The Game to Show the Games

Breaking Bad and the future of scripted linear television

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Of the many cable series that have attracted tremendous critical acclaim and popularity in recent years, there is one in particular that seems to be reaching its zenith in popular culture in its final year, one that has certainly received its share of critical acclaim but isn’t even the biggest critical darling (or, arguably, most popular show) on its own network. That show is Breaking Bad.

Grantland’s Bill Simmons describes how Breaking Bad airing its last few episodes head-to-head with Sunday Night Football over the next few weeks is forcing him to make the sort of decision that seemed to have been left behind in the pre-DVR era:

Back then, most people couldn’t record two shows at the same time, and you didn’t have to worry about an unexpected moment being spoiled on Twitter…So you simply recorded The Wire and watched the game live. And that became the habit on Sunday nights, at least for me — record the good Sunday-night show (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Dexter, whatever), avoid it until the football game finished, then throw that episode down like television dessert…[But] this final season of Breaking Bad changed the rules…It’s the greatest final season of any television show. At least so far. Two different times this season (including last week), the show ended in such an electric way that I didn’t even know what to do with myself. After last Sunday’s episode, I somehow ended up in my backyard — I don’t even know how I got there. And there are three episodes left!…For the first time, I find myself choosing an already-filmed, can-watch-it-whenever-I-want television show over live football.

At a time when DVRs and online streaming threaten to make the traditional linear broadcast schedule obsolete for scripted shows, is Breaking Bad a glimpse into the future, a preview for how a scripted show on a linear television network can be so compelling as to pull a sports fan away from the almighty NFL? Outlining how Breaking Bad got to this point, Slate’s Willa Paskin describes an aggressively modern, yet potentially soon to be normal, rise to prominence, and identifies in Breaking Bad the qualities that can allow a scripted show to survive on linear television:

The ratings success of Breaking Bad shows that excellent programming can grow an audience, a big audience, if treated with proper patience…Breaking Bad is also, perhaps, proof of what a really propulsive plot can get you. Mad Men was media-friendly and stylistically aspirational from the very start, but it does not have the same What happens next?! vibe as Breaking Bad, and its slower-growing audience reflects that. Don Draper looks great and deep, but there is still nothing like a cliffhanger to make sure an audience checks in at the appointed time.

Once you’ve had a shot of a show like Breaking Bad, in other words, it’s like crack (or, perhaps more appropriately, meth): it keeps you coming back every week to find out how the story unfolds next. Social media reinforces this process and forces someone like Simmons to tune in at the appointed time, not a second later, lest spoilers litter the feed. HBO understands this well, which is why so many of its most popular and talked-about shows, like Game of Thrones and True Blood, are heavily serialized.

But while such shows can ensure that no one who starts watching will dare to stop, it can also make it difficult for any potential new viewers to join in, lost in the thicket of continuity built up over the seasons. This helps explain why broadcast networks have typically been reticent to air serialized shows in primetime. Instrumental in the slow growth in Breaking Bad‘s audience and AMC’s willingness to wait for that audience to build, Paskin notes, was the ability to catch up on past episodes on Netflix; even if the show premiered with middling numbers, any new viewer could watch all the previous episodes and be as up to speed as someone there from the beginning. (Webcomic aficianados may recognize this as the archive binge.)

If and when the day ever comes that a scripted show can just as easily be released over the Internet as over a traditional linear television channel – and that day may be fast approaching, given Netflix’s own investment in original series – there will need to be a good reason for it to be tied down to a slot on a linear television channel, a reason that can compel millions of people to tune in at one particular time, as opposed to watching at their leisure. Ironically, the best bet for compelling such behavior is another aggressively modern technology, social media, and the desire to engage with the discussion about the show on social media or simply avoid the spoilers that discussion inevitably contains.

In other words, the most important property that the TV show of the future can have is the modern equivalent of “water cooler value”, and that value is amplified when people are so engaged with the content they have to see “what happens next” as it happens. As I explained four years ago, the latter is best served with serialized installments doled out slowly on a regular basis to build anticipation for what comes next, which Paskin suggests belies Netflix’s own strategy of releasing entire seasons of its own original series at once. If it becomes harder for a scripted series to justify its place on a linear television schedule, then such serialized shows are investments requiring much more patience than broadcast networks have shown in recent years, and the ability to easily catch up on past episodes is instrumental to allow the audience for such a show to grow fairly quickly over the seasons. Regardless of whatever else you may think about the CBS-Time Warner Cable dispute that ended earlier this month, this is why Les Moonves’ desire to secure CBS’ right to sign digital distribution deals with platforms beyond cable operators was so relevant.

I personally think most of what currently passes for a scripted show on linear television will move to the Internet within a decade. What’s left, though, will need to provide a good reason for people to come back at the exact same time every week – and in doing so, they may want to take a few pages from webcomics’ playbook.

In Defense of Broadcast Television

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Technology has radically changed how we consume video, and how we will consume it in the future. Though much of the current landscape still reflects the cable television paradigm that became mainstream in the 80s and 90s, we are fast approaching a critical point that will establish the new paradigm going forward, as on-demand streaming of TV shows becomes more and more popular. The Internet has blown the “thousand channels” once promised by cable out of the water with a seemingly limitless selection of video, all waiting for you whenever you want. Soon, your television and cable box could be replaced by a computer that can pull up shows from the Internet, rendering any older concept of the “television” obsolete.

Yet another aspect of technology may in some ways shake up the landscape even more, if only in how it shakes up our definition of a computer itself. This is the rise of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, devices that connect to the same Internet as more conventional computers even if they do so in ways that present themselves differently to the end user. There may not be any distinction between TV and Internet in the future, but these devices are counting on it, because they have no way to connect to cable TV other than by using the Internet as an intermediary. And if the Internet itself changes when we consume content, mobile devices change where we consume content. Ironically, this shift could make the question of “when” less relevant by making sure you’re never unable to catch your shows when they’re on (unless perhaps you’re behind the wheel of a car). Perhaps partly because of this, for the moment the consumption of content on mobile devices reflects the current cable television paradigm even more than the general landscape, with cable companies embracing the future they call “TV Everywhere” where any channel you can watch at home you can watch on your smartphone, tablet, or computer – if you “authenticate” with your cable provider.

The notion that in the future, there will be people that get all their video off the Internet in some way should give one pause, raising the question of what the implications are on a more basic level. What sort of infrastructure are we building for the consumption of video, and is it the right tool for all the jobs we might end up asking it to do?

Consider what happens when you watch a video over the Internet. Your computer (or phone, or tablet) sends a message that it’d like to watch a certain video, which the ISP (or wireless carrier) relays to the server on the other end. The server sends the video back through the network to the ISP, which delivers it to your computer. If someone else wants to watch the same video at the same time, specifically a streaming video showing something happening live, even if they’re on the same ISP or wireless carrier, they go through the entire process over again: their computer indicates that they’d like to watch a video, and the server on the other end sends it back to them. Not only the server on the other end, but even the ISP in the middle, has to deliver the stream to each of you individually; you can’t piggyback off the other guy. In effect, if a million people are watching the same thing, they’re effectively watching it on a million different “channels”.

This helps explain why NBC’s streaming coverage of the 2012 London Olympics ran into so many problems with just a million people watching at most (could you imagine if everyone who wanted to watch the Super Bowl wanted to watch it this way?), and why ESPN is reportedly trying to get wireless providers to exempt their WatchESPN service from data caps. The Internet is good at delivering a large amount of content to a few people each, but not so good at delivering a small amount of content to a lot of people each. That is the strength of over-the-air broadcasting, and admittedly linear cable television as well, and it’s a strength that shouldn’t be overlooked, even in areas beyond video; imagine if your device, whatever it is, was capable of passively receiving data from a wireless provider, broadcast station, or cable company, without specifically asking for it. A broadcast station can send out a single signal from a single antenna, and that signal can be seen by anyone with an antenna capable of picking it up; a cable company similarly sends the same signal across all its pipes, and your cable box simply tunes into the sliver you want (though cable companies have increasingly shown interest in “switched-broadcast” technologies that switch out a single sliver when you change channels).

It may seem as though all this means is that the Internet will never eclipse the existing linear television infrastructure, but the other principle once upheld by broadcast television, that anyone with the proper equipment can tune in for free, is one worth preserving even if the majority of people have been willing to pay for more options; the state of sports, which probably makes up the majority of this sort of live event, should serve to underscore that. If anything, the Internet seems to me to be more of a threat to cable than to broadcast. When you look at everything out there on cable, very little of what’s out there consists of the sort of live event people wouldn’t be willing to watch on their own time later; the Internet holds the potential to absorb most of the promise of choice cable once offered. If the demand for traditional linear television is more limited, if it reaches a level broadcast can fulfill on its own, cable television, not broadcast, becomes a relic of times gone by, squeezed out by the double whammy of the Internet and a resurgent broadcast.

Broadcasting, however, has not really effectively competed with the Internet. The digital television standard America finished transitioning to in 2009 had a number of flaws, both in and of itself and in the manner in which it was implemented, but perhaps the most critical was that it failed to anticipate the magnitude of the advent of mobile devices, devised as it was in the early 90s and with implementation beginning in the early 2000s, years before the birth of the iPhone. It was woefully ineffective at being received by anything but a traditional, stationary television set. The industry has responded by adopting a modification that allows broadcasters to transmit a second, low-resolution feed that can overcome interference, but it’s a kludge to overcome the deficiency of the original standard in the first place, and it says a lot that you probably haven’t heard of it or any of its implementations – with the end result that ABC has rolled out a separate app that allows users of mobile devices to watch the programming of participating stations over the Internet… but only – say it with me now – if you authenticate with a participating cable provider, an absurd outcome that results from broadcast stations attempting to play the cable networks’ own game by acquiring “retransmission consent” fees from cable companies, resulting in the seeming paradox that over-the-air broadcast stations would seemingly prefer that people not consume their content over the air.

In an age where this paradox has reached the seemingly inevitable conclusion of News Corporation COO Chase Carey’s threat to make most of the Fox network’s most valuable programming cable-only if anything happens to cripple Fox stations’ retransmission consent leverage, an age where, with only the ever-powerless and ignorant consumer seemingly left to defend the technology of broadcast, the FCC seems to be proceeding full-steam ahead to reclaim vast amounts of broadcast television spectrum on behalf of big wireless companies that don’t need it, it’s important not to lose sight of the important role the technology of broadcasting can serve in the video landscape of the future.

The Future of Sports and Broadcast Television

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I’ve spoken in the past about how the rise of the Internet may render the sports TV wars irrelevant, but it may be helped on that front by a most unlikely source, a blast from the past making a vinyl-record-esque return from the grave: over-the-air broadcast television. I wrote about the state of broadcast television way back in 2009, and since then “cord-cutters” have caused the seemingly inexorable climb in cable-TV penetration to level off and start declining, though estimated rates vary widely depending on the source and methodology. I’m reposting this guest post I wrote for RabbitEars.info exploring what this could mean for the TV industry in general and sports in particular.

There have been several posts on RabbitEars opposing efforts by the FCC to reclaim spectrum from broadcasters for the sake of wireless providers and touting the value of broadcast television, and many in and out of the industry have refuted the notion that broadcast television is an outmoded technology obsolete in the age of the Internet. While I sympathize with the cause and don’t disagree with the message (a change of heart for me), I think it’s worth considering why people might think the Internet makes broadcast television obsolete, and from that determine how broadcasters might be able to leverage their strengths to survive and thrive going forward.

Regardless of anything else, I think it’s hard to dispute that technology, not only the Internet but also DVRs and maybe even digital television itself, have rendered the traditional linear broadcast schedule mostly obsolete. It’s now possible to watch huge libraries of movies and episodes of TV shows past and present in places like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more, all waiting whenever you want it. Even when the episode first airs, it’s possible to use a DVR to time-shift it and watch it whenever you want, skipping ads along the way, which has become the bane of broadcasters and cable networks alike. The traditional linear broadcast schedule is an artifact of the days when television spectrum was extremely limited to the point where no market had more than seven VHF stations and the vast majority had far less; shows had to be squeezed into whatever spots on the schedule were available. Now, however, cable television has hundreds of channels and still falls far short of the offerings out there online; a typical scripted TV show on broadcast ends up waiting to be squeezed into a spot in a three-hour window (two on Fox and the CW, plus another hour on Sundays) where it has to compete for attention with numerous other shows on other networks and hope no one fast-forwards through the ads.

Where the value of a traditional linear broadcast network may lie is in live events that can’t be started whenever you want and can’t be delayed until later. If broadcast television survives and thrives past 2025, I have a hunch that a majority of it will be live programming. Scripted shows will not go away entirely, because advertisers can still get people to watch more ads more reliably when they’re stuck watching a linear channel (especially, oddly enough, if social media makes the first airing an event unto itself), but their share of the total schedule will shrink. I see the broadcast schedule of the future being heavy on news (especially live events like the State of the Union), reality shows with a live component, and – perhaps especially – sports.

One of the topics I tend to talk about the most over on my blog is sports, and specifically the state of sports on television. For those who have cable, we live in a golden age of sports on television where our options keep on expanding. For broadcasters and cable networks alike, sports has proven to be incredibly valuable programming as one of the few types of programming truly resistant to time-shifting, compounded by its ability to attract the kinds of audiences advertisers love. These factors have propelled ESPN in its rise from a small operation run from a shack in Bristol, CT, to quite possibly the most powerful brand in American media, one that makes so much money as the most profitable division of the Walt Disney Company it allows Disney’s other operations to rest on their laurels. A couple years ago ESPN paid the NFL nearly two billion dollars a year for the rights to Monday Night Football into the next decade (only a 63% increase over the previous contract, worth $1.1 billion) – the most valuable of all the NFL’s contracts despite MNF arguably being the second-weakest package in terms of quality of games behind only the package on the NFL’s own network.

This was partly for ESPN to have the rights to a considerable amount of NFL highlights, but also because having NFL games is a major reason for cable companies to pick up ESPN and people to sign up for cable to watch it. MNF and many other big-time sporting events make ESPN by far the most pricey national non-premium cable network out there: a good $5.26 of your cable bill goes into ESPN’s pockets (and that’s just for the main network, not its sister networks like ESPN2, ESPNU, or ESPNEWS). Where being a cable network was once a huge disadvantage, these days the fact ESPN can make money not only from advertising but also subscriber fees, something broadcast networks can’t do to the same extent, has given it a massive advantage when acquiring sports rights. In 2008 the Bowl Championship Series signed a contract with ESPN to put their five games on the ESPN network, turning the once-unthinkable into reality: college football’s national champion crowned on cable. Four years later no one batted an eye when the BCS extended that deal for ESPN to show the new playoff for another twelve years on top of that, especially after CBS and Turner’s own deal for the NCAA Tournament included a provision that will put the Final Four on cable the next two years and crown the national champion on cable every other year starting 2016.

The other three broadcast networks have taken notice, and all of them have launched sports networks of their own for their own piece of the action. CBS, which bought College Sports Television in 2005, has rebranded it into the non-college-specific CBS Sports Network; a big reason Comcast bought NBC was to synergize it with its own Versus network, since rebranded NBC Sports Network; and Fox relaunched its Speed Channel into Fox Sports 1 just this past weekend. That’s not all; Turner has reportedly flirted with converting TruTV into a male-focused sports-heavy network; Viacom replaced departed UFC programming on Spike by out-and-out buying the closest thing it had left to a competitor, Bellator, and reportedly kicked the tires on going after some Thursday NFL games; even Discovery Networks reportedly kicked the tires on putting some English Premier League games on its Velocity network. Even Al Jazeera has gotten in on the action, picking up rights to three European soccer leagues to help it establish a foothold on American soil with beIN Sport. All four traditional major sports leagues have started their own networks, as have two college conferences with a third on the way.

With the major media companies fighting each other for sports rights for their various networks, the fees those companies pay for rights have skyrocketed, and every time another incredibly lucrative deal is signed or another sports entity launches its own network, commentators come out of the woodwork to complain about the inevitable effect on your cable bill – including (perhaps especially) some within the world of sports itself. Here’s a little exercise: Take a look at your channel lineup, make a note of every single sports channel you receive (as well as other networks with significant sports content like TNT, TBS, and Galavision), then go to What You Pay For Sports, check off the networks you receive, and find out just how much of your cable bill is going into the pockets of big-time sports leagues before you even turn on your television set. Even cable operators are chafing at the rates all these sports networks charge them; after the MNF package was signed, some wondered openly whether cable and satellite providers might start dropping sports channels to save their customers money, and now DirecTV and others are charging a fee to customers in areas with multiple regional sports networks and Verizon’s FiOS is offering a package without sports channels.

Sports may be a big reason cable has gotten so expensive, but it’s also a major obstacle to cord-cutting, perhaps the single biggest one. Back in December, Slate‘s Matthew Yglesias wrote a blog post explaining to people looking for Apple to make some sort of disruptive product to magically accelerate cord-cutting that pretty much everything you’d need to cut the cord successfully is already here – with one glaring exception:

In my household, as it happens, we’re cord-cutters. The only things connected to our television are an Apple TV and a broadcast antenna. We watch Hulu and Netflix on our Apple TV, we buy some shows and rent some movies à la carte on our Apple TV, and we subscribe to NBA League Pass Broadband on our Apple TV. The disruption, in other words, is right there right now as we speak. The problem is it’s not quite good enough. Thanks to blackout rules, even if you subscribe to League Pass Broadband you can’t watch your home team’s games or ESPN or TNT games (i.e., the playoffs). To really make League Pass Broadband a compelling product, Apple and the NBA would need to negotiate different deals. I assume the MLB and NHL apps suffer from similar limitations.

The state of Internet streaming of sports is decidedly mixed. ESPN’s broadband service, ESPN3, is available on most Internet providers, providing access to events ESPN has the rights to but doesn’t have room for on ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPNU, and many other networks that carry sports can be streamed online as well. However, most of these, as well as NBC’s streams of events like the 2012 Summer Olympics, require you to “authenticate” with a participating cable provider, effectively forcing you to sign up for cable in order to use a technology that should be making it obsolete. That’s assuming your cable provider has signed up for online access to those networks; the list of providers offering access to ESPN’s WatchESPN service is distressingly short (I believe it includes a grand total of one provider outside the top ten, and neither satellite provider). In any case, the great advantage of the Internet is its on-demand nature, which means its only value for sports-watching, aside from its potential cord-cutting value, is mobility.

As cable providers begin to launch new low-cost packages for customers who only want to pay for the channels they actually want even as they fight calls for a la carte, teams and leagues must ask themselves: will they continue to sacrifice some exposure for money, cutting deals with the likes of Apple (and Google, and maybe Microsoft and Facebook) as Yglesias suggests? Considering that this would either move national and local-team coverage to a subscription model (a-la-carte or no) or effectively turn Apple into a cable provider (Google’s actual entry into that field notwithstanding), I’m not sure that would preserve exposure as much as you might think, and it certainly wouldn’t be the best option for consumers. Thus, they must ask whether they are willing to keep taking more money even if it ultimately limits their exposure to the die-hards who can’t live without their product or whatever other programming their partners offer. Considering most sports as it stands consciously avoid the logical conclusion boxing took, with the biggest fights almost entirely residing on HBO and pay-per-view and the sport pushed to the margins of the mainstream consciousness, I doubt their appetite for money is that bottomless.

But that leaves teams and leagues with a seemingly intractable conundrum: their programming is so valuable that seemingly any outlet for it ultimately prices out the casual fan and threatens to rob it of that same value – unless they find an outlet that can continue to reach the maximum number of people no matter how valuable it becomes. That would appear to leave over-the-air broadcasting as the best long-term solution, and as such, broadcasters may well find themselves at a critical point of opportunity, the salvaging of the marriage between sports and broadcasting critical to the future of both, a substantial, rejuvenated sports presence on broadcast potentially enough to spur the unthinkable outcome of cord-cutting sports fans, even sports fans at the forefront of cord-cutting.

One of broadcasters’ great advantages is their ability to operate locally, an aspect that, when it comes to sports, should come in especially handy when it comes to the level of individual professional teams. However, in addition to the aforementioned disadvantages, broadcasters run into a few other problems that effectively leave them begging for scraps in most cases from local teams. Teams want an assurance of coverage outside their immediate market, and that means they’d rather sign up for a single regional sports network that can establish cable carriage fairly easily with a small number of providers than try to syndicate their games to stations in outlying markets; for their part, in an age where most general-purpose stations are network affiliates, broadcasters are reticent to piss off those networks by pre-empting programming for sports events. Many teams have also decided to start networks of their own, especially in baseball where money from owning your own RSN isn’t subject to revenue sharing agreements in a sport without a salary cap, allowing the Yankees to use their YES Network to maintain their dominance at the top of baseball’s food chain. (The Yankees sold close to half of YES to Fox last year.) Even the venerable WGN could see the end of its 65-year-old relationship with the Cubs so the team can chase more money by putting all its games on cable (never mind the national distribution on cable WGN America gives them), on a channel the team owns itself.

To me, this suggests the key could be the edge cases – once-independent stations that once were at the core of local teams’ reach, but were deprived of them not only by the rise of the RSN but by their own affiliation with UPN and the WB, and these days, with the CW and MyNetworkTV. Though it initially launched with pretentions of bringing English-language telenovelas to the American market, MyNet quickly abandoned it in favor of a mini-network format consisting of a random collection of reality shows and, for a time, WWE SmackDown!, before abandoning even that pretense and becoming a “programming service” doing little more than redistributing other syndicated programming, resulting in there being no practical difference between taking on MyNet and remaining independent; it is, quite literally, the “network” that should never have been, yet one that continues to survive against all odds because cheap station group owners appreciate the two hours a day of inventory they don’t have to program themselves. I have no doubt MyNet, and possibly the CW, would not even exist, at least not on a national level, if it weren’t for RSNs’ advantages in money and distribution that leave local stations begging for scraps from local teams (scraps that most outlying markets have to watch on the RSN anyway).

What would happen if stations that were MyNet (or even CW) stations now instead somehow were able to obtain the rights to a variety of local sports? By itself, it probably isn’t enough reason for ESPN junkies to cut the cord, but I have to imagine that for many, the ability to watch your local team is a bigger reason for getting cable than simply grabbing ESPN, especially if cord-cutting accelerates to the point where leagues decide taking money from ESPN doesn’t outweigh the relatively marginal exposure they’d get, resulting in even less reason to pick up ESPN. Perhaps ESPN comes to resemble what it looked like in the 80s, running on college and niche sports, perhaps with some occasional professional games thrown in. Even at best that would be a long-term process, at least on the national scale, with most of the most valuable national contracts locked up into the next decade, though I could see some of the most popular games, like the college-football playoff, moved to sister broadcast networks through emergency contract tweaks if cord-cutting accelerates fast enough.

This is just one area where broadcasting can reclaim some territory in the world of sports that has been ceded in recent decades, and it may not be one the owners in the best position to do so would want to take; the part-owner of the CW and the full owner of MyNet, CBS and Fox, care so little for broadcasting they’ve been making noise about migrating their networks to cable, and Fox in particular also happens to be the largest owner of RSNs and so is the last party who’d want to stop that gravy train. (Tribune, the other major big-market CW and MyNet affiliate owner on top of owning WGN, could take the lead on this, but I personally would like to see the rise of a true fifth network, and Tribune’s stations are pretty much the only CW or MyNet affiliates in the country, with a very small handful of exceptions, to produce their own news, making them the most important stations for such a network to corral.) Broadcasters would face tremendous obstacles in trying to wrench rights away from cable channels in the short term, but in the end, sports may be vital for the survival of broadcasting in the long term – and broadcasting may just have something to offer to teams and leagues that could make their long-term prospects more viable as well, if they can sell it to them.

The Fox Sports 1 Gambit

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Several months ago, when Fox announced the launch of Fox Sports 1, it boldly proclaimed that the network would have the biggest launch for a television network in history, opening in 90 million homes. At the same time, it reportedly told cable operators that it would honor old Speed contracts and only jack up their rates as those old contracts expired.

This Saturday, Fox Sports 1 will launch in 90 million homes, a number of which will be under old Speed contracts. But what happened in between is another story entirely.

It all started about a month ago, when it came out that FS1 didn’t have deals in place with three of the nation’s four largest providers, DirecTV, Dish Network, and Time Warner Cable. The piece noted that not having deals in place a month before launch – or even until the days leading up to or even just after launch – wasn’t unusual and characterized the talks as “amicable”, but it seemed to put the lie to Fox’s earlier lofty promises. As it turned out, contrary to Fox’s earlier claims, no cable operator was being allowed to carry FS1 at old Speed rates without signing a new contract at higher rates, and Fox would start preparing to offer a watered-down version of Speed to cable operators that didn’t agree to carry FS1 at higher rates to fulfill their old contracts.

That was pretty much it for the next month, with the prospect of four of the nation’s largest cable companies (Time Warner handles negotiations for Bright House Networks) not carrying FS1 at launch in the back of everyone’s minds, and potentially becoming more foreboding as the launch neared with no news of an agreement with any of them. The rest of the top 11 companies were lined up, but that was only enough for about 45 million subscribers, only about half of what Fox had promised. And all the news coming out about it was coming from outside channels, with not a peep from Fox about the prospect of launching with a fraction of the audience of NBCSN, aside from the ongoing efforts to ready “Speed Lite” – no calls to contact any of the companies and pester them to get Fox Sports 1, nothing. As recently as last Thursday, Fox executives assured investors that FS1 would launch in the promised 90 million homes, but considering how frugal all three companies have been with sports networks (DirecTV continues not to carry the Pac-12 Networks in their second year, and Time Warner Cable is in a nasty dispute with CBS), no one else in the sports blogosphere felt it was even plausible that Fox would get deals done with all three before launch. Those Fox executives must have seemed delusional.

Fast forward one week later, and all three companies reach agreements with FS1 on the same day. And how does Fox go from no progress with any of the three companies for a month to reaching agreements with all three on the same day? Apparently, by… allowing them to air FS1 under their old Speed contracts.

What happened? What I suspect is that Fox was always bluffing, pretty badly actually. They always had the option ready to allow distributors to show FS1 at Speed rates, but if seven of the top 11 distributors (and probably several smaller distributors besides) were willing to raise their prices, why wouldn’t Fox try to get as much money as it could as soon as it could? Fox wanted to see if it could con all the nation’s distributors to take the higher price, using “Speed Lite” as the implied consequence if they didn’t, and I suspect DirecTV, Dish, and TWC saw through the bluff. I do think if it was just DirecTV, or just Dish, or just Time Warner Cable holding out, Fox would have gone ahead and given them “Speed Lite”, but Fox never intended to take the PR hit of launching FS1 in half the homes they promised (and having only 45 million households able to see the stacked UFC card the network’s first night or the States’ first glimpse of Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole).

I do think it odd, regardless of anything else, that Cablevision (another company prone to get into disputes with sports networks) and Cox were apparently allowed to take their old Speed rates in time to be reported as being on board on Monday, but DirecTV, Dish, and TWC continued to hold out until Wednesday, when they ended up getting the exact same concession. It’s worth noting that Cablevision and Cox are smaller than the other three; perhaps, not wanting to add another seven million or so angry customers to the many that could be left out with the satellite companies and TWC, Fox gave those two companies what they wanted in hopes of being able to put more pressure on the remaining three, though that may have actually crippled their leverage if the satellite companies and TWC caught wind of what they had done. Or perhaps work was already well underway on wrapping up negotiations when that list on Monday came out. Or perhaps Fox gave those two companies concessions in order to help shut up the companies that took the higher price (perhaps specifically the companies most likely to speak up) when it offered the lower price to the other three.

Whatever the case, I don’t think it’s looking at it from the right perspective to claim Fox made “major concessions” and took “steep losses”. By making sure FS1 gets on the ground running without any major carriage embarrassments, Fox has done much to ensure its health in the long term, and by getting as close to those embarrassments as they could, they made sure they pocketed a tidy sum more in the short term than if they had just let everyone carry FS1 under the Speed contracts.

2 years of the Sports TV wars, and the coming Year of Fox

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Year Three of the sports TV wars will be when they start to kick off in earnest with the pending launch of Fox Sports 1, and not only is Fox making a huge push for the launch, they’re not giving up their regional sports network hegemony without a fight. Over the past month and a half, Fox has bought portions of the YES network and SportsTime Ohio, the RSN run by the Cleveland Indians.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about Fox no longer having any presence whatsoever in any market larger than Dallas should Time Warner Cable win the rights to the Dodgers (though TWC SportsNet’s chances are still very much alive at the moment), about the launch of Fox Sports 1 representing the final abandonment of the FSN concept and that Fox would cannibalize FSN’s national programming to fill time on its new national networks. Now Fox has an owned-and-operated presence in the top two media markets, and if they win Dodgers rights they’ll be very hard to kick out of either one.

What might be sustaining FSN’s continued interest in acquiring existing RSNs, including a rumored bid for the MASN network co-owned by the Orioles and Nationals? It may be a clause in Fox’s new baseball contract that only recently came to light: apparently, Fox can fill up its lineup of games on FS1 by cannibalizing them from RSNs it owns – a clause that might be a remnant of the early days of the national FSN experiment when FSN would air a “national” game every Thursday. Owning a piece of YES allows Fox to fill up FS1’s lineup of games with far more Yankees games than, say, Mets games.

This suggests Fox might also be thinking about making a run at NESN and its associated Red Sox rights, and why Dodgers rights will be far more valuable, at least to Fox, than has already been suggested. As much as basketball can move the needle, baseball’s lack of a salary cap and some quirks in its revenue sharing model have made the local sports TV wars especially competitive regarding, and lucrative for, baseball teams, long higher-rated as a whole than basketball games anyway (notwithstanding national interest). If Fox has this added motivation driving them to acquire baseball rights specifically, don’t be surprised to see the values climb into the stratosphere, especially in competitive markets. In particular, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fox absolutely break the bank on the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves, and Detroit Tigers in their next contracts, even without obvious competition; even the Florida teams could rake in the dough if Fox fears Comcast or Bright House coming calling.

Most speculation on national networks beyond Fox Sports 1 has settled on Fuel becoming Fox Sports 2, with Fox Soccer remaining as is, which has never made much sense to me given Fuel’s smaller reach and Fox Soccer’s loss of its best, most consistent programming. But Fox may have in mind transitioning Fox Soccer out of the sports market entirely. The LA Times reported earlier this week that Fox is considering relaunching Fox Soccer into a general entertainment network, effectively an “FX2”. That seems a substantially riskier move than turning it into Fox Sports 2; if your company runs multiple entertainment networks, it’s usually critical to make sure they have their own identity so as not to cannibalize one another (for example, TBS being all about comedy while TNT stresses its dramas), especially when the channel is starting with relatively little distribution – Fox Soccer is in about 50 million homes, better than a lot of startups but not enough to launch a big-time network and vulnerable to cable company defections, especially when many cable operators currently put it on sports tiers. To explicitly market it as a “lesser” channel to FX smacks of borderline suicide, and something no general entertainment channel I know of does.

If Fox is going to do this, I would suggest either marketing it as a comedy network (FX is primarily known for dramas though it does have more than a few comedies), marketing it towards women, or create a kids network powered by the old Fox Kids block that entertained so many kids during the 90s (though the rights to many of those cartoons may be owned by other entities). Fox could also market to niche genres, like with NBC Universal’s Cloo and Chiller channels, or pick up the geek crowd disenchanted with the state of SyFy and G4. An outside-the-box possibility could be to convert Fox Soccer into an international version of the Fox News Channel; Fox Soccer already occasionally airs the general “Sky News” from Britain. Ultimately, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox decided that turning Fox Soccer away from sports risked losing too much existing distribution for too little gain to be viable and the only feasible option would be to convert it, not Fuel, into Fox Sports 2, getting that network off the ground that way. (I continue to maintain that Fuel doesn’t feel like a sports channel in the same way as the others to me; it may be about “extreme” sports beyond its UFC coverage, but, well, those are marginally “sports” at best.)

In any case, if Fox only creates two networks that means the chances are borderline at best that it shuts down Fox College Sports entirely, but recent events have still suggested it should rethink what role FSN takes when acquiring college rights – people in the Bay Area have been scrambling to watch Cal and Stanford basketball games FSN holds the rights to since the area’s Comcast SportsNet networks aren’t showing FSN programming.

I haven’t spoken about conference realignment in a while (partly because the whole thing has just gotten too depressing for me), but Fox is also the reported leader in the clubhouse for the rights to the so-called “Catholic 7”, the non-football-playing members of the Big East who finally figured out that the depleted remnants of the football half of the conference weren’t going to command a contract anywhere near as good as what commissioner Mike Aresco was trying to make them believe, especially with the Big East losing its privileged BCS status. (Once Tulane became a viable Big East member, it became clear that this was essentially Conference USA 2.0, with only UConn being a true “Big East” school – and they, not Louisville, probably should have been the school the ACC called when Maryland left for the Big Ten.) Fox has been reported to be offering something in the neighborhood of $300 million, an astonishing number for a non-football conference and hopefully a wake-up call for all the other actors in conference realignment that football itself is not what powers the money machine, but sports people want to watch.

Fox is a rather odd choice to go after the Catholic 7, but unless its existing Big 12 and Pac-12 contracts have limited at best basketball inventory for FS1 their only other option to truly establish their basketball bona fides is the Big Ten contract in a few years, which admittedly I’d be shocked if they don’t snag. But until purchasing YES Fox had very little RSN presence in the Catholic 7 territory; RSNs in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, but Marquette might be the only school in any of those states. YES puts them in St. John’s backyard, and the Catholic 7 might be going after the likes of Butler, Dayton, Xavier, and Saint Louis (and Virginia Commonwealth, which might bring FS South/SportSouth into play as well), so they have that going for them.

But considering how much the Big East and ESPN have meant to each other, and the fact that the Catholic 7, to me, are the true inheritors of the Big East’s legacy regardless of whether they actually win the name (a basketball conference with the likes of Memphis, Temple, Cincinnati, and UConn may be a very good mid-major, but still a mid-major), I cannot believe that ESPN would let them blithely walk away to Fox so easily. I have to imagine ESPN will make a big run for at least a piece of the Catholic 7, probably sublicensing some games to CBS – the first real competition between ESPN and Fox since the World Cup rights came up. (Pre-split, NBC was considered a favorite to snag Big East rights and a major reason Aresco kept hyping how much money the conference would make from the sports TV wars – but at this point, which half they go after depends on whether NBC wants to keep piling up mid-majors in football or establish their basketball bona fides. Considering the Mountain West was literally the only FBS conference at their disposal last season, I would lean towards the latter at this point; the only major football conference they have a shot at for several years at this point is the Big Ten, and that shot is very remote.)

Last year saw Fox establish the foundation for Fox Sports 1 with its baseball and NASCAR contracts, while NBCSN settled into a third-place groove (and potentially started to establish a niche for themselves) by acquiring the Premier League, driving the final nail into Fox Soccer’s coffin. While this year will see the fight for the Catholic 7 and the awarding of the other half of the NASCAR package, and the NBA rights might come up for negotiation as well, for the most part the stage for the sports TV wars will move away from acquiring rights and towards what the contenders, especially Fox, do with them. FS1 is likely coming in August, and that is when the Wars will start in earnest.

What Bob Costas’ halftime commentary should have been

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As seems to so often be the case, whenever a tragedy happens that shakes us to our very core we’re left unable to figure out how we should feel, knowing only that however we feel, someone is going to tell us we’re wrong. Such is the case with the shocking murder-suicide of Jovan Belcher on Saturday, which have left many of us unsure what to make of any of it.

We like to put people into black-and-white categories as a society – we like to have someone to blame and someone to be the victim. We like to fit everything into a nice and neat story. No one would put any blame on the girlfriend who was killed or the young girl who was orphaned; they are both clearly victims. But let’s face it, neither are they the story here. No one even knew who either of them were until they were reported in the aftermath of the tragedy. The reason this has become a national story is because the man who did it was an NFL player.

Certainly it’s hard to sympathize with Jovan Belcher, who took the life of his girlfriend and then himself, leaving his young daughter without any parents and rattling the Kansas City Chiefs organization to its core. It’s tempting to blame him, to turn him into a monster. But ultimately, it’s hard to blame him either; Belcher’s actions were in keeping with suffering from mental illness. Which brings us to the elephant in the room, the question of whether Belcher’s living, playing the particularly physical position of linebacker, had anything to do with his death.

Five and a half years ago, professional wrestler Chris Benoit took the life of his wife – and didn’t spare his son – before hanging himself. His brain was subsequently examined by neurosurgeons at West Virginia University, who compared it to that of “an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient”, and his father attributed his actions to the effects of repeated bumps to the head over the course of his wrestling career. For a league already haunted by the specter of concussions, as the Saints’ Bountygate appeals continue to drag on, to witness such a chillingly similar turn of events should serve as a reminder of the consequences of this sport’s brutality.

The case of Chris Benoit also, perhaps, suggests exactly what we should make of this tragedy. Before his death, Benoit was one of the more beloved figures in wrestling, but that adoration quickly turned to sadness and anger as most of Benoit’s career was all but forgotten and Benoit himself became a symbol of the effects of the culture of wrestling. Jovan Belcher was hardly a superstar, so perhaps it’s telling that we find ourselves conflicted in how to feel about him all the same. Regardless, while it’s too early to know exactly why Belcher did what he did, it’s entirely possible that in a few years, Jovan Belcher could be every bit as much a symbol of the NFL’s concussion problem as Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears safety who committed suicide nearly two years ago.

Sports TV War news and notes

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How much have we gotten used to having big events on cable over the past four years? When ESPN and the BCS announced, as expected, that the new college football playoff, including the championship game and non-“contract bowls”, would be going to ESPN, there was nary a peep about the fact that the new championship game would remain on cable for the life of the contract. No one, aside from Sports Media Watch, found it in any way noteworthy that college football will crown its champion on cable for a total of a decade and a half.

They should; ESPN’s Monday Night Football contract currently only ends in 2021 (though it’s likely to be extended to 2022), meaning by the time the contract for the new playoff ends, it could well be the only thing propping up ESPN’s hegemony, for a full four years. If cable has moved to an a la carte system by 2022, or if Internet streaming is making an undeniable impact on the viability of cable television, ESPN may find itself forced to move the championship game to ABC… or it could use its monopoly on the college football playoff to inflate its viewership numbers beyond what they actually should be and thus keep rights above the station those developments should by all rights place them.

Fox’s rumored victory in the race for Dodgers rights and announced acquisition of almost half of the YES network shores up the health of its regional sports network operation and technically puts Fox right back into competition with Comcast in a market. While it’ll now be a long time, if ever, before Fox is forced to leave the Los Angeles market or even shut down one of its two regional sports networks there, it doesn’t really change the calculus for the state of national FSN programming or the national FSN brand; I would bet MSG Plus was one of FSN’s more loyal non-in-house affiliates. (On the Yankees’ end, while it does hedge their risk for a potential collapse in the RSN market, it doesn’t leave them as well prepared if a streaming-heavy future replaces it.)

However, it’s clear that Fox is serious about launching an ESPN competitor, even placing it in the same tradition as the launch of the Fox network itself or the launch of Fox News as a competitor to CNN. I don’t see the point of their proposal of running ads in split-screen even when nothing is happening during the break; while it should work for NASCAR and could work for soccer and even UFC, it seems supremely pointless for other sports, and I could see advertisers balk at applying it across the board.

Sport-Specific Networks
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Unsurprising sports TV war news

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Of course CBS Sports Network would pick up the Arena League. It’s just one more tiny league to fill time on CBSSN.

Actually, the Arena League might be a pretty big get for CBSSN, and quite possibly the biggest non-college programming on the network (unless you count odd US Open tennis coverage). It wasn’t that long ago, before the ESPN experiment and bankruptcy, that the Arena League was considered on the level of MLS and the WNBA. The earlier moves by the CFL and UFL to find networks proved that it wasn’t the NFL restricting them to “NFLN or bust”, making it all but inevitable the Arena League would fall short, especially after the final indignation earlier this year when NFLN, Olympics-restricted into carrying an NFL preseason game the night of the ArenaBowl in New Orleans, had it played at the relatively ungodly hour of 9 PM CT with a three-hour time slot. Especially with NBCSN picking up the CFL, it wasn’t out of the question for the Arena League to return to its previous stomping grounds of NBC, so for CBS to pick it up is a pretty big deal and one of those “baby steps” needed to escape being a laughingstock. It’s telling that the ArenaBowl will be aired on the CBS broadcast network on a Saturday afternoon.

I’m not even adding the Sugar Bowl shacking up with ESPN now that it’s taking the Champions Bowl matchup, since we kind of knew that already.

Sport-Specific Networks
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The Premier League is headed to NBC

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It’s official: we are in the middle of a massive paradigm shift in the world of sports, and especially in how soccer is consumed in this country. Don’t believe me? With one exception that I bet won’t stay an exception for long, the top European leagues are now aligned with a network that didn’t exist a few months ago and an entity that didn’t have any soccer presence outside the Olympics a year ago.

I was somewhat shocked to find NBC bidding so aggressively that the Premier League reportedly told the incumbents, Fox and ESPN, late last week not to even bother showing up with a bid. Without the World Cup, with MLS for only two more years, with Formula 1 recently added to its portfolio, and with its dreams of competing with ESPN looking to be on life support, I didn’t think NBC had much motivation to make an aggressive bid for the Premier League.

In the end, though, after reading the announcement, I have to figure the deciding factor was the same one I thought might land NBC the World Cup but didn’t: NBC’s Spanish language presence. I get the impression the Premier League was never going to split up the English and Spanish language rights the way FIFA was willing to, and as a result, I have to imagine a big chunk of NBC’s bid – triple what Fox and ESPN’s joint bid was – was more to land Premier League rights for Telemundo and mun2 than for NBC Sports Network. Compared to most soccer rights, the Premier League has a disproportionately English-language audience in the United States, but it is still one of the two best soccer leagues in the world with multiple major teams, which I have to imagine still makes it a huge draw for Spanish-language eyeballs as well.

It sounds like NBC could make a concerted effort to put games on as many platforms as possible on a regular basis, including substantially more live games on the broadcast network than Fox was willing to show (maybe even involving teams not named Manchester United!), as well as CNBC, MSNBC, and maybe even Bravo or on a pay-per-view package, which could help resolve any Formula 1 conflicts; I can’t help but wonder whether Universal Sports might end up being an option, and whether or not it is could hint at the long-term plans for that network. (I’m very surprised to see USA even be brought up after NBC semi-publicly dropped all non-dog show sports programming from that network. Whether or not Comcast SportsNet might pick up Premier League games would be a very interesting possibility, fraught with plenty of political implications.)

I think this sends a pointed message that NBC has every intent on taking over the unified MLS package when that comes up in another year, possibly in both English and Spanish as well – although the Premier League deal will only coincide with a unified MLS deal for another year. As for the other contenders, while ESPN made noise about its continued commitment to soccer after losing the World Cup, I don’t see them as very motivated at all to hang on to MLS and US National Team rights, certainly compared to NBC and Fox; certainly this, combined with the earlier loss of UK Premier League rights, must make it a lot harder for them to hold on to Ian Darke and other English soccer announcers after the 2014 World Cup.

Perhaps the biggest impact, though, might be to Fox. What little chance there might have been that Fox wasn’t going to launch an all-sports network is gone now, and in all likelihood it’s going to launch at least two. Fox Soccer has lost almost all the programming that was worth it maintaining a separate identity; while Fox still has the Champions League and World Cup, they don’t do nearly as much to support the network as the Premier League did, and could easily survive the transition to a system of all-sports networks, while whatever else is left of Fox’s soccer programming might be kindly described as scraps. There is no reason for Fox to maintain Fox Soccer as a shell of its former self, and I fully expect Fox to be running at least one all-sports network by August 2013.

Without knowing how much beIN Sport bid, I have no way of knowing how much of this is NBC overbidding or ESPN and Fox underbidding. If NBC overbid, I have to wonder what their priorities are, as well as their grasp of the big picture given the F1 problem; some of Mark Lazarus’ comments in the SI interview linked above suggest NBC has become resigned to its third-place status and wants to carve a niche for the NBC Sports Network in the international sports scene (which again makes me wonder what the role of Universal Sports might be long-term). But if ESPN and Fox underbid, that would tell me that Fox may have already set its sights on transitioning Fox Soccer away from its soccer identity and was more concerned about dumping sport-specific network rights F1-style than anything else, even if the Premier League would have been valuable enough programming to add considerably to the value of a general Fox Sports network. Fox may have driven the final nail in Fox Soccer’s coffin itself.

Sport-Specific Networks
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Why ESPN effectively created a Fox Sports network – and why NBC was never going to compete with either of them

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Virtually from the moment the sports TV wars started, I have been wondering why ESPN seemed to have such a myopic fixation on NBC’s attempts to build the NBC Sports Network that it was willing to essentially give Fox rights left and right to potentially create a far more imposing competitor sooner than NBC might ever pose – especially when ESPN gave so many statements early on effectively dismissing NBC’s prospects of competing with them. Starting with the alliance for Pac-12 and Big 12 rights, continuing with Fox’s big wins of UFC and World Cup rights, up to the first rumors of the Fox Sports 1 plans, and right on through the bizarre saga of the baseball renegotiations, my bewilderment at ESPN’s game plan has grown and grown.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so confused. In fact, maybe everyone should have written off NBC’s prospects of competing with ESPN from the start. Comcast’s cable operator business, seemingly the ace in the hole for carriage of all its other networks, may well be the Achilles heel that forever cripples NBC’s efforts to get any sort of head start.

What clarified this for me was a post on the Frank the Tank’s Slant blog earlier in the week (specifically the third full paragraph). Essentially, it suggests that what ESPN fears is not so much NBC as a competitor for sports rights and eyeballs as Comcast as a business partner potentially holding its own ace in the hole. ESPN really doesn’t fear any entity eating into its dominance, but what it doesn’t want in a million years is Comcast owning a sports network that might remotely be construed as anywhere close to on par with ESPN. An even remotely strong NBC Sports Network could give Comcast leverage to lower the rights fees it pays ESPN for carriage, and that could eat substantially into ESPN’s bottom line when combined with the impact of the sports network itself. ESPN may not want any real competitors to its dominance, but it really doesn’t want NBC to be one of them. It’s perfectly happy to build up Fox as its “competitor” if it means avoiding the fate a competition with NBC would entail.

I suggested that for ESPN, the smart play in the Major League Baseball negotiations was to pit NBC and Fox against one another, and that its move to grab all three of its existing primetime packages was therefore a mistake because it all but eliminated NBC from the bidding. But ESPN had a reason for its myopic focus on NBC. If it wanted to pit Fox against anybody, its first choice would be to pit it against Turner, or even CBS, before NBC. That’s exactly what it did by grabbing all three primetime packages, forcing Fox and Turner/CBS to slug it out for what initially appeared to be a single remaining package. (That ESPN didn’t come back in to grab more of the postseason when it turned out to be two packages after all remains mystifying.)

Comcast (and Cablevision, and to some extent Time Warner Cable) can leverage its cable business to build its regional sports networks. Most areas have one or two dominant cable providers, so they are primarily using regional sports networks to pry customers away from satellite companies like DirecTV, knowing they have few other options. In most cases, when there is one regional sports network in an area it develops a complete monopoly over the area’s sports teams, with the exception of team-owned networks. To my knowledge, there are only three places in the entire country where a Fox Sports network competes with a network owned by a cable operator: Los Angeles, where Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket compete with Time Warner Cable SportsNet; the South, where Fox Sports South and SportSouth compete with CSS; and Florida, where Fox Sports Florida and SunSports compete with Bright House Sports Network. But while the jury’s still out on TWC SportsNet, CSS falls far, far short of Fox’s monopoly over the South’s professional teams, with even its SEC coverage stuck behind Fox in the pecking order, and Bright House is so far further behind than that it barely even qualifies. Neither of them can use their networks to hold Fox hostage.

But when Comcast runs a national sports network, it’s competing on a completely different playing field. Its status as a cable operator becomes far less important because it must operate primarily as a media company, negotiating with other cable providers. Its goal is different as well; where a regional sports network seeks to form a monopoly over a market, the sports TV wars have all along been all about the opposite: to compete with ESPN. But it still remains a cable operator and customer of all the other sports networks as well, and the two roles must necessarily intersect. Nowhere does Comcast have so complete a monopoly that it can force favorable terms for its own sports network on anyone, because it must necessarily compete nationally, a problem numerous league-owned networks (as well as beIN Sport) have run into in recent years. Carriage on satellite providers wasn’t enough to get NFL Network on cable companies without the added carrot of RedZone, nor is carriage on some cable providers enough to get the Pac-12 Network on DirecTV. But it can do just enough to put pressure in the other direction on behalf of its cable business – but only if NBC Sports Network is already big enough to do so, and ESPN wants to make sure it never is.

If TWC SportsNet really takes off, especially if it wins Dodgers rights, it’s entirely possible it could force Fox to leave the Los Angeles market completely. Certainly whenever Comcast has moved into a market, Fox has pulled up its tent poles and fled town. When Comcast signed up with the Astros and Rockets to form CSN Houston, Fox shut down FS Houston virtually the instant its last Astros game ended. Fox also knew FSN Chicago wasn’t long for this world when the area’s teams signed up with Comcast as well. As I suggested before, Fox realizes that as a pure media company without a cable operator business, it is at an inherent disadvantage in the regional sports network market, and I think that’s why it is thinking of changing its sports strategy away from its current mix of RSNs and sport-specific networks and towards the formation of at least one general national all-sports network – and why I think it’ll cannibalize FSN’s remaining national programming to do so.

I have to imagine the NHL has to regret shacking up with NBC now, staking the future growth of the sport to Comcast’s ability to grow the NBC Sports Network at a time when that ability looked a lot bigger than it actually was. Had the NHL’s contract come due even one year later, I have no doubt it would have come crawling to Fox to take it in; as it is, it’s now stuck with NBC for the rest of the decade, at which point (assuming the Internet hasn’t rendered TV rights meaningless by then) I fully expect it to beg and plead with another entity to take it in anyway, pending the outcome of NBA negotiations and the overall course of the sports TV wars. (Having another two years on its previous NBC and Versus deals also means any customers wouldn’t have to worry about the lockout the NHL is going through right now. Just reason #2246 why Gary Bettman is clearly a mole planted by David Stern to undermine the NHL.)

This also affects how I see future contracts going down. I now suspect Turner has the lead over Comcast for whatever Thursday Night games the NFL elects to sell (though I still doubt they sell any), because if Comcast starts looking like a legitimate threat Fox and especially ESPN will go all-out to keep them down. (Fox would be the no-brainer favorite if not for its existing NFC package; as it stands I still see ESPN in third place, not that far behind Comcast.) Anyone looking for the return of “Roundball Rock” can forget about it right now, because it’s far more likely you’ll see Fox make a serious run at NBA rights than NBC, especially with NBC’s existing NHL commitments. And it’s hard for me to see a future where NBC has much of a chance to win MLS rights long-term, especially with Fox looking to complement their World Cup rights; I don’t think it’s far-fetched for Fox to beat both incumbents and rejoin MLS two years after losing those rights to NBC, especially as Fox Sports 1 wasn’t being bandied about at the time. Unless Comcast wanted to separate all its non-RSN sports properties, including the entire NBC broadcast network and stations, from at least its cable business, the NHL might remain now and forever the only thing keeping NBC Sports Network from CBSSN’s level.