TV Business

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.

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.

Is Google the cable company of the future?

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Amidst a television landscape of authenticated streaming, pointless restrictions on online viewing, inflated sports rights fees, a-la-carte debates, cord-cutting debates, five-dollar ESPNs, and contentious carriage disputes, a technology giant that originally made its money on the technology responsible for all of this is about to give a bunch of ordinary people in America’s heartland a taste of the future.

Google is about to launch its new Google Fiber project in the Kansas City area, and it provides a glimpse into how what we now know as a cable provider might look in the future. At first glance, it’s offering a standard TV/Internet bundle, but Google seems to see it as substantially more than how you might be seeing it, that it’s not clear where the TV ends and the Internet begins, if it does at all. In addition to an HD-ready “TV box” and network connectivity, Google is also offering a “storage box” with two terabytes of DVR storage (including the ability to record eight shows at once) and other functionality, as well as a free Nexus 7 tablet (advertised as “your new remote” while also touting the ability to share your TV viewing with friends), a free 1TB Google Drive account, and the chance to buy a Chromebook on top of everything else. (I’m guessing either the TV or storage boxes will come with Google TV as well; Google is promoting Netflix integration with the service. It’s also possible to just get the network box and Google Drive account without the TV hookup or anything else.) According to Google, its gigabit Internet speeds are 100 times the norm in the industry – enough, it believes, to completely revolutionize the Internet experience – and it claims to be able to deliver HD with zero compression.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the rollout of Google Fiber, though, has to do with the process of getting it. Part of the reason why cable companies tend to have effective monopolies – and why the “last mile” problem in installing fiber-optic networks has been so intractable – has to do with the nature of the technology and the expense of laying down wires across a large urban or suburban area. Google, by contrast, decided to save money by only building its network in areas that wanted it enough to justify the expense. So it divided the two Kansas Cities up into 202 “fiberhoods” and gave each one a threshold for pre-registrations it had to meet for anyone to get Fiber installed. To sweeten the pot for anyone who would normally be uninterested, Google has even offered Internet service at typical broadband speeds for a one-time $300 construction fee (payable in $25 installments for the first year), and completely free thereafter. Google is also providing full service to community buildings in each fiberhood for free as well. As a result, 180 of the 202 fiberhoods met their respective thresholds before Sunday’s deadline, nearly 90 percent of all the fiberhoods Google identified.

There is a massive Achilles heel in Google’s pitch, as right now its TV lineup has some glaring omissions – most notably, the Fox and TimeWarner cable networks (including the Turner networks and HBO) as well as AMC. One wonders if those companies are trying to slow down what could prove to be a massive disruption to their business model, though Google did recently get the Disney networks, including ESPN, on board. By forcing neighborhoods to pay first before Google will connect them, it could also leave poorer neighborhoods out in the cold. Still, if it works (and many in the old guard are skeptical), I wonder if this could prove to be a paradigm shift in the cable industry, one pointing to a future of blurrier lines between TV and Internet, one where the infrastructure needed to bring both technologies into the future becomes cost-affordable by building it only in the places where it’ll be most profitable, and thus one where that future, one that blows the massive potential of the Internet wide open and where TV as we know it today ceases to exist, becomes a reality.

Misconceptions about the Future of Television

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I have spoken often about a future in which television as we know it today no longer exists – where producers of television content, be they sports leagues or major studios, cut out the middleman and release their content directly to the people via the Internet. But on Wednesday I mentioned that such a future is at least a decade away, and to the reasons I gave in that post I would probably add the struggles people have had making money off video ads on the Internet. People don’t tolerate ads on the Internet in the same numbers they do on TV, though my anecdotal evidence suggests the tide may be turning on that front, and those ads don’t make nearly as much money as TV ads despite the lack of competition.

As such, it’s hard to imagine such a future at all, and it’s tempting to define it in terms of the structures that exist today. When I see much of the “old media”‘s streaming efforts consisting of Internet versions of their normal linear channels, when I see networks control streaming rights instead of studios, when I see access to shows continuing to be restricted by country, when I see that access to NBC’s Olympics streaming is controlled by your cable provider (regardless of ISP), I just shake my head. Such things are necessary in the present as we go through the awkward transition to the future, but I hope they don’t give anyone the wrong idea of what the future is going to be like.

For example, because the Internet video ad market isn’t mature and because of the nature of streaming of cable channels right now, it’s tempting to think the future won’t be much different from the ecosystem of channels that exist now, only with those channels that don’t offer live programming decoupling their lineup from a schedule. Most of the bigger-budget shows will be associated with some sort of “network” that charges substantial fees to Internet service providers to allow them to access their content, even if it’s just a brand name for content produced by a studio. It’s technically getting rid of the middleman, but in a way that mirrors the current TV landscape and, more importantly, preserves the revenues the biggest-budget productions require.

It’s also wrong. I don’t believe we’ll need to set up “barriers to entry” to pay for most of our TV shows, in part because I don’t believe it’s possible; “barriers to entry” is another word for “a reason to pirate”. Piracy is only going to get easier; I have on my computer RealPlayer SP, which pops up a button whenever I’m watching a video on the Internet to download the video to my computer. Not all videos can be downloaded, but there are videos with ads that can – and when I watch the version that RealPlayer downloaded, there are no ads. If a respected, legitimate video player is making piracy that easy, the fight against it might be futile.

We have shows that are paid for entirely through ads. They’re called broadcast television, and while it may be a wasteland now, that’s only because of the increased competition from cable; before cable came along, broadcast television had no shortage of groundbreaking shows. All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and the early seasons of The Simpsons (back when it was still good) all aired on broadcast; so did Star Trek, Hill Street Blues, and Twin Peaks. Even today there are independent producers making money by making high-quality videos on the Internet off ads alone (though probably the majority of the ones I know of use footage from older, more popular shows or otherwise relate to other things rather than be wholly original creations themselves). Today’s television landscape privileges those who take advantage of the “dual revenue streams” of advertising and subscriber fees; the Internet turns that on its head. It’s too democratic for every video producer to charge subscriber fees and succeed. I don’t believe pay-per-view or the equivalent of premium channels will go away entirely (Netflix seems to be becoming the HBO of Internet “premium channels”), but neither do I think the biggest budgets will become the sole province of movies either.

That said, I don’t want to discount that model entirely, but I would rather see it in a more decentralized form, where anyone can and does make money off of what they put on the Internet. Whenever you access a page, your ISP automatically pays the producer of whatever content you’re accessing, and passes the costs on to you. Had this model been in place from the beginning of the Internet we wouldn’t have spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out how to make money off the Internet and struggling through such gimmicks as micropayments. I’m not sure if it’s realistic now, and it could give ISPs a real incentive to attempt to repeal network neutrality laws so they can block sites they don’t like.

But I do think that one of these days, your bill for the Internet alone will start to rival what you pay now for cable and Internet combined, and producers will want to tap some of that. That may take the form of charging you directly for content, it may take the form of charging ISPs, or it may take the form of some variant of the automated-payment system I just laid out. Or it could be a combination of all of the above. But it’s not going to turn the Internet into the same cable TV model we have today.

Dang it, if I’d posted this yesterday I could have dropped not one but TWO Homestuck references.

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(From Axe Cop. Click for full-sized cover-maintaining murder.)

Would you believe that we have our first webcomic to be adapted to a broader medium – and it’s not PVP or Least I Could Do, or Girl Genius or Gunnerkrigg Court, or Order of the Stick or Sluggy Freelance?

Would you believe that it is, instead, a comic about an axe-wielding cop joined by his absolutely insane collection of fellow crimefighters that turned into an internet sensation shortly after its debut in 2010?

Would you believe that this comic has been adapted into print comics by Dark Horse, including a print-only miniseries, has crossed over with Dr. McNinja, and has had an RPG set made for it?

Would you believe that this comic has been picked up by the Fox network for six 15-minute episodes for a new late-Saturday-night animation lineup debuting sometime next year?

Now, would you believe that the author of this comic is just seven years old?

I almost feel sorry for the kid, who I doubt can even grasp entirely the way the product of his imagination has been exploited and turned into a money-making machine. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for wondering how much of the comic’s popularity owes itself to the novelty value of a comic made by a kid as opposed to having anything to do with the comic itself. You’ll also forgive me for wondering how much of the comic’s popularity is akin to when your kid wants to tell you a story and you humor him and tell him how great his story is no matter how much it’s really utter crap. Sure enough, Axe Cop is full of the sort of ridiculous silliness that makes you say “this is so cool!” “this is so stupid” you’d expect from a comic written by an overimaginative five-year-old. Almost everyone’s name, especially the major protagonists, is a description, so Axe Cop’s name is literally Axe Cop; he charges into battle yelling “I’ll chop your head off!“; looking for a partner, he picks out a Flute Cop, who promptly turns into a humanoid dinosaur-creature by getting splashed with dinosaur blood; among their other allies is Sockarang, a character with socks for arms who can detach them from his body and throw them as weapons.

It almost sounds redundant at this point to note that I did not make any of that up.

El Santo makes an interesting point, though: even considering all the craziness populating Axe Cop, it’s possible we’re more willing to accept it coming from a six-year-old kid than from an adult, or at least understand it. We see elements like Mega Man-esque absorption of powers from blood and a dude with socks for arms and we think, of course that’s the sort of thing a six-year-old kid would come up with! We excuse the insanity of Axe Cop because we honestly don’t expect a six-year-old kid to do any better. It’s much harder to pull off those sorts of things as an adult without getting laughed out of the place.

As is evidenced by his allies, Axe Cop quickly becomes less of a police officer and more of a superhero, fighting a variety of villains as completely bonkers as the protagonists. Don’t go looking for petty crooks getting their heads chopped off. There are aliens and vampires and robots and mad scientists and any number of other wacky enemies. As such, it’s interesting to see it through the lens of that genre, both for what it says about the definition of a superhero, and in how it reflects the core appeal of the genre. Some parts of the comic display such a self-awareness that I can’t help but wonder if it was in some way goaded into being added by Ethan, but for the most part, at least in the early part of the comic, it is just a barrage of one bizarre development after another, ratcheting up the awesomeness quotient as high as it can go.

(Incidentially, the way the site is set up far better reflects the more-than-a-webcomic philosophy, and possibly the implications of PVP‘s new setup, than anything else I’ve encountered. Axe Cop has so successfully set itself up as at least giving the appearance of a larger franchise that you’d be forgiven for missing that it’s a webcomic at all. If nothing else, Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere should take a good, long look at the Axe Cop site and take copious notes, even if they don’t end up using them.)

I think my opinion of Axe Cop is somewhat opposite from that of the general public. I couldn’t stand the original, memetic comics, constantly facepalming and eventually bailing after the first two or three chapters because I just couldn’t take it anymore. On the other hand, I have to begrudgingly admit that more recent comics are considerably more tolerable – albeit possibly at the expense of the elements that made it popular in the first place. The characters are still as crazy in concept as they’ve ever been, and the events that happen to them are as silly and nonsensical as ever, but the characters now seem to lead relatively more grounded lives, and the comic seems to have settled at its natural level of craziness and found a normalcy within the silliness, if that makes sense. It’s not really that much crazier at this point than Dr. McNinja, or the worse sufferers of PVP/Goats Syndrome (such as Scary Go Round), or even Homestuck, or even Sluggy Freelance or Irregular Webcomic! The problem, of course, is that while it may now have more reason to exist, its reason to exist in the first place was to present the wild and outrageous imaginings of a real-life Calvin, so as it gets more reason to exist, it paradoxically and simultaneously loses its reason to exist.

Perhaps El Santo is right, and perhaps Malachai is losing interest as he gets older and more self-aware, and perhaps Axe Cop doesn’t really have much life left in it. Perhaps it was always a short-lived meme destined to flame out. But if that’s the case, we can only hope the TV show doesn’t end up tainting webcomics as a source for adaptation to broader mediums.

Fox Sports Takes Over Saturday Nights

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Content, Part IV: The Home of the Future

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I’d previously claimed that in a few decades, TV as we know it may become a thing of the past. But it’s possible that what may really become a thing of the past is the desktop computer.

Already laptops serve many of the same purposes for a lot cheaper and with a lot more portability, with desktops’ only advantage being the ability to play video games, where they’ve long competed and lost to console systems. But we’re fast redefining what it means to be a “computer”. As the iPad proved, today’s “phones” are really miniature computers, and many of today’s “TVs” are also starting to redefine what that is.

Last night I posted that our house finally got HD earlier this year. Since then, we’ve added a Sony Blu-Ray player with Google TV functionality to our repertoire. HD will not change the way you see TV appreciably; Google TV (and its competitors like Apple TV) definitely will. Google TV’s main feature is the ability to search for programs using a text-message-like keyboard, but that’s just the start of it. It comes with a version of Google Chrome, allowing you to surf the Internet on your TV. It also can support a wide variety of the same apps that run on an Android phone. On the same TV you watch March Madness on, you can also send tweets and update Facebook, catch up on your favorite blogs, watch some YouTube videos, even download movies and TV shows from Netflix.

Someday, I predict that every home will have something that looks like a TV but is really a computer, capable of running apps, playing games, and connecting to the Internet. Much of what falls under the domain of “watching TV” now will instead involve a trip to YouTube or hitching onto some sort of stream. Everything will still be available in crystal-clear HD quality, assuming it was made with that quality. The TV, desktop computer, and video game console will effectively be merged into a single unit (video game consoles are increasingly adding Internet access and other smart-TV-like functions). It will be the most powerful form of computer, supplemented by portable tablets and smartphones. Laptop computers will be retained by employers and educational facilities for the productivity software, but that may change if cloud-based solutions like Google Docs prove popular, since they can conceivably run on the “TV”.

This explains why Microsoft is overhauling its venerable Windows operating system to match its johnny-come-lately Windows Phone system. Mobile OS’s are fast becoming more important than old-fashioned desktop operating systems, as evidenced by Google TV’s patterning itself on Android. The business world may soon approach an inflection point as the old-fashioned keyboard and mouse undergo a revolution. Mouses may even come to be seen as quaint and old-fashioned as touchpads on laptops and smart TVs and touchscreens on smartphones and tablets supplant the mouse’s old breeding grounds, the desktop computer.

The television industry is not particularly friendly to this shift; Web sites affiliated with television networks have blocked access to their content from Google TV and its competitors. (Cable companies are also lukewarm, perhaps because they don’t want to cannibalize their current “on demand” offerings.) Given that they’re obviously not blocking their content from any other browser, the only explanation I can think of is that they’re worried no one will have a reason to watch their regular, linear channel, with its greater number of ads, if they can watch the same thing on the same device through another avenue; like everyone else I called out in Part I, the television industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the inevitable future, not wanting to give up their current business models. But in doing so, they may be digging their own grave, for within a couple of decades, the very avenue they’re trying to block may be the regular channel.

My One-Month Review of HDTV

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I finally joined the twenty-first century earlier this year: our household finally got HDTV. Specifically, we got it the day before the Super Bowl, but couldn’t get actual HD service until the day after, meaning there was a period of less than 48 hours where we had to watch TV in pixellated stretch-o-vision, a period that just so happened to include, oh yeah, the single biggest reason to get HD in the first place. Oops.

I have to say I was never as swept off my feet by HD before as some people might have claimed. I was impressed at how certain graphics looked in HD when I happened upon various public displays of it, but I never felt the picture quality was such an improvement that I couldn’t bear to watch in SD, though as more and more channels (especially those showing sports) have gone letterboxed in recent years I could tell the writing was on the wall. To me, HD is just another way of saying “big”, as in, it keeps the effective picture quality of a big TV about the same, maybe a little sharper, as my old SDTV of half the size. If anything, I can say that I would never want to watch SD on an HD set.

But even though graphics were the thing that most impressed me about HD before, now that I’ve had a month of up-close-and-personal experience with it, I’ve gotta say… I’m not that impressed with the state of HD graphics.

Part of it is that a lot of graphics on a lot of channels are still designed for SD. They leave a lot of awkwardly-used space on the sides of the screen if their channel isn’t letterboxed, and they make the type too big if it is (which can affect even SD viewers). But a potentially bigger issue is that a lot of times, text in HD is just too sharp. It creates an odd air of artificiality that can come off as jarring, especially when it’s against raw video as a background.

Maybe I just need to get used to it, but I’m not sure that I totally agree with xkcd that we only see higher-quality video as somehow more fake only because of what it’s been used for. I think there definitely comes a point at which higher quality starts to become oddly artificial, perhaps even falls into an uncanny valley. At the very least, I would think any use of Helvetica on television should probably die pretty quickly.

Not that the opposite problem doesn’t exist; it’s one of my beefs with the March Madness graphics, but I’ll get to that at a later date. Also, while my own mockups of my own sports graphics concepts have often used black-on-white only because of my lack of creativity with colors, I now find it a rather stark contrast when I see it on ESPN and TNT’s basketball coverage. I’d say any use of solid blocks of color should probably be re-examined.

Finally, I have long bemoaned the lack of respect broadcast television receives, and how cable’s unfair advantages threaten the usefulness of free over-the-air television. When I grew up, there were broadcast channels and cable channels (and premium channels and pay-per-view channels), and they were all very well defined. But now… now I get the sense that HD really dissolves the distinction between broadcast and cable for the uninformed viewer, to a greater extent than before, even considering the effect of local stations and how iffy their graphics can be. Part of it may be that broadcast channels can have odd differences in quality from any cable channel on my cable system in SD, which disappears in HD. But if nothing else, it helps me realize how someone might not care so much for the declining state of broadcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The prospects of the unholy union of Comcast and NBC from a sports perspective

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There are a few things I don’t get about the Comcast/NBC merger. For one thing, how can Comcast own both its cable system and NBC’s owned-and-operated stations? (Answer: That would have been a problem a decade ago, but not now. Or maybe it is. Still, it’s one of many questions Comcast will have to answer to pass regulatory and Congress muster, and maybe Comcast wants to sell off the NBC network to a third party, as little sense as that seems to make.)

And as for the common notion that having NBC and Versus join forces could start creating a genuine competitor to ESPN… am I the only one who remembers Versus’ Jamie Davis saying back in March he didn’t want to be ESPN? Or would he now say “We didn’t say we didn’t want to compete with ESPN, just that we didn’t want to be ESPN,” even though he was explicitly responding to people’s expectations and Versus may have to drop their “focusing on certain audiences” tack if they want to compete with ESPN? Or would Versus drop its “not ESPN” shtick in a heartbeat given the opportunity, as evidenced by its past plays for NFL and MLB rights? Or maybe “We have a huge opportunity to create another sports brand in America” just as Versus hits a low point with the DirecTV dispute? And how do Versus and Universal Sports fit together, anyway?

Comcast certainly has a lot of resources now. If it can find the right synergy between Versus and Universal Sports, it now has its own equivalent to ESPN2 – though which is which, and whether they’re equals, or even if Comcast wants to emphasize one or two channels as opposed to the whole, I don’t know. (If they’re equals, does the Tour de France move to Universal Sports? It seems to fit that network’s Olympic-sport theme better…) More importantly, it now has its own broadcast network connection, regardless of how strong NBC is, as well as a start on a Spanish-language presence with Telemundo (and its sister mun2). Versus also now has a connection with a general-interest sports news website, and a Versus connection could help build the brand of NBCSports.com. Those are important bargaining chips in negotiations with sports entities, matching some of the exposure ESPN can give.

Comcast also has some things ESPN doesn’t have, mainly a collection of regional sports networks, though those will help Comcast with the brand more than with national sports rights, as Rupert Murdoch found. (“Oh, ESPN is launching a series of local web sites? Oh look, we already have them!”) It’s anyone’s guess how Comcast SportsNet will benefit from an alliance from NBC and whether it’ll seek greater synergy with Versus and Universal Sports. Those networks could benefit from synergies with NBC stations in the same market. Comcast also has its own video-on-demand service for its cable customers, as well as the Golf Channel. To do: Launch your own version of SportsCenter, get some sort of international presence, get a radio network so you can offer rights there, and overcome the fact that NBC is the only one of the four major networks without a connected college sports network. (Comcast brings the mtn., but that doesn’t count.)

But if Comcast wants to get serious about creating competition for ESPN, they may have an even more uphill climb than most people think, and it’ll be a decade-long process to achieve theoretical parity that’ll also cost a lot of money. It used to be that whoever controlled the NFL cable contract controlled the world of sports, but the BCS deal shows anything not under the scrutiny of Congress could conceivably move to cable, though even there there’s fairly slim pickings. Comcast would need to either somehow pick up a contract on the level of the NFL or BCS (and picking up an NFL contract in addition to ESPN’s is fairly unlikely, and with all their NFL programming and cable ratings records ESPN isn’t giving up their NFL rights without a fight), or find a way to overcome its lack of that kind of big-ticket contract – I don’t see Sunday Night Football moving to cable (unlike some), and the Olympics are not going to give Versus the kind of big-ticket events that draw ratings (most of which are not only already on NBC, but already in primetime).

That means Comcast will need to focus on lots of slightly lesser-ticket events, and that brings me to the blueprint I proposed for an “ESPN killer” in March. (Which seems to suggest look for Golf Channel to pick up the first two rounds of the US Open at the next opportunity…) They will still need at least one major professional sport – and not the Traditional Big Four, which would make the NHL count, but the Modern Big Four, which swaps out the NHL for NASCAR. The NHL counterpoints the NBA and IndyCar counterpoints NASCAR, so baseball – up in 2013 – would be a good fit. ESPN’s partnership with baseball is nearly as deep and long-lasting as its partnership with the NFL, but it seems to be being forced out – after having baseball nearly ubiquitous on the schedule a few years ago, it’s now down to Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday Night Baseball, and no longer shows any postseason games. Comcast could take one (probably Sunday), two (Mon/Wed), or all of those, while making a play for at least some postseason games. If an LCS remains on cable Comcast’s biggest coup would be to take it, giving it much-needed eyeballs. If it can’t get that (though I see this contract as TBS transitioning out of baseball entirely, by having an excuse to dump the Braves), it should go after the Home Run Derby as a consolation prize, consistently one of the highest-rated non-NFL sports events on cable.

Comcast might also be thinking about going after one other sport, just to get one more boost in eyeballs. But if it can’t add the NFL, NBA, or NASCAR, it’s time to start thinking about going after college football – but that opens up a whole new can of worms. NBC brings its Notre Dame contract and Versus already has a deal with the Mountain West and lower-tier Big 12 and Pac-10 games, but generally ESPN gets all the good stuff before Versus, and while Comcast is reportedly thinking about putting some lower-tier Notre Dame games on Versus, Notre Dame would be livid if another college football conference were to share time on NBC. (That could mean Notre Dame and NBC are done after 2015, and maybe then Notre Dame joins a conference.) But Comcast should ideally go after at least three BCS conferences – establishing themselves, at least perceptually, as ESPN’s equal.

Comcast has an interesting opportunity right now (if it’s fine with pissing off Notre Dame), but not a lot of time to take advantage of it (if negotiations aren’t so far along there’s no time at all), and probably can’t wait for the merger to pass regulatory muster (and by merely mentioning this idea out loud I probably doom it not to happen). After seeing the megadeals the SEC and Big Ten received, the Big 12 and Pac-10, finding themselves waiting a year behind the ACC for their share of the pie, have reportedly been thinking about joining with the ACC to form one coast-to-coast college sports network. Here’s an idea: Perhaps Comcast can convince all three of them to abandon ESPN entirely (perhaps one can remain on ABC) and put their games on NBC, Versus, and Universal Sports, plus join with Comcast to form the aforementioned college sports network, convincing them that the three of them combined, with their existing power, can form a college sports television power rivaling ESPN – taking care of your college needs in one fell swoop. Comcast could even take over the Raycom syndication empire and have a college syndication arm to match ESPN Regional Television. This doesn’t give you either of the two conferences that are powers in both football and basketball, the SEC or Big Ten, and it gives you the two weaklings in basketball in the Big 12 and Pac-10, but it does give you the powerhouse conference in basketball, and with it a major coup: the Duke-North Carolina rivalry. What will Dick Vitale do?!?

Versus shuns bowl games right now because it doesn’t fit its “total immersion experience” or something like that. That needs to change if it’s serious about building a college presence and taking on ESPN, and the contracts are on the line pretty much now for the next four years. Tip: The Alamo and Holiday bowls would provide Big 12-Pac-10 matchups. I would also go after either the MAC or Conference USA (the latter is up now, the former in 2016), just to create another even split of the mid-majors, even though that’s more to please me than for any actual ratings. (I’d also go after any two of the WCC (for Gonzaga), the CAA, or Horizon League, for basketball and an even split of those mid-majors, and maybe that College Basketball Invitational or College Insider tournament oddity.)

A union between Comcast and NBC might lead to big changes at Comcast’s sports networks – Dick Ebersol’s expertise might bring the quality of Versus, Golf Channel, and Comcast SportsNet more on par with NBC, and more importantly, ESPN. I also can’t help but wonder if the graphics on Versus shift to be more like the graphics on NBC or Universal Sports, and more consistent. (Versus’ college football and NHL score graphics have never looked very similar. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find modularity between any two of Versus’ sports score graphics, despite theoretically similar overall graphics.) And what happens with the US Olympic Committee? They wanted to launch their own network with Comcast, which raised the hackles of its partners since it didn’t form one with partner NBC or hitch on to Universal Sports. What happens with that project? Does it hitch on to Universal Sports? Does it form a new network with Comcast/NBC, or someone else? If it forms a new network with Comcast/NBC, does most of Universal Sports’ programming move there, clearing the way for US to become “Versus 2” or vice versa? Also, I don’t see any need for Versus to change its name – odd as it sounds, and odd as it sounded at the time, it’s better than “OLN” ever was and kind of fits in its own little way. I can see a contrast between ESPN and “Versus”. Not that I wouldn’t be surprised if Comcast did change the name, but it fits in with such NBCU channels as “Stealth” and “Chiller”.

Things could get very interesting over the next ten years (and potentially just the next five) as Comcast seeks to shake up the sports TV landscape… before the Internet overturns the TV landscape in general.