly low-balled the IOC, rightfully not seeing the need to bid high with no competitors and no guarantee that NHL players will attend future Olympics. That could open the door for Yahoo to force Canadians to go to their site to see the Games. It’s still a middleman, but considering what I said not that long ago about sports entities potentially seeing the future on the Internet, it’s still a development to watch, especially considering the conviction of the blog mentioned therein that Yahoo may be the best positioned of anyone to take on ESPN.

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The war for TV sports supremacy, one year in

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About one year ago, the first shots were fired in the great push to dethrone ESPN from its perch as the undisputed king of the sports hill. NBC finalized its merger with Comcast, CBS removed the “College” from the CBS College Sports Network, and Fox decided it would be a good time to bring sports back to FX. While the past year has seen some high-profile contracts for them to fight over, from the Olympics to the World Cup, it’s nothing compared to the contracts coming up for bid this year, with MLB, NASCAR, the BCS, and the Big East all coming up for bid. Nonetheless, one year in, let’s take a look at how all the combatants are shaping up.

ESPN: The Worldwide Leader did a decent job defending its title, and seeing the threats on the horizon, making an enemy-of-my-enemy deal with Fox to keep NBC from picking up Pac-12 rights – though one wonders if it reconsidered that move when Fox stole the World Cup rights away from them. Other than Wimbledon, though, ESPN’s only real victories tended to be things no one cared about or things where they were the incumbent, usually with no one else caring. Probably the most notable victory other than the Pac-12 or Wimbledon involved keeping the Indy 500 on ABC rather than let the IndyCar series become an all-NBC affair. ESPN is still the king of the hill and still the ones to beat for any contract, but the fact that the biggest contract to come up for bid this year where ESPN was the incumbent other than Monday Night Football was the World Cup, which ESPN lost, could be foreboding. Grade: C.

NBC: Comcast’s efforts to dethrone ESPN from their perch is off to a rocky start, largely because of how strong Fox has come onto the scene. NBC did win the big fights over the NHL and Olympics, but they were the incumbents in both cases. They did win a slate of MLS games previously held by Fox Soccer Channel, but Fox probably feels that’s a fair trade-off for World Cup rights. They did become the beneficiary of ESPN’s decision to effectively leave the horse racing market, but they were boxed out by ESPN and Fox for Pac-12 rights and lost Wimbledon when ESPN could promise to show more matches live sooner than they could.

The Network Formerly Known as Versus did add a piece of NBC’s Olympic pie, but that will only attract viewers to the network for two weeks every two years, and they added no other games that will attract more viewers than the NHL already does. And the now-NBC Sports Network did add “NBC SportsTalk”, “NFL Turning Point”, and “Costas Tonight” to its repertoire, but the latter two shows aren’t getting any more viewers than Versus’ much-maligned “T.Ocho Show”, and “SportsTalk” is doing far worse than that. A combination of conference realignment, potential changes to the BCS, and the long-term nature of many recent contracts, means that the Big Ten in a few years will be NBC’s last best hope to add truly marquee college football to NBCSN’s slate for a long, long time, and the NFL’s decision to pull Thursday Night Football off the market hurts NBC more than anyone else, requiring them to get something on the scale of MLB or NASCAR to have any hope of challenging ESPN. Grade: C-.

Fox: NBC may have started this fight, but if anyone other than ESPN is winning it it’s definitely Fox. With three different college conferences, the UFC, and the shocker of the past year, the World Cup, Fox got right to work re-establishing sports on FX and making their networks as much of a destination for sports as anyone outside ESPN. Most notably, Fox’s family of networks is fast gaining ground on ESPN as a home for college sports. Fox doesn’t have an all-sports network like ESPN or NBCSN, but they’ve still made clear that this is going to be a three-way fight. Grade: B+.

CBS: Realizing that the CBS Sports Network is a looooong way from challenging for any serious sports rights, CBS stayed largely out of the fray, instead focusing on brands that will build an audience another way: through CBSSN’s non-game programming. To that end, adding Jim Rome to their stable was a shrewd move. The loudmouthed radio host will start a replacement for his old ESPN show “Jim Rome is Burning” on CBSSN in April, instantly bringing a sizable contingent of fans who only ever would have watched CBSSN for the occasional Mountain West or Atlantic-10 game. “ROME” should instantly become CBSSN’s most popular program, and for the moment, it certainly looks to be a faster route to relevance than picking up rights like Major League Lacrosse. Grade: C+.

Turner: Turner was making noise about adding more sports to truTV to build on their NCAA Tournament games, but their only real efforts towards that end seemed to involve the NHL. They were considered the other favorites for Thursday Night Football rights besides Comcast, and now face a very real chance of losing MLB games from TBS and NASCAR from TNT, where both packages are fairly forgotten. This year may be as critical for them as for anyone. Grade: D+.

The Future of Content, Part II: The End of Television (Or, Has ESPN – And Everyone Else in the Sports TV Wars – Already Lost the Future?)

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By 2050, television as we know it now may be a thing of the past.

Of course, we said the same thing about movies when TV itself came along, which is why I don’t want to make it a definite. But here’s the difference: everyone who brings you television is jumping headfirst into this future like lemmings off a cliff (aside from the negative connotations of that analogy). TV manufacturers now allow you to watch YouTube and other Internet videos, cable companies now heavily emphasize their “on-demand” offerings, and three of the four major television networks have teamed up to put virtually all their shows on the Hulu website. All of these have the effect of rendering superfluous the traditional network schedule. You don’t need to wait for a programmer to tell you when to watch an episode of your favorite show; you can watch it when (and where) you want.

Of course, if this renders the traditional network schedule obsolete, it shouldn’t take much to see that it renders the networks themselves obsolete as well. The networks exist because in order for a TV program to exist in the past, it needed to be broadcast at a certain time for people to see it, and spectrum – broadcast or satellite – was limited enough that networks were needed to clear time for those programs. Now, to someone who watches their favorite programs on Hulu or “on demand”, the association of a program with a network seems arbitrary at best. At some point, watching shows on the Internet could become mainstream (and profitable) enough that producers – possibly even including major studios, even those associated with networks – may increasingly forego distribution via the networks and set up their own Web sites for distribution of their shows, or otherwise distribute through YouTube or other such sites – a process already in its infancy. (And I’m still convinced HTML5 will eventually make sites like YouTube obsolete too.)

One aspect of television programming, however, will be resistant to this process. Most TV programs do not have a particular reason to be broadcast at a particular time, but live events are inherently restricted by when they happen. The process of moving to the Internet has begun here too, as streaming capabilities are popping up all over, but it is an order of magnitude more technically advanced and needs to be able to deal with a large number of people accessing the stream at once in order to catch on – we’re a long way away from the Super Bowl being able to move exclusively to streaming.

But once it does happen, the networks will be completely superfluous here too, as teams and leagues decide to cut out the middleman and produce their own streams of all their events. It’s an open question whether they’ll want to, as they’ll no longer get the extensive rights fees the networks pay them and may have to take on the cost of production themselves, but sports events are loss leaders for the broadcast networks, their sizable audience usually failing to pay for the cost of production, and their point is mostly to direct that audience to other programming. Once that other programming dries up, the networks won’t be as interested in sports anymore. As for cable networks, much of the profit that comes from airing sports comes in the form of the mark-up on the subscriber fees they charge, something teams and leagues will want to get in on the action on, especially if those cable networks try to increasingly become streaming services.

In other words, as streaming becomes more technologically advanced and common, teams and leagues may increasingly decide they don’t need a sports network like ESPN and may decide to stream their events themselves. A streaming service like ESPN3 is little more than a middleman that degrades the brand of the teams or league and takes money that could go directly to the team or league. That explains why last year, the Outkick the Coverage blog could write a provocative post entitled “Why ESPN Has Already Lost the Future“, which explains the situation better than I do here, though I’m hesitant to say all this will happen within a decade.

But ESPN isn’t the only loser: every outlet that airs sports could find themselves left behind by teams and leagues increasingly deciding to go it alone. For the past year, I’ve been tracking the efforts of NBC, Fox, and others to challenge ESPN’s hegemony over the world of sports, when the same force that’s most likely to ultimately break that hegemony will render all their efforts in vain in the same fell swoop. As a result, there have been times when I’ve wondered whether any of it has really mattered, whether it’s all much ado about nothing.

There is one place where “networks” may still have a place, and that is in the coverage of breaking news (or even some form of newscast). But here, there’s not really that much difference between a news network (CNN, MSNBC, or Fox), a broadcast news agency (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS), or things like the AP, the New York Times, USA Today, NPR, or even blogs. The Occupy Wall Street movement even set up its own UStream channel to control, to some extent, its own message and coverage of the protests.

As such, I think there will ultimately come a day where the medium of television itself will be rendered completely superfluous and will be folded into the larger Internet. I see a day where “televisions” are sold that are really super-large netbooks adapted for video, streaming and otherwise. I see a day where the FCC ultimately decides that broadcast spectrum is an artifact of the twentieth century that is mostly going unwatched and reclaims all of the remaining spectrum, with most of it going towards providing free wireless Internet, and (I hope) a good chunk of it being reserved to improve the streaming capabilities of the entire Internet.

And I see a day where we gather around and tell our kids how, before there was the One Great Network, there was this “proto-Great Network” called television that ruled our lives for over half a century, just as the baby boomers heard about how their parents listened to the radio before there was television. Yes, television really did make another medium obsolete, which makes it all the more plausible it’ll now suffer the same fate.

CAA Shacks Up with NBC Sports Network

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This is just a quick little post to make sure I continue The Streak into tomorrow. Normally I doubt this would deserve a post entirely its own.

However, I wanted to note that this is very good news for the CAA, which is one of the better mid-major conferences in basketball, if not quite on the level of the Big Three of the Missouri Valley, Mountain West, and Atlantic 10, boasting among others March Madness darling George Mason. Hooking up with NBC Sports Network greatly increases its exposure, as opposed to being a gap-filler on ESPN2 until the conference championship, and occords it a certain measure of respect beyond that of merely being a “miscellaneous” conference. It also shows that college basketball on NBC Sports Network isn’t merely shackled to the network’s desire to show Mountain West football.

It also exemplifies something I have long held about the sports TV wars: by creating a mass of sports networks, all hungry for programming, it frees up programming space on ESPN and others for more niche sports and leagues to get more exposure. Before, it was ESPN or bust; now, a league like the CAA can find a home on NBC Sports Network and not get lost in the shuffle. Not only that, but the CAA’s departure frees up space on ESPN to get more exposure there as well.

However, NBC may be running out of time to get a real, bona fide major conference. For reasons I’ll get to later this year, conference realignment and proposed changes to the BCS may make the Big East, already a relative football weakling, not much better if at all than the Mountain West at football, though it would still add greatly to NBC’s basketball bona fides. Coupled with ESPN and Fox locking up most of the other major conferences to long-term deals and teaming up to shut NBC out of the Pac-12, that could mean NBC’s only chance at nabbing a real major conference for a long time could be when the Big Ten’s rights come up in four years. NBC could claim some success if it won both the Big East and Big Ten – given how strong Fox has been, and the objections Notre Dame would raise to adding any more football to the broadcast network, a third of the Big Six conferences is doing about as well as could be expected – but anything less may well be unacceptable.

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What does the NFL Network’s expanded schedule mean for the NFL’s efforts to sell some of it?

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Roger Goodell’s announcement at his Super Bowl press conference that the NFL Network would get an expanded slate of primetime games isn’t really new news by itself. But when the NFL first announced that the NFLN would get this slate, it sounded like they would get 10-12 games, which allowed for speculation that the NFL was expanding NFLN’s slate as a short-term move to ease people into a full-season Thursday Night slate and goose NFLN distribution for one last time before the NFL sold half of that full-season slate to another entity.

So to hear that NFLN will have a 13-game slate, starting the second week of the season, taking only Week 16 off among weeks NBC doesn’t already have and that the NFL would be willing to schedule a Thursday night game on, effectively going to a full-season slate already… should that shock us into realizing that the plan the NFL seemed to be floating during the lockout is off the table?

When you combine it with NBC’s Thanksgiving night game, and NFLN seemingly abandoning Saturdays, which would mean that there are now, at most, 14 games to go around where before there were 16, it certainly should look like a distinct possibility. The NFL could very conceivably maintain this schedule indefinitely if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to engage in wishful thinking, you could say that NFLN is only serving as a placeholder because the NFL didn’t sell the Thursday night package this year, and they’ll have a package in place for next year… but there’s only so long you can maintain that notion. (And I don’t even want to dignify the notion of selling a Saturday night package.) The best chance for the NFL to eventually sell half of its Thursday night slate is if they administer an even bigger poison pill: an 18-game schedule, which the owners clearly still want.

At this late stage, it’s not as though losing that contract would be a disaster, at least not for the media companies. This year will see a number of high-stakes rights battles go down, including MLB, NASCAR, and the BCS, and I wonder if part of the reason the NFL is doing this is because several media companies have lost interest and intend on scaling back their bids in the near term. As much as Comcast, the company with probably the most interest, would love to use NFL programming to grow its NBC Sports Network, they could do the same thing with an MLB or NASCAR contract, possibly (I haven’t looked up the numbers) for cheaper, and attract a smaller but broader audience more days of the year and possibly get some big events on top of it. ESPN, which I had ranked third-most likely, was probably only really in it to keep Comcast from getting it. That leaves Turner and Fox; as much as Turner would love to get back into the NFL, they’re in a strong enough position as it is that they don’t really need it (unless they intended to put games on truTV), while Fox continues to be hamstrung by its inability to raise subscriber fees for FX.

The NFL would be leaving a lot of money on the table if they didn’t sell off those games, but they already extorted a lot more money out of their broadcast partners, and it’s apparent they’re more pissed that there are still some big-time holdouts for NFLN distribution even after the RedZone offer – although color me skeptical that throwing more third-tier primetime games on the pile is really going to bring Time Warner Cable around at this point if they weren’t brought around already. (This may be why Roger Goodell talks about putting every team in primetime… but the games will be shown on broadcast in the local markets, so those people won’t be motivated to call their cable provider, and showing every team means you’re going to be putting on some pretty crappy teams with apathetic fanbases, which may underline the cable companies’ point and, considering apparently every team will play a Thursday game following a Sunday game, might even further devalue the half of the package you sell because the scheduling ends up being so restrictive.)

On another note, did the NFL just kill Thursday as a viable college football night?