Warner+Fox+ESPN streaming service

[Jockey]

Cable is done. It is a money losing business. The future is streaming.

Yes the future is streaming. No, cable is not done. The business is not losing money. Comcast gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $45.751B. Same story with Spectrum.

That will change in the future - but the future is still quite a ways off. As long as there is little difference in price, cable companies will be OK.

[Not A Serious Person]

Yes the future is streaming. No, cable is not done. The business is not losing money. Comcast gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $45.751B. Same story with Spectrum.

That will change in the future - but the future is still quite a ways off. As long as there is little difference in price, cable companies will be OK.

Effectively, cable exists for one reason: to deliver live sports. If that is changing starting this fall with sports streaming apps, then cable usefulness will quickly go the way of broadcast TV.

And, yes, there is no real point in building a $40 to $50/month sports streaming app if you leave live sports on cable to compete with it. So expect it, over time, sports to disappear from cable. (Maybe cable gets delayed replays)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/10/10/with-cord-cutting-cable-tv-industry-is-facing-financial-challenges/?sh=36e0484a756c

According to Nielsen, cable penetration reached its high-water mark in May 2011 when 90.7% of all TV households (105.1 million) had subscribed to cable television. Fast forward to September 2023, Nielsen counts 75.3 million multi-channel households accounting for 60.8% of all TV homes.

With the loss of subscribers, in third quarter 2023, there were only three cable networks averaging over one million primetime viewers, Fox News, MSNBC and ESPN. Back in 2011, there had been 19 cable networks that surpassed an average audience of over one million primetime viewers.

---

One of the few bright spots for cable television will continue to be live sports. S&P reports in 2022 ad revenue from live sports grew by 2.8% reaching $4.3 billion. For the 2023-24 upfront, with a writer’s strike and a sluggish ad economy, live sports continued to be a popular genre with advertisers with reports of CPM increases in the +5% range. A number of live sports such as NFL Thursday Night Football, several MLB games each week and MLS among others are now exclusive to streaming platforms.

[Jockey]

You’re just as wrong on this as you are on everything else.

Less than 20% of pay-TV households watch ESPN for 3+ hours each month. I think it’s in the 1-2% range that watch 12hours a month. The huge majority of people are not big sports fans.

So feel free to copy/paste a 2000 word essay in response - but you will still be wrong

[Not A Serious Person]

You’re just as wrong on this as you are on everything else.

Less than 20% of pay-TV households watch ESPN for 3+ hours each month. I think it’s in the 1-2% range that watch 12hours a month. The huge majority of people are not big sports fans.

So feel free to copy/paste a 2000 word essay in response - but you will still be wrong

You just repeated what I said and called me wrong.


And why are you always do angry about everything?

[THRILLHO]

You just repeated what I said and called me wrong.


And why are you always do angry about everything?

Then I guess we learned how much shorter your posts could be!

[79Warrior]

You’re just as wrong on this as you are on everything else.

Less than 20% of pay-TV households watch ESPN for 3+ hours each month. I think it’s in the 1-2% range that watch 12hours a month. The huge majority of people are not big sports fans.

So feel free to copy/paste a 2000 word essay in response - but you will still be wrong

Interesting. Then why do sports rights fees generate so much revenue for the leagues and conferences? If the huge majority are not sports fans, why do networks pay so much to air the games?
What advertiser wants to advertise on a program where a huge majority of viewers don't watch?

[MU82]

Interesting graphic on this topic from Yahoo Finance:

[Uncle Rico]

Interesting graphic on this topic from Yahoo Finance:

Finally, the woke NFL will go broke

[Jockey]

Interesting. Then why do sports rights fees generate so much revenue for the leagues and conferences? If the huge majority are not sports fans, why do networks pay so much to air the games?
What advertiser wants to advertise on a program where a huge majority of viewers don't watch?

basically all of them

[ATL MU Warrior]

Interesting. Then why do sports rights fees generate so much revenue for the leagues and conferences? If the huge majority are not sports fans, why do networks pay so much to air the games?
What advertiser wants to advertise on a program where a huge majority of viewers don't watch?

Even if an NFL game does a 20 rating that means 80% of the people who were watching TV during that time were watching something else.  AKA huge majority.

[MU82]

What advertiser wants to advertise on a program where a huge majority of viewers don't watch?

Well, lots. Why? Because live sports is the one thing that millions upon million of people watch without fast-forwarding through commercials. It’s also an audience that can be targeted in specific ways. It’s also an audience that has passion for the things it likes.

Which is why the bidding for rights just keeps going up.

Will it keep going up forever? I doubt it; nothing lasts forever. But for the foreseeable future, advertisers will keep going where they have a captive audience they want to reach.

[Jockey]

Even if an NFL game does a 20 rating that means 80% of the people who were watching TV during that time were watching something else.  AKA huge majority.

Plus a lot of the population isn't even watching TV which brings that 20% much lower.

[ATL MU Warrior]

Plus a lot of the population isn't even watching TV which brings that 20% much lower.

Correct

[Not A Serious Person]

A good breakdown of the new sports streaming service in this weekend's WSJ

Some passages are below.  Here is the bottom line from an economic point of view.

--

The new streaming service will cover Disney (All ESPNs, ABC, ACC, SEC), Fox (Fox Networks, FS1, BTN) and Warner (TBS, TNT, TruTV)

It will cover about 55% of all sports streaming rights. It is expected to cost $40/$50 per month (after initial promotions to get sign-ups).

It will NOT include Peacock, Paramount, and Amazon (at least not yet). They also have NFL games. So, signing up for all these (new streaming services, Paramount, Peacock, and Amazon) will push $75 to $100 a month to get all the NFL and most other sports offerings. And, if you're into other sports (tennis, golf, European sports,  local MLB, etc), this will be extra, up to $25 to $50/month, depending on how much you want.

To break even, the new streaming service will need 6 million people to sign up at $40/month.  And if they get 6 million, this is the toll everyone else will have to pay to watch.

The price of tickets/parking/concessions to go to live sports events on a regular basis is priced for the top 10% in income or others that have to make serious sacrifices in other areas to budget for it.

Watching sports seems to be heading down this same road.

------

The Frantic Blitz to Figure Out Sports Streaming
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/disney-fox-warner-blitz-to-figure-out-sports-streaming-b5b8d8a9
Disney, Fox and Warner’s venture to bundle live sports content—the latest hit to traditional cable packages—needs to cover high costs and keep leagues on board

The as-yet-unnamed service, expected to launch this fall, will carry 14 networks, including Disney’s ESPN channels and its ABC network, Warner’s TNT and TBS, and Fox’s broadcast network and sports cable channel. The service will feature sports including the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, college football and basketball, golf and Nascar.

Now, the cable industry is reaching a tipping point: Only 73 million households subscribe to pay-TV, either through traditional distributors such as Comcast or internet versions of cable like YouTube TV, down from about 100 million a decade ago, according to MoffettNathanson. The rate of decline has picked up pace since streaming really started to take off in 2019, when multiple services beyond Netflix became popular.

Even with all the sports games the planned service will offer, it still won’t be a complete, all-in-one sports platform, partly because Comcast’s NBC and Paramount’s CBS aren’t part of the partnership. NFL fans would still need CBS to watch Sunday afternoon football, NBC’s Peacock for Sunday night football and Amazon Prime Video to watch Thursday games.

The biggest losers in cable’s collapse will likely be the owners of local TV stations and smaller entertainment networks, from A&E to AMC to Comedy Central and Syfy, that are the most dependent on cable TV. Shares of Scripps, owner of 61 local stations, are down 24% since the sports venture was announced.

By packaging together all the content, the companies are hoping they can bring in enough sports-first customers to make the economics work. Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall projected, based on various assumptions, that the service could break even if around six million subscribers paid at least $40 a month.

The companies are discussing a price that could approach $50 a month, people familiar with the situation said.

The collaboration by three giants to pool a huge amount of sports programming—Citi analysts peg it at 55% of U.S. sports rights—could draw antitrust scrutiny. Smaller rivals have already raised alarms.

[Uncle Rico]

I ain’t reading all that.  Very happy for you or very sad for you.

[FairWeatherEagle]

A little bit of a tangent for trailer trash like myself who don't have streaming or cable and it's on a FOX thing like FS1,etc..
Use foxsports.com , scroll to live stream options, view for their 60min trial....when out ( or at a convenient break), close window, clear all cache, and repeat.
Careful you don't end up in fox sports app rather than browser...no cache to easily clear.
Not sure if it works in duckduckgo or incognito browsers...haven't tried.
Anyway as I said, a trailer trash way of streaming most MU (FS1) games.

[El Guerrero 2]

This should be good news for Big East contract negotiations, right? Now the football money is set, and Fox needs to go after other sports and hopefully differentiate with college basketball. Or is there another angle to these TV wheelings and dealings?

https://theathletic.com/5272749/2024/02/13/college-football-playoff-espn-media-rights-deal/?redirected=1&source=googlesearch&access_token=12973123

[muwarrior69]

The only sport I watch entirely are MU basketball games. If the score is close I might watch the closing innings of a Yankee or Met game or the closing minutes of a Giant or Jets game. I don't follow pro Basketball or the NHL. I do watch March Madness and I just happened to catch the last play of the Super Bowl. So not much of a sports guy in my old age.

With this new streaming service are they pulling ESPN and FS off the cable and satellite providers? If not, I'll just keep watching DirecTV and since MSG is our local market my son-in-law can watch all his Ranger games.

[dgies9156]

OK, let's look very hard at cable and ask, are they really gone?

Cable was started for cities, like Dubuque, Iowa, that needed better television reception. It was originally CATV, or Community Antenna Television. Ted Turner and Time Warner morphed it into the monster it became in the 1980s through the 2010s.

For those of you who remember, cable was like what telephone was before 1982. There was one provider for much of the nation -- AT&T through its regional affiliates. Phone service lacked innovation and long-distance calls were ungodly expensive because they effectively subsidized universal service. Telephone service as we know it today would not have existed if a consent decree with the Justice Department had not occurred in 1982. That broke AT&T into pieces and effectively spurred innovation. Services were unbundled and then rebundled.

Technology did the same for cable. We now can have YouTube TV, which is an internet cable. We have an internet provider (mine, ironically, is AT&T) and we decide on our own what bundle of services we bring through the internet portal. What I expect to see from cable providers is that they become their own version of YouTube TV and offer their service over the internet the same way any other app would. For the sports consortium, this means either generating enough subscriptions to earn a market based rate of return after marketing and rights fees or the idea will fail.

For those of you who say, "I only watch this... or that..." the sports app is not for you. But I'm guessing they think there is enough demand nationally to warrant such a consortium.

One side note to all of the new apps: What does it mean for local television? Like what the internet did to local newspapers, I'm wondering how long it will be before local television starts dying. My children's generation hardly ever watches local television -- indeed, the apps to which they subscribe don't even carry it. How long will it be before Morgan and Morgan or Gruber Law pulls its ads from over-the-air stations and instead targets app programming? In Florida, if I see another "Legal in Florida" ad for Hard Rock Casino sports betting on Hulu or Amazon, I'm going to be sick!

[Not A Serious Person]

This should be good news for Big East contract negotiations, right? Now the football money is set, and Fox needs to go after other sports and hopefully differentiate with college basketball. Or is there another angle to these TV wheelings and dealings?

https://theathletic.com/5272749/2024/02/13/college-football-playoff-espn-media-rights-deal/?redirected=1&source=googlesearch&access_token=12973123

ESPN paid $600 million for the 2024 College Football playoffs this year. That was three games (two semifinals and the Championship).  $200 million/game

Next year, the College Football playoffs will expand to 12 teams. That is 11 games. (4 first-round games with four byes, four quarterfinal games, two semifinal games, and the Championship). ESPN is paying $1.3 billion/year for all these games. $118 million/game.

Honest question: is this progress? Or is there a warning signal that broadcast rights are peaking?

And ... get your credit card out if you want to watch these names, probably in 2026. They will likely be on the new sports streaming service at $50/month.

Of course, Fox is already part of this new sports streaming service. So, in 2026, everyone here will happily pay $50/month from November to March ($250) to watch Big East/MU basketball ... right?

[Uncle Rico]

ESPN paid $600 million for the 2024 College Football playoffs this year. That was three games (two semifinals and the Championship).  $200 million/game

Next year, the College Football playoffs will expand to 12 teams. That is 11 games. (4 first-round games with four byes, four quarterfinal games, two semifinal games, and the Championship). ESPN is paying $1.3 billion/year for all these games. $118 million/game.

Honest question: is this progress? Or is there a warning signal that broadcast rights are peaking?

And ... get your credit card out if you want to watch these names, probably in 2026. They will likely be on the new sports streaming service at $50/month.

Of course, Fox is already part of this new sports streaming service. So, in 2026, everyone here will happily pay $50/month from November to March ($250) to watch Big East/MU basketball ... right?

ESPN?  I thought they went out of business

[Mr. Nielsen]

With this new streaming service are they pulling ESPN and FS1 off the cable and satellite providers? If not, I'll just keep watching DirecTV and since MSG is our local market my son-in-law can watch all his Ranger games.

Not at all.

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

ESPN paid $600 million for the 2024 College Football playoffs this year. That was three games (two semifinals and the Championship).  $200 million/game

Next year, the College Football playoffs will expand to 12 teams. That is 11 games. (4 first-round games with four byes, four quarterfinal games, two semifinal games, and the Championship). ESPN is paying $1.3 billion/year for all these games. $118 million/game.

Honest question: is this progress? Or is there a warning signal that broadcast rights are peaking?

The first round and quarterfinals are less valuable properties. I also haven’t seen when these games will be played, if there’s any overlap, etc.

[Not A Serious Person]

Not at all.

Not initially, but the medium to longer-term plan is to exit cable and make sports fans pay the full freight via streaming subscriptions.

[wadesworld]

Not initially, but the medium to longer-term plan is to exit cable and make sports fans pay the full freight via streaming subscriptions.

I hope you and Scoop are still around to gloat in all your glory when you are finally, years from now, correct.