Sports TV Business

ESPN extends its baseball contract eight years

by

I never expected ESPN to not be part of the new baseball contract, but I have to admit I’m left utterly bewildered by the new contract that keeps all three primetime cable games on ESPN… but only gives them a single measly wild card game (and any tiebreakers).

First of all, I’m shocked that ESPN would pay so much (something like double the previous contract) for what basically amounts to the status quo, especially after their vocal commitment to get back into the postseason. I suspect that, even more than getting back into the postseason, ESPN’s real motivation was to blunt NBC and prevent NBC Sports Network from getting into baseball in any way. While TBS’ acquisition of one LCS was negotiated separately from their acquisition of the entire Division Series in the last contract, I don’t see how, if ESPN was going to acquire most of the rest of the postseason similarly, why they wouldn’t announce it now, yet I have a hard time seeing who else might get it. There’s no reason for Fox to suddenly do an about-face and go back to clearing out their October schedule for postseason games, there’s no point in NBC getting baseball without putting games on NBC Sports Network, and there’s no room for any other cable outlet to air regular season games, unless… sigh… the Sunday afternoon package is kept.

I now, sadly, think the most likely outcome is a maintenance of the status quo with the only real change being ESPN’s addition of holiday and tiebreaker/wild card games (and I do suspect ESPN will add some Division Series games later). NBC could take over the Fox package for the broadcast network and the Sunday afternoon package for NBC Sports Network, but considering how crappy the latter package has been, I think it’s more likely that NBC is already focusing on trying to get a piece of the NASCAR package. I also think any chance of Fox putting games on FX or certainly a Fox Sports Network is now out the window, reducing the chances of the latter coming to fruition.

By keeping all three primetime cable games, ESPN just severely crippled the chances of any entity seriously competing with them, and one has to wonder whether NBC will be stuck fighting for scraps forever.

Sport-Specific Networks
9 11.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

What Arab oil has to do with the Premier League – and the sports TV wars

by

ESPN. Fox. NBC. Al Jazeera?

One thing that has become apparent to those following the world of international sports in recent years is that you don’t bleep with oil money. There’s no other way to explain why the United States lost the 2022 World Cup to Qatar of all places, in spite of all its problems. The richest horse race in the world is held in Dubai, as is the culminating event of the European Tour (last I checked Dubai is not in Europe, and I doubt it’s in a climate particularly conducive to golf courses). And American interest in soccer, at least European club soccer, could be shot down just as it’s getting off the ground by the whims of an Arab oil sheik.

Al Jazeera is best known to Americans as that group that aired Osama bin Laden’s tapes, and as such most Americans pretty much associate it with terrorists and thus its attempt to launch an English-language news network in the US has pretty much been a miserable failure. But over the past year it’s been on an astonishing run of acquiring US rights to international soccer leagues, winning rights to three of the five biggest leagues in Europe – Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and France’s Ligue 1 – which it will use to launch two new channels on Wednesday called beIN Sport.

But of course, the big daddy of European soccer rights in the US by a long shot is the English Premier League, and that has to have people at Fox quaking in their boots. Fox has already lost the rights to MLS to NBC, and Serie A to the new beIN Sport operation. It still has rights to the UEFA Champions League and newly-acquired World Cup rights, but the English Premier League is the bread and butter of their Fox Soccer operation. Lose that, and you might as well move what’s left to a Fox Sports network and shutter Fox Soccer, convert it to Fox Sports 1 or 2, or sell it to the beIN Sport people. Already competitor GolTV has lost the rights to its own La Liga bread and butter, leaving it with not much more than the German Bundesliga, the Brazilian league, and some scattered international competition.

If Fox has to be worried about the prospect of these upstarts from Qatar stealing Premier League rights, American soccer fans have to be absolutely terrified. A lot of work has been done to get to the point where a substantial number of Americans are now interested in the Premier League and to a lesser extent European soccer in general, and beIN Sport could end up destroying all of it. Not even the NFL can launch a network from scratch in less than a year and get anything close to wide distribution, and even Fox Soccer doesn’t have as much distribution as you might think. How quickly can beIN Sport even get to Fox Soccer’s level? A year? Two years? Five years? (It doesn’t help that a lot that beIN Sport has done has been kept low-profile, almost secret, to the point that it’s not even clear what carriage agreements beIN Sport has signed, but the list of providers to call on their Web site indicates it includes none of the biggest ones.)

beIN Sport has already declared it has no plans to sublicence any games to anyone, meaning the sizable stateside fandom of Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid used to seeing games on GolTV and ESPN are already screwed. For the same to happen to the Premier League, so soon after Fox’s much-publicized experiment in airing every game of the Premier League’s final week, could be potentially catastrophic. And what of ESPN? They’ve gone on a full-court press promoting their embrace of soccer, even after losing the World Cup to Fox. But what if they can’t air Premier League or La Liga games anymore either? They’ll still have MLS, some National Team games, and the Euro tournament, but will that be worth it?

ESPN’s UK operation has already lost the rights to the Premier League, which could reduce ESPN’s motivation to keep airing it in the States. Fox will surely have motivation to keep the backbone of Fox Soccer, but will that be enough to counter seemingly bottomless piles of oil money? Soccer fans should enjoy the current relative glut of European soccer on television, especially the recent thrilling Premier League finish, while it lasts, because it might not for much longer. And they should root hard for Fox, as well as anyone else – ESPN, NBC, even CBS Sports Network or truTV, or a strange bedfellows alliance between two or more of them – in the sports TV wars interested in the Premier League rights, lest soccer in this country end up set back decades.

Then again, maybe beIN Sport can round up cable providers with no problems whatsoever… in which case the sports TV wars, and maybe the larger American media industry, might just have a new contender.

Sizing up NBC’s new French Open contract

by

After NBC lost the Wimbledon contract, I expected it to be only a matter of time before it lost the contract to the French Open. If NBC didn’t decide it was time to get out of one of the lesser grand slams after losing the premier grand slam to cable, Roland-Garros surely would award it to ESPN rather than put everyone through excruciating tape delays. That’s why Sunday, NBC signed a deal to broadcast the French Open for another twelve years… wait, what?!?

Yep, and there are no signs that NBC is stopping with its tape delays either. Not only that, NBC is expanding its coverage to levels more akin to what it used to do for Wimbledon or what CBS does with the US Open.

I can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with the Tennis Channel being the official cable partner, which might complicate ESPN’s ability to take NBC’s package. More broadly, the timing of the broadcast deal vis-a-vis the cable deal clearly is huge. NBC lost Wimbledon almost solely because it would have to wait for two more years to put games on the NBC Sports Network. With the French Open, the cable deal came first, meaning ESPN’s position was already locked in for the long haul. I have to imagine the confluence of these two items boxed ESPN out and gave NBC all the leverage (unless CBS was interested).

Sport-Specific Networks
8 11.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

Tying a bow on the Canadian Olympic rights negotiations

by

Canada’s long national nightmare is over. CBC will be sole broadcaster of the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games.

You may recall how acrimonious the prior negotiations with the IOC were, with CBC’s union with Bell the sole bidders and far apart from what the IOC wanted, raising the specter of Canadians having to watch the Games on NBC or on the Internet. One of the bigger hang-ups – whether NHL players would be in Sochi – hasn’t been resolved yet, so I can’t help but wonder what changed to get the deal done.

I’d like to see some numbers on how much CBC paid. Did the IOC look at the landscape and realize the bleak future facing the Games in Canada if they didn’t take CBC’s offer? Did the IOC see that CBC was paying less than the combined bid and attempt to save face by lowering their demand down to the level of the combined bid? Did CBC realize the PR hit both sides were getting in Canada (and, possibly, see the ratings for the 2012 Games) and up the ante to make sure the Games could be seen on a normal platform?

Regardless, Canada has dodged a bullet, and combined with the complaints of poor quality for NBC’s streaming of big events (which the IOC may also have been looking at when considering a potential Yahoo bid), it’s a sign that we’re probably still at least a decade away from streaming being the norm for viewing sports.

The state of the college football playoff’s TV rights

by

The so-called “Champions Bowl” may not have a venue or even a proper name, but it does have a TV deal. ESPN will reportedly pay the SEC and Big 12 Rose Bowl money to show the game over the duration of the new playoff format.

Make no bones about it: this puts ESPN in a dominating position to land the entire college football playoff, especially if it also lands the Orange Bowl. The BCS wants to take advantage of the increased and higher-value inventory to pit networks against one another and drive up the price, but ESPN will now have two of the five most prominent games in the new system, maybe two of the top three. Fox and CBS will need to do a lot to convince the BCS to split up the new postseason. I’m not sure they can even put enough pressure on ESPN to force them to put the new playoff (and, presumably, the Rose and Champions Bowls) on ABC, meaning we might be in for more national championship games on cable for another twelve years. At best, I would expect ESPN or ABC to alternate with Fox or CBS for the championship game, even if they don’t officially win the rest of the new postseason contract. Reportedly, CBS hadn’t even shown interest when the Rose Bowl deal was announced, meaning Fox must fight ESPN alone.

(I don’t see NBC being a factor, because they need to save their money for sports that can help build the NBC Sports Network, especially if they lose the baseball rights. They might be a dark horse for the Orange Bowl if Notre Dame agrees to an arrangement with it, similar to when they showed the Gator Bowl when Notre Dame had an arrangement with them, and I think they will because the selection committee could be selecting as few as two teams that aren’t in the playoff to go to other bowls, and the Rose Bowl reportedly would like that to be substantially more often the case than six, meaning Notre Dame needs to do something to protect their elevated stature in college football. I also think this removed whatever slim chance Turner, with their lack of college football and not being a broadcast network or ESPN, had to land any part of the new playoff.)

To put it simply, the new college football playoff is ESPN’s to lose. Fox and CBS have one heck of an uphill climb ahead of them.

Sport-Specific Networks
8 10.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

Two lesser football leagues complete TV deals

by

CBS Sports Network continues its acquisition of every professional league no one else wants, completing the long-rumored agreement with the UFL, that league everyone’s heard about but that couldn’t even complete a four-team season last year. I’m not sure whether to count the CFL towards NBC Sports Network’s total (added in the middle of the season!); for now I’m not because it’s not a primary arrangement and no one stateside (or hell, even in Canada) cares about the CFL. Both deals seem to shut down speculation I had read that indicated that the AFL and CFL were on NFL Network because of the NFL’s influence on its TV partners; NBCSN used to air CFL and UFL games in the past, but stopped doing so around the time Comcast acquired NBC.

Sport-Specific Networks
7 10.5 4.5 4.5 0 1.5

A random rant.

by

In most programming guides, ESPN scheduled two hours for the Home Run Derby.

At 10 PM ET, two hours into the window, we were late in the second round.

Prince Fielder had advanced to the second round with a grand total of five home runs. It’s not like they were hitting them out of the park all over the place.

I can’t imagine how powerless a two-hour Home Run Derby would have to be. This affects the plausibility of scheduling the softball game right afterwards, because the result is SportsCenter coming on at midnight ET and airing on ESPN2 in the meantime.

If not a full three hours, how bad would it be to lengthen the Derby’s timeslot to two and a half?

But that’s nothing compared to Fox’s All-Star Game window, which has always been three hours despite the fact that Fox wastes a half hour on pomp, circumstance, and starting lineups. Why baseball insists on listing the game’s start time when it does when all parties involved KNOW the first pitch won’t be thrown for another half hour is beyond me.

This year, at least, Fox’s time slot has been moved back a half hour to start at 7:30 ET. But the time slot is STILL only three hours and there is STILL no mention of the game itself beginning at 8, despite the fact that all parties involved know even MORE that the game won’t start for a half hour, because ESPN’s Baseball Tonight pregame show will still be a full hour ending at 8 ET.

What’s more, in this case it’s completely pointless; why not lengthen the time slot by a half hour? To bamboozle affiliates into thinking they’ll be able to start local news at a time they clearly won’t?

There’s no reason to think the game is going to be any shorter than a normal game. If anything, the All-Star Game tends to last longer.

Probably this isn’t interesting to any of you, but I wanted to get it off my chest.

Can boxing re-colonize broadcast television?

by

I didn’t pay much attention when NBC announced an expansion of its relationship with promoter Main Events for its Fight Night series on NBC Sports Network – it wasn’t even enough to budge my Sports TV Wars count. But there is one aspect of the deal that is intriguing: up to two fights (presumably per year) airing on the main NBC network.

Before you go heralding the return of boxing to broadcast television a year after Fox’s relationship with the UFC began, keep in mind that these probably aren’t even fights of the caliber you’d see on Showtime, let alone HBO or pay-per-view. Don’t expect many if any world title matches; most fight cards on ESPN2, NBCSN or FSN tend to be focused on building up-and-coming fighters in hopes that, one day, they’ll fight for a title and justify the investment in the original broadcasts. To me, that makes it somewhat mystifying that NBC would put boxing on its broadcast network when it’ll pale in comparison to the matches even hardcore fans of the sport would be interested in. I doubt any of the other broadcast networks are going to put boxing on anytime soon, though CBS could certainly take a card off Showtime if they wanted. Granted, calling the NBC shows “Fight Night” is a bit of a misnomer, as the first broadcast show will run 4-6 PM ET, but that raises its own questions regarding whether it’s a good idea to hold US-based cards so early. (And it’s emblematic of the decline of the sport that boxing, once a broadcast mainstay, isn’t a solution for a network looking to follow Fox’s lead in giving Saturday night to sports, even with Saturday’s own decline. To be fair, though, that timeslot does better facilitate a European audience.)

NBC and Main Events seem to be big on the notion of inviting fighters from any promotion to participate on their cards, thus presumably pinning their hopes on being the premier source of boxing on broadly-available television. I’m not a big enough fan of the sport to know how well it’s worked so far beyond press-release spin, but color me skeptical. Boxing, rather infamously, has become a rather territorial sport, and just because Main Events is willing to play with others doesn’t mean the others, especially the big boys Golden Boy and Top Rank, will want to play with them.

NBC and boxing can help each other greatly, but I’m skeptical whether the relationship will be enough to overcome the larger problems with the sport. Considering how high most people seem to be on the partnership, though, I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect it to be a panacea, especially for the ongoing loss of interest to mixed martial arts.

Sizing up the MLB contract situation

by

Here’s the way I see things heading into MLB’s rights renegotiations:

  • Fox’s decision to hand over Saturday nights to sports, of which MLB plays a key role, may have MLB thinking of moving its main broadcast package to primetime full-time. As the only entity of sufficient stature that can fill the time all summer, MLB would have to be something close to the lynchpin of any effort to turn a network’s entire Saturday primetime schedule to sports. One problem: Fox and ABC would have to postpone the start of their primetime college football schedule to October, and NBC is lacking in sports it can plug in the rest of the year. The state of MLB’s infamous blackout restrictions that prevent out-of-market Fox games from appearing on Extra Innings may affect this as well.
  • With the NFL likely not selling a Thursday Night package in the near term if ever, MLB is in the role of kingmaker, potentially singlehandedly deciding Fox and NBC’s chances of running down ESPN. MLB is NBCSN’s best hope for increasing its reach and popularity, and along with NASCAR, is the other sport that will play a key role in Fox’s eventual decision whether to start a network.
  • Despite all this, the fact is that MLB’s status overall isn’t that great. For a variety of reasons, MLB isn’t succeeding at all at connecting with younger audiences. In particular, I think Fox kinda wants to get out of the sport that was always an odd fit for their brand and interrupts their highly successful primetime schedule considerably during the fall.
  • TBS’ postseason coverage seems to be working out fine, but it’s hamstrung by the utter failure of their Sunday afternoon package, which last year wasn’t even attracting as many viewers as a freaking Formula 1 race. Of course, we’re comparing cable with broadcast, and part of the problem is that TBS is blacked out in home markets and gets second choice after ESPN’s Sunday night package, but it also has to do with a glut of sports on broadcast and cable weekend afternoons, and the fact remains that for most people, baseball means Fox and ESPN all year long, and then abruptly and inexplicably moves to TBS when the postseason hits. My feeling is that MLB won’t try to include that Sunday afternoon package in this round of negotiations, instead giving it to MLB Network and splitting up ESPN’s games. Most analysts seem to think MLB will create a Sunday/Wednesday package and sell the Monday package solo, but selling the Sunday package solo and packaging Monday and Wednesday together makes more sense to me, because Sunday seems to be the marquee package with exclusivity and no other games in the time slot, similar to the relationship between TNT’s Thursday NBA games vis-a-vis ESPN’s Wednesday and Friday games.
  • Complicating matters even more for TBS, ESPN desperately wants back in the postseason. That will probably force MLB to find a way to juggle the postseason between two cable partners and MLB Network. Analysts are predicting that the LCS currently airing on Fox will join its sister on cable; perhaps the arrangement will be similar to how the NBA shuffles its conference finals between TNT and ESPN.
  • The All-Star Game has been an especially odd fit on Fox, and last year actually lost in the ratings to NBC’s America’s Got Talent. My hunch is that it will move to cable, probably ESPN.

Putting all this together, I see only three potential outcomes:

NBCSN and ESPN split the cable contracts, NBC gets the World Series. There’s so much that fits about this, even beyond NBC’s desire to improve the status of NBC Sports Network: NBC’s primetime has been mired in last place for ages, so it has less to lose during October than the other broadcast networks do, plus NBC generally has a weaker sports profile overall. Also, it would mark the return of Bob Costas to baseball coverage people would actually watch.

I would expect NBC, more than any of the other contenders, not to settle for “second-class” cable status in any way. I would expect NBCSN to get a share of the postseason, including LCS games, and possibly even the Home Run Derby. There’s no way to really avoid conflicting with hockey on NBCSN in April and into May, but the Sunday package would work out better for that purpose. Meanwhile, golf and horse racing could pretty much force the broadcast package into primetime.

The biggest problem is probably that even there, NBC would run into conflicts with the Stanley Cup Final on one Saturday night a year, plus occasional West Coast US Open golf tournaments NBC would rather allow to leak into primetime. A bigger problem could be that this would involve MLB jettisoning two partners at once, which could be a bridge too far for them. That could be enough for them to back away in favor of…

ESPN and TBS split the cable contracts, ABC gets the World Series. This might be the most comfortable option for MLB, shacking up with the two most established sports broadcasters on cable in a mirror of the NBA’s relationship, but it would be disastrous for anyone who wants a competitor for ESPN. It would certainly produce some happy faces in the offices of the Walt Disney Company, not only by shutting out any potential competitors and winning World Series rights but mitigating the loss of one or two nights to TBS with the addition of the broadcast package. I wouldn’t be surprised if ESPN were trying to form an alliance with Turner to make this happen.

The only people this would make happy outside Bristol and Atlanta might be people who want to stem the death of sports on ABC. Because of the restrictions of MLB’s anti-trust exemption and MLB’s own desires, neither ESPN nor TBS would be able to move the World Series to cable, and I don’t think either CBS or MLB want a relationship between those two to fill the broadcast contract, despite its popularity with MLB’s own audience – CBS has US Open tennis in September, SEC football in the rest of the month, golf the rest of the year, and “America’s Most Watched Network” in primetime to avoid disrupting in October. ESPN would be fine with putting the World Series on broadcast and giving ABC a regular-season broadcast package because ABC’s primetime in recent years has become increasingly weak, coming dangerously close to falling to NBC’s level, and like NBC, ABC has an infamously weak sports portfolio. I could see ESPN airing a regional ABC game on its cable network, similar to what it does for college football, though only in primetime.

All things considered, though, I don’t see this happening; the most recent contract, to me, ultimately amounts in the grand scheme of things to a way for TBS to transition out of its old Braves games. MLB might be more comfortable if…

FX (or the proposed Fox Sports network) and ESPN split the cable contracts, Fox gets the World Series. Given Fox’s desire to increase the presence of sports on FX, this is the only way I see Fox staying in the sport – from both Fox’s end and MLB’s. When the Sports Business Journal wrote an article on the Fox Sports network speculations, they cited as one key factor MLB telling Fox they needed to “establish a better cable sports presence” to compete with NBC and ESPN. I don’t know whether that says more about NBC’s chances, Fox, MLB, or FX. (Or Turner, for which it might be even worse news than it is for Fox, both in the fact they weren’t even mentioned and in what it implies MLB is looking for.) In any case, while Frank the Tank suggests that big-time sports leagues like MLB would rather be on a network with other draws, whether other big-time leagues or general-entertainment programming, and cites that as a big obstacle to both NBC and Fox’s all-sports networks vis-a-vis ESPN and Turner, this little piece of information suggests otherwise.

This is the closest outcome to the status quo, and it’s hard for me to find convincing points against it – if Fox ends up launching an all-sports network. It was harder for me to see this happening when it involved FX getting games, because of FX’s inability to raise the fees it charges to cable providers. To my knowledge, however, a Fox Sports network wouldn’t have that problem, so the only real issues left are the ones laid out in the opening of this post.

The most likely scenarios are the ones involving NBC and Fox, with TBS being an outcome of last resort if Fox decides not to launch an all-sports network and Turner’s desire to stick with baseball combined with ESPN’s desire to keep NBC from approaching their level are enough to keep NBC out of the sport. Before Fox’s network dreams came to light I would have considered the TBS/ABC scenario the second favorite, and normally I’d say ESPN could completely box NBC out of the market – besides Turner, an alliance with Fox makes sense even with their network ideas because of their established relationships with MLB – but I think NBC is willing to overpay considerably on possibly their last, best hope to establish NBCSN’s bona fides, and I think NBC can provide a high-quality enough broadcast to overcome any qualms MLB might have over NBCSN.

I keep going back and forth on which scenario is more likely; it’s hard because the MLB contract will influence whether Fox starts a network, but the existence of a network will determine whether Fox gets the contract. That may be one reason why they’re trying to renew the NASCAR contract early, which could be a bellweather for the outcome of the MLB talks if it’s announced first. If Fox doesn’t launch a network, I think it’s probable that NBC ends up with the baseball contract, dependent on the outcome of an ESPN-Turner alliance. But if they do, or even if they haven’t decided yet? Then the race is on as Fox and NBC wage a fierce (and expensive) battle to determine which will move on to take on ESPN, with Fox being the slight favorite if they have decided and NBC a slight favorite if they haven’t.

ESPN and the Rose Bowl stay in business

by

No sooner did college football approve a revolutionary playoff structure than ESPN made sure at least one aspect of the past remained in place: the Rose Bowl breaking off from the rest of the BCS and signing its own television contract.

ESPN has signed an agreement with the Rose Bowl over the entire 12-year course of the new format.

I don’t know what this would mean for the other bowls’ TV rights, especially as regards to the semifinal rounds of the new playoff structure, although the release seems to imply ESPN would carry the Rose Bowl in years it’s a semifinal. If that’s true, it would seem to dilute the proposed $5 billion agreement the BCS is looking for for its proposed playoff system, especially since the SEC and Big 12’s “Champions Bowl” would likely also have a separate agreement. A big part of that desired number is the addition of semifinals, but four out of twenty-four of those games might end up going to someone else.

On the other hand, the BCS may decide to sell the semifinals separate from the championship game… but from what I read, if that was the case both semifinals would likely be sold together (which doesn’t make much sense to me – maybe what was meant was one semifinal and the title game?). I don’t know how the whole thing will end up working, but I guess we’ll find out in the fall.

Sport-Specific Networks
7 10.5 4.5 3.5 0 1.5