The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
"Sports" is not about to pop. Anecdotally, I would assert sports (NFL, NBA, futbol/ soccer) seem to be growing more popular to every day people.
What is potentially about to pop is the "entertainment" apparatus around Sports. Ie ESPN's programming the majority of hours per day that sporting contests are not airing.
It feels like ESPN is going the way of MTV. I doubt that music is less popular than it was in the 90s, but the one of its strongest previous consumption channels was disrupted by dozens of access/ consumption points - and simultaneously instead of dedicating themselves to airing music videos, MTV began to divert a lot of their airwaves (and I would assume resources) to reality TV and non-music video content.
ESPN (specifically) is in a similar position. On one hand, they appear to be working hard to offer streaming options - but they haven't gone all in on any type of consumption based or bulk access (to my knowledge)...
Instead, they put "characters" like Mike&Mike or Stephen A Smith to put on shows that are related to sports.
Unfortunately for ESPN there are too many content options (as well as competing sources for contract rights) for them to skate on thinly veiled sitcom characters and _very_ poor quality highlights in a world where we aren't locked in to 1 or 3 "channels" to access what is happening in the Sports world.
#1 is that ESPN doesn't own the rights to air all sports (1), they have rights to certain events or leagues to air games on certain nights. For example, ESPN only airs 1 NFL football game per week, which is on Monday night. CBS, Fox, & NBC air games (which are subject to localized markets) on Sundays at various times.
Another example, DirectTV (a satellite provider) offers a content package called NFL Sunday Ticket which gives subscribers the ability to stream any game live in any market (which is in many NFL fans opinion, the superior option).
... which brings another note to the parent topic - I would assert Sports (specifically the individual sport leagues) are effectively monopolies. The NBA is the professional basketball league in the USA. Its largely considered the best league in the world. It's product is very difficult to replicate. So those specific "properties" will continue to try to maximize their value as well as grow their audiences - and its not like you know Seinfeld is super popular so you can just write a new show and call it Friends.
2. When I was growing up, Sports highlights were ESPN's bread and butter. You couldn't watch every game the day or weekend before, so you watched ESPN that morning or night to see what happened and the spectacular plays. Well, now twitter or youtube or reddit are better sources of highlights than ESPN. They are on demand, close to real time, and (IMO) often higher quality.
3. Lastly, the "analysis" and ancillary Sports content that ESPN works hard at, is very competitive now. There are great podcasts and blogs for every sport and most teams. Those channels can be accessed almost anywhere - and they are often more "targeted" than what ESPN is offering.
For example, I am a Memphis Grizzlies NBA fan. Let's equate that to I'm an Enterprise SaaS fan. Well, r/MemphisGrizzlies is kind of like Jason Lemkin's SaaStr - a site dedicated primarily to my specific niche. ESPN would be more like TechCrunch at large.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ESPN_sports_properties
Sports subreddits are a prime example of how hardcore fans are finding more focused and higher quality venues to follow sports. The comments on r/NFL or r/NBA seem to be of a much higher quality than those on espn.com. As you said, over time it means fans just use those sites as their sports portal rather than espn.com or Sportscenter.
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> Anecdotally ...
Perhaps you should rethink the flow of your argument, here?
So I believe the author is possibly correct in his assertion that cutting off the money from non-fans (since fans will presumably pay in some way) will materially affect the valuation of these leagues.
i.e. the value from bundled programming profits don't get passed on to the NFL
With that premise and those numbers from the article, the crash will be something like a 35% drop in revenue (bounded by 25% and 50%) for sports teams when the transition from obfuscated to transparent pricing is complete. That seems like a big deal.
I'm not a [watching] sports fan — is BT Sport making much impact in Britain?
The logical error is assuming that sports franchises are overvalued just because the entertainment options that report on sports (ESPN) may be overvalued.
The OP is saying that reddit/r/cfb, reddit/r/nba, bleacher report, twitter, youtube etc. all now actively compete against ESPN's cash cow, highlights / analysis.
People are tuning in to live sports more than ever, and sports are the only consistent option for TV advertisers to capture viewers due to the importance of watching sports live.
Several major college football conferences will be renegotiating their TV rights over the next 36 months, including the Big 10. Most people expect it to be the highest price ever paid for TV rights because there are so few 'live' options left for advertisers and the Big 10's viewership is increasing rapidly. At the same time, less and less people think ESPN is important.
well put!
Since you cannot buy ESPN alone, we do not know who is cancelling ESPN because they never cared about ESPN and are simply ending their relationship with cable. I know that if it wasn't for live sports, I would not have cable and from talking to friends that also seems true. Those 7m subs that ESPN lost, may all be people who switched away from cable because ESPN wasn't important to them. If that is the case, ESPN may be able to actually get more value from less subs.
There are going to be a lot of bloggers out there that do not understand how value is migrating from one group to another. Its a complex problem for cable companies and ESPN and I think ultimately, sports franchises are going to be able to capture most of the value.
If it's not all noise, then there are a few different scenarios:
1. Some exogenous factor is causing more people to cancel in general than to sign up. This would mean that across the board every television content provider would be seeing similar subscriber loss as what ESPN sees. I'd argue that we're not seeing that, even though there is huge rage against the major cable providers. People are tuning into live sports on network TV more than ever ... so if they are doing that, yet ESPN sees consistent subscriber loss uncompensated by complementary new account sign ups, it's evidence that people are indeed choosing to drop ESPN specifically.
2. There could be an exogenous factor causing people to sign up for cable more than drop it -- in which case ESPN's subscriber loss would be even worse. I don't think we're seeing this either.
3. It could be the endogenous factor that ESPN's content offerings are no longer compelling. This is generally directly tied with advertising metrics, so if advertisers are putting a red flag on ESPN, you can bet that they did lots of due diligence to ensure they were measuring the right thing, and not some accidental side effect of exogenous changes in cable habits overall.
On this last point, I think it bears pointing out that ESPN has a lot of different digital properties. There is the WatchESPN app which provides a ton of free content that doesn't require anything but an internet connection, even though it also provides more premium content that does require you to obtain login credentials through a supported cable provider based upon your level of ESPN subscription.
It's very easy to see how they could use the overall viewership statistics of WatchESPN combined with the specific statistics based on the subset of viewers who actually log in via a subscription to watch WatchESPN content. From that you could derive reasonable estimates of the changing number of subscribers.
Add on to that things like fantasy sports accounts, "insider" subscribers, and so forth, and it should give you a decent holistic understanding of whether subscriptions overall are increasing or not specifically in response to ESPN's offerings.
The dramatic increase in the valuation of sports is largely due to it being one of the few remaining forms of entertainment that can still reach people with advertisements. Most people watching games want to do it live, which means they cant block or skip through commercials like they would with an everyday TV show.
Are they? As average IQ continues to rise (the Flynn Effect), I would expect to see fewer and fewer people being as heavily devoted to sports as previously, not because sports fans are stupid, but because intelligent people are capable of enjoying more than just sports. The folks in my D&D game like to talk about the game sometimes, but they have other fun things in their lives too.
If you are comparing fans of esports vs. D&D players, that gap would probably be narrow to non-existent.
Really? What do you base that claim on? The fact that lots of "geeky" people play D&D doesn't mean that the average person playing D&D is actually smarter than the average sports fan. In college I knew some smart people who played D&D, but I knew some dumb people who played it, too.
Also, attending college does not guarantee that one is above average intelligence. The average intelligence of college attendees is higher than the average intelligence of all adults, but there are certainly some college attendees with below-average intelligence.
As cord cutters increase the sports fans will decrease.
The money can only go up if the prices continue to go up to attend the games or watch live.
Personally I watch basketball and more and more esports have been more my focus. I don't watch football, baseball nor hockey which I did when I was younger.
NBA, MLB, NHL and many NFL and College basketball are not antenna sports for the most part.
So it's not that sports fans are stupid. It's just that non-stupid people aren't so interested in sports. Got it.
There has been and still is something of a shunning of sports among the "intelligentsia". There have been studies about it, and how people who wish to be perceived as smart tend to avoid the things viewed as common. That still continues but I think it's reducing in frequency at least with respect to sports.
I work with a lot of really smart people. A big chunk of them are invested in sports and discuss games at work, wear jerseys on Friday, etc.
Also, if the average person is really interested in sports, then generally rising IQ wouldn't change the number of people interested in sports. The number of average people is still the same when everyone's IQ rises.
No, it's that they have other things they are interested in. Rather than spending 50% of their time on sports, they might spend 10% of their time on sports and 40% on something else. That's not a negative thing: it's just indicative of the fact that the brighter one is the broader one's horizons.
> There has been and still is something of a shunning of sports among the "intelligentsia".
No doubt because sports is something at which one can excel while not being particularly intelligent. Again, that's not a negative statement: it's just that physical and intellectual ability don't seem (to me) to be highly correlated.
> I work with a lot of really smart people. A big chunk of them are invested in sports and discuss games at work, wear jerseys on Friday, etc.
I was very careful not to say that intelligent people hate sports, because I too know many intelligent people who enjoy them. All I'm suggesting is that I suspect that as IQ rises people will spend less of their time on sports because they will spend more of their time on other pursuits.
Has it occurred to you yet that your beliefs here might just be incorrect? You're clearly biased against sports and sports fans, and you're letting that affect your critical thinking.
Less intelligent people might spend 50% of their time on sports. They might also spend 0% of their time on sports. There are a million hobbies that people can have and relatively few of them have anything to do with intelligence. Smart people can (and do) watch sports, just as dumb people can (and do) hike, bike, fish, paint, cook, homebrew, and play D&D.
> it's just that physical and intellectual ability don't seem (to me) to be highly correlated.
That's true. There seems to be little correlation between the two. It's critical to realize that the two are not negatively correlated either, though.
> I was very careful not to say that intelligent people hate sports, because I too know many intelligent people who enjoy them. All I'm suggesting is that I suspect that as IQ rises people will spend less of their time on sports because they will spend more of their time on other pursuits.
I'm doubting that's really the case. Has interest in sports declined since the 1930s? Because measured IQ has certainly risen.
There's so much quality content produced for or available on on-demand streaming these days, to the extent of it being called the golden age of television, that when I have 2-3 hrs I could devote in front of the TV, I'm not going to give it up to a long sequence of commercial breaks. I'll catch the highlights of the game afterwards or just check the score on my phone.
That being said, going to live sporting event with friends always makes for a good time.
Not being live will hurt that option somewhat, but since most sports I watch are time-shifted anyway (F1 races in the middle of the night, Football games whenever I can find time to watch, etc), it's not that big a deal.
Actually, right now, there's a free week trial and an $85 for the remainder of the year option. For the free week, you have to cancel or they bill you automagically. But I'm thinking of giving it a try (I don't have cable, and I'm a fan of an out-of-market Football team).
Maybe a new request for startups could pop up, "Kill ESPN".
When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber.
7,000,000 * $78 = $546,000,000
Yeah, that's definitely not a blip.
The reason this affects sports leagues is because a huge chunk of their revenue comes from TV.
ESPN pays the NFL nearly $2B per year[1] just for Monday Night Football - or roughly 16 games a year. That's more than $100mm per game.
It's becoming pretty clear that ESPN isn't going to be able to afford TV rights deals like that for much longer. Which means the NFL is going to have to find someone else (there is no one else) or reduce its prices. When the sports league revenue drops, collective bargaining agreements will be disrupted and the result will be labor unrest and (potentially) team bankruptcy.
It's going to be entertaining to watch the entire industry implode before our eyes. When it's all over, we'll be able to enjoy sports as they should be - any game, streaming for a reasonable price, no blackout dates or other restrictions.
It's a shame an entire industry has to collapse to get a good user experience.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-exten...
Except NBC, CBS, FOX, Yahoo (hah), and the NFL itself via NFL Network, all of which already have contracts with the NFL which are worth more combined than ESPN's. For the NFL, having ESPN drop out would probably be a blip.
Perhaps, but worth noting that when NHL ended their relationship with ESPN business suffered.
While NFL is much larger, w/ greater and more diverse revenues, NHL suffered all sorts of unintended consequences, like reduced exposure when ESPN deprioritized hockey highlight packages.
* They had a small national contract with NBC and showed top games on OLN, a tiny cable sports network that mostly showed fishing. * OLN became Versus, which later became NBCSN (after Comcast & NBC-Universal merged). NBC airs the higher-profile games (many playoff games, marquee weekend matchups, and most outdoor games), so cable ratings will be a bit lower as a result. * Looking at the ratings for the final round, they're up more than 100% over the current period (2007 averaged a 1.2 rating, while last year's final scored a 3.2 rating; these ratings fluctuate greatly based on the teams taking part).
The NHL is interesting, since the hard cap puts them in a position to be able to slowly ratchet down without putting as much pressure on teams. On top of that, hockey has always been more gate-driven than TV-revenue-driven, so as long as attendance figures stay high, they'll be OK.
ESPN isn't losing subs because people are calling their cable companies and saying "I don't want ESPN". They're losing subs because people are cutting the cord.
1. The sports networks these companies have launched are all fledgling and receive a miniscule subscriber fee relative to ESPN.
2. All 3 broadcast their games over the air. Cordcutters undercutting (ugh) ESPN's ability to bid too much on NFL rights might bring down the price for NFL games a little bit, but there's still going to be plenty of demand not tied to cable subscriptions.
I'll concede that I don't know them any better than anyone else speculating on the matter, but I know for sure that all three networks get a per subscriber fee from cable companies like any other channel on cable.
The NFL has 15-16 games per week. Of those, 4 or 5 are on the local broadcast (three or four on CBS and FOX, one on NBC in the evening). If you want to access the other 11 games, you're reliant on cable-based access.
And the NFL is a unique animal here. MLB, NBA, and NHL are all completely reliant on cable-based delivery methods.
The sports networks these companies have launched are all fledgling and receive a miniscule subscriber fee relative to ESPN.
Fox Sports is not fledgling. They've been number 2 to ESPN for most of their history, and a huge number of NBA and MLB games are broadcast on Fox Sports.
Sports as an industry clearly needs cable subscriptions to support its current business model. And those cable subscriptions are reliant on people that don't watch sports paying for them anyway.
Eventually the sports industry is going to be forced, one way or another, to deliver a better user experience, and it's highly questionable whether or not they'll be able to generate the same revenue without the support of non fans that cable brings.
True, but you still have to pay the Sunday Ticket Premium of 300.00 or whatever it is now for the year. DirecTv paid 12b for it last time the contract was up, and my guess is they don't fully recoup in that in the Premium (part of the value is that it's DirecTv exlcusive). Whether the NFL can make as much selling the package (or a different one) a la carte is impossible to say.
Fox Sports is not fledgling. They've been number 2 to ESPN for most of their history, and a huge number of NBA and MLB games are broadcast on Fox Sports.
Fox Sports (and FSN aren't) but FS1, the non regional Fox network with the highest subscriber fee, is.
But I think I agree with you on a broad level that the sports other than football are going to have to rebuild their revenue structures (probably via direct access streaming) before the cable complex completely collapses. Football is largely, but not completeley insulated.
The argument for bundling is that it subsidizes production of the long tail of TV programming that would never exist if each production had to stand on its own feet.
But cable providers can't be satisfied with the status quo. They want more and more money, so they are killing the golden goose. Americans were perfectly willing to pay $30-50 a month for cable. Industry greed has kicked that up to $70-80.
It boggles my mind how utterly stupid they were to, not just negligently let this happen, but to work as hard as they can to force consumers to look for cheaper alternatives.
What's going on there is imho quite similar: By default it's expected that the costs of major sports events are largely payed by the public. But a large part of the population has no interest in that and asks why they should pay to make people rich that they don't care about.
It seems the sports complex is in large partsdepend ing on income payed by people that don't care about it. It's only good if that's going to end. Sports events should be payed for by the people who like it, not by everyone else.
Not a huge loss though, netflix helps make up for missing content.
http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/125/rec/1
> HBO NOW is a stand-alone streaming service that you can purchase from a participating provider (not part of a cable subscription).
The point is that the blanket statement, "And you can get HBO without getting cable," is correct but not complete. You still must flow through a provider, and the providers are not universally available. A random person with an internet connection and a computer cannot order HBO Now.
In fact I remember the panic from Sky when courts forced Sky to basically give up some of the EPL games. Sports is huge in the pay tv arena.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/170d365a-97ec-11e3-ab60-00144feab7...
[1] http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/tv/sport/premier-league
Honestly, sports have negative value to me, like ads. The manufactured excitement, the soap opera lives of the players, the constant assumption by the media complex that I must care about who plays and wins are draining. If I could pay for some sort of sports blocker which would prevent me from having to know about what sports season it is and what athlete is doing what, I would throw my money at it. Likewise for actors pontificating about science and politics…
But, ironically, I realized the main reason I watch video content is for sports. It's just sports that the ESPN world doesn't value. I watch every Formula 1 qualifying and race session, but ESPN doesn't care, and anyway, F1 coverage in the US virtually died with the death of Speedvision/Speed Channel.. it's only now coming back, but it sure ain't on ESPN.
About the only other thing I care about these days is the occasional NHL game and live football game, but I follow an out-of-market team and ESPN doesn't help me much there anyway. 99.9% of their content is drivel -- I simply don't care about the analysis or talk shows or sports center.
So, I guess I do value sports, but I sure as hell don't value ESPN, and I'm happy to cut off their funding.
Bring on unbundled content so we can vote with our dollars.
I haven't seen anything about changes to streaming in the new deal other than the contract leaves the issue open for negotiating a joint-partnership that could supersede previous limitations, which included teams in your local market, nationally televised games, and the playoffs.
I absolutely love NBA basketball and although I don't watch a ton of it, it probably makes up for 90% of my television watching while it's in season. But I have to pay a cable bill upwards of $100 / month to do so. I really hope professional sports follows the decoupling model and offers higher-value streaming options in the future.
The NFL's online offering is equally restricting, but local NFL games are generally broadcast over-the-air, so you can pick them up with an antenna, making cord-cutting easier.
I know outside of the US, they offer an international version that has it all and seems great, but they can't do that because of television deals in the US.
It's the weird straddling of "old model" and "new model," and the big players trying to catch up while keeping contracts happy. Up until this year, for example, when I watched my team play on their home channel, I'd get all the commercials too. So, same as being in-state. Now I just get a message about a commercial break.
The weird crux of it all is that you can watch many of the games if you want to wait 48 hours after the broadcast ends. However, in a world so connected, even not being on social media, even following a team 2,000 miles away from me, it's still hard to be purposefully oblivious to what's happening.
I was sorta hoping the next round of contracts would leap the content divide and make streaming a first-class citizen along the rest (I don't mind watching commercials while streaming, I'd assume that would just make those spots even more lucrative.) But it looks like we're still a couple years away from that.
Not that it's a great replacement, but I've really grown attached to listening to the audio-only streams through the NHL app. I'm pretty sure those aren't blacked out anywhere, and radio is still very entertaining. I especially love the crew in Ottawa and the crazy old man in Pittsburgh.
Of course, there's the whole weird, questionable business model world of hockeystreams.com -- which puts really high quality streams of all sorta of hockey games up live (not just NHL, but I believe AHL and others too), probably proxied in from other places that don't have all of the silly restrictions. Their site isn't much right now, they limit subscriptions and during the season it's all "use" mode and no "sell."
Also, I totally understand the hate from an Avs fan, and can only say, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, for the less technological among us, a cable subscription is required, which adds quite a lot to the price tag.
To me the deal seems more like the deals major A-list movie stars make: a cut of the up-front box office instead of a fixed salary. It's risky, but a massive upside if the movie is a hit.
If the NBA's revenue slides because of falling TV revenue, won't they be pulled down as well?
[And no blackouts etc. for Europeans...eventhough I'm not sure I think UK customers had some blackouts since the NFL is a pay TV option there...blackouts are a silly concept, glad we don't have them]
Can you share it? I am a NFL fan and quite hard to see the games live except pirated streams in low quality.
Pretty much every one of these deals turned into a financial disaster. The biggest of these was probably Mariah Carey, who ended up being paid $28m not to sing [1].
My point is that the presence of massive deals doesn't guarantee continued growth or success.
The most ominous part of this article is the loss of 7m subscribers. ESPN has managed to shake off--so far--the overall trend that cable TV is dying. The average age of TV viewers is increasing [2], which is bad for advertising and thus bad for revenue.
In the US, the more subscribers a cable or satellite TV company has, the more bargaining power they have, which translates to lower per-subscriber content costs. This is why Comcast wanted to merge with TWC. It's all about reducing TV costs. It's also why cable companies will practically give away TV (ie your cable Internet is under $20 with a TV package or $60+ without).
So for the last 10+ years, ESPN has managed to thrive in a market where demographic trends are ultimately against them. The flood waters are still rising and eventually you run out of dry land.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/us/record-label-pays-dearl...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/t...
I worked in the entertainment industry during this time.
Great point to remember specific to Mariah Carey was that she was originally signed by Tommy Mottola who she eventually married WHILE he was the head of the label (Columbia) & Music division. This 'business' decision had a very personal side. It was more than just a financial disaster.
Also, let's say this author is right, ESPN dies a slow death. How does that stop sports? ESPN doesn't have much (of the main sports) on it anyway. Sports games are on other networks. NFL - CBS,FOX. MLB - FOX,TBS. Soccer - NBC. NHL - NBC.
I'm sure the sports that are on ESPN can find an home elsewhere. I'm not sure the dog shows are raking in huge TV money from ESPN that some PETS CHANNEL can't cover.
This has allowed MLB teams to spend a great deal of money in the past 5-10 years as teams have signed ever-more-lucrative television rights deals with FoxSports and others. If non-cable media packages are luring more and more cable subscribers (HBO, Hulu+, SlingTV, Netflix, etc) the pool of non-sports watching people subsidizing these networks shrinks - this will force either prices to rise for actual sports watching customers, or it'll lower revenues for teams.
Rumor has it that MLB has been trying to push the RSNs to accept universal MLB.tv access for all regional markets, this at least makes the costs explicit - $100-140/season for each subscriber.
1. ESPN historically was making way more money than they should due to bundling.
2. ESPN is passing along a large percentage of this money to the sports teams in the form of media rights (aka they pay the NFL teams to show Monday Night Football).
3. ESPN is now on a downward path due to people opting out of bundles.
4. Sports teams will make less money overall after this shakes out as ESPN artificially bid up the market.
They run multiple channels 24/7 and a ton of their content is studio analysis-type shows, most of which I find absolutely terrible. I'm sure they have reasons for how they select and utilize the talent they have, but aside from a few writers and commentators, I have a hard time watching or reading anything they produce.
I was hoping they'd eventually figure out a way to do more Grantland-produced television, where someone with some journalistic and creative taste, as well as more creative freedom could develop, but that obviously did not happen. Maybe Bill Simmons will be able to do that with HBO and finally create a legit competitor to ESPN's non-live sports programming.
Their 30 for 30 films are awesome (thanks to Bill Simmons though, we'll see if it continues).
The biggest mistake the article made was conflating sport related spending with the housing bubble. The housing bubble blew because the last entrants into the ponzi were tapped out. The cost of sports is microscopic in comparison and very few people give up cable because they're completely and utterly tapped out. They just spend the $100 on something else. Probably a smartphone and some subscription services. Certainly the last entrant into the ponzi of paying a billion bucks for a team on the assumption you'll sell to a greater fool at two billion has not been reached, nor has the very last new sports fan been born yet.
The biggest oversight in articles of this type is no one wants to discuss bundling. The kind of business that forces all video subscribers to pay $30/mo for sports even if they're not sports fans, could, with just a couple clicks on a keyboard, change the bundle so all the cablemodem subscribers pay the same $30 extra for their cablemodem, but now it comes with free ESPN video or some kind of web access deal. There are, after all, only a handful of monopoly providers. So either pay $30 for ESPN, or disconnect yourself from the internet.
Trying to avoid paying for sports is like trying to avoid paying for organized crime. Or disorganized crime, for that matter. Unfortunately you can either pay up, or leave the geography and culture entirely. The government and corporations certainly are not going to help us because they are the organized crime in this analogy.
You still "pay for ESPN" in the sense that TWC prices low-end internet-only packages to be uncompetitive with cable+internet bundles, but if you opt for the internet-only package TWC keeps the money. This works out great for TWC but not so much for ESPN or sports fans used to subsidy.
I'm a huge football fan and while I still watch live games on ESPN and the major networks, I find most of my analysis and commentary online. At the moment a substantial percentage of that is from ESPN, but more and more I'm getting it from Reddit, sports-specific web sites like Pro Football Talk, and -- the channel most ready for the future -- NFL Network.
Sure, I'd pay the NFL $99 for the Sunday ticket package. Take DirecTV out of the picture. That's only a couple bucks per week.
As people that don't care about sports on TV ditch cable for streaming, that will just increase the budget pressure on all sports networks.
If there is, the change probably happens incredibly swiftly.
The commercials that are aired during sporting events make me feel like my IQ drops 30 points just watching them.
No, can't do it. No NFL for me.
1) Most of the high profile ESPN personalities departing had little to do with finances. Some of it was internal feuding (ie, the Bill Simmons departure), some of it was firing loose cannons for boorish statements that don't fly in our hyper-PC culture, and some of it was people leaving for more money from competitors. As others have noted, for a company the size of ESPN the salaries of a few high profile personalities are mostly negligible.
2) Same thing with the Grantland shutdown -- the site was never realistically expected to be a money maker, it was essentially shut down because the departure of Simmons made the site's future unclear, and ESPN decided to get out of the pop culture business and fold the sports writing back into their main site.
3) A lot of ESPN's cutbacks are because they (foolishly) forecast their finances on the assumption that subscriptions would continue to grow. That doesn't mean the well has dried up, it just means that they've been a bit reckless the past few years.
4) I think this is excluding that a lot of sports are consumed on the free broadcast stations (CBS, NBC, FOX, etc.). Even with cable folding, those networks are still going to be paying billions for TV rights.
That said I agree with the overall gist of the argument that valuations are going to drop when the cable money starts drying out. I just don't think it's going to be a catastrophic crash or something; I doubt the average consumer will even notice.
Discovery expects Eurosport app to reach one million subs in two years
Discovery Communications Chief Executive David Zaslav said he expects its Eurosport Group's player app to reach one million subscribers in two years and that it will bring an additional $100 million in revenue.
"It's a big initiative," he said about the Eurosport app.
Discovery took a controlling ownership position in the European sports broadcaster last year. The app currently counts about 200,000 subscribers.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-discovery-eurosport-idUSKB...
Disclosure: I have been a subscriber since 2012, it costs about $5 a month. It is the only "tv" I watch. You get 2 regular sports channels. At the moment it is mostly Winter Sports: Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Ski-jumping etc. With Snooker & Tennis. Summer is two wheeled action: Tour de France, World Superbikes plus World Touring Cars, Tennis, and a whole host of sports you can't get anywhere else.
We even had minority sports like American Monday Night Football ;)
:(
I suspect we will see much more direct interaction with teams & athletes, off-season live events, AR & gaming tie-ins, etc. We will move from passive, centralized TV consumption to more distributed, interactive interaction.
Sports, as entertainment, is still very healthy, even if the mediums and peripherals are changing.
So I cancelled cable TV, saved $100/month. Put some of that money into Netflix. And pay for streaming coverage of cycling events as-needed.
You can get the highlights of pretty much any event with a simple search, so why pay to watch the whole thing? Sure, now and again a Champions League match could be good, but if people are like me, they'll mostly just have a look at the highlights. And I'm guessing there's a lot more marginal consumers than massive fans.
My sense is that the hardcore fans are still there, but a lot of casual followers are slowly being peeled away into other immersive experiences - well written TV, social media communities, deeper and deeper gameplay experiences. Additionally, gathering a bunch of people into a room to watch something isn't as much of a draw with the constant connectivity of smartphones. My girlfriend is a
When you add the dinosaur economic model controlling the medium and the rising sensitivity to the brain damage that football causes, I wouldn't be too surprised to see a more perceptible downturn.
This sounds like a "collapse of complex societies" in which the Roman Empire can expand as long as there are increasing returns to complexification, but collapses when the yields of complexification plateau and there is instead declining marginal productivity. http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse...
I don't think the sportstainment industry will see a bursting of the bubble, so to speak. I do think instead, people who consume sports and sportstainment will simply pay more to make up for the suckers that were pitching in without ever realizing it.
There are sports fans out there that are cable-cutters, but not as many as you would think. Sooner or later, sooner if they have any sense, ESPN will move to the HBO Now type of model. That will bring many of them back.
And, I really resent the 'ESPN tax' on cable bills, although now it is sometimes possible to unbundle that.
Sports bars are very alive and well in Chicago. Atypical for the US as a whole.
For example: the BBC shows some F1 races in their entirety and the rest are aired as highlight packages after-the-fact, while all races are shown on Sky Sports F1. In the US, NBC airs a select few races in their entirety (Monaco, Canada, and the US GP), while NBCSN shows the rest of the races live as well as tape-delay full-race repeats. NBC can be accessed over-the-air for free, but NBCSN is typically an add-on to a cable bundle, so you're paying $60+/mo to have access to that channel for (if you're only an F1 fan) at most 12 hours of content a month.
It seems like ESPN gets bundled in as default with any extended package in the US. In the UK, sport is something you quite specifically have to sign up for - it doesn't get bundled with anything else because they assume not everyone is into sports.
popular sports became filthy moral dump where elite tries to outsmart doctors in doping tests, cares primarily about PR and chasing sponsors, and the sport itself sits somewhere out there, like a necessary, but not that important part if it all. honest, pure sportsman doesn't stand a chance in such a crowd.
I choose not to support these "sports" anyway, ignore them and couldn't be happier. I focus on activities where athletes are doing it without massive cash incentives, because they love it.
And since my sports include climbing, alpinism, ski touring etc. which at any point hold small risk of major injury or death, fear is semi-constant part of whole experience and overcoming your fear is necessary for any success at all... these sports discussed look very "meh" compared to it.
Some real-people example - this Lebron James guy mentioned here today vs say Ueli Steck, or Alex Honnold.
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-prof...
I'm a nerd and I'm not big into the NBA (although I am into other sports) and I think if you can't figure out what is impressive about Lebron James then I think you're maybe not really trying to.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nfl-controversy/still-playi...
http://www.ranker.com/list/famous-athletes-convicted-of-sexu...
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/nfl/arrests/
The main difference between prison guards, LEO, lawyers, soldiers, is that these people are famous celebrities. They're looked up to as role models.
And for them to be allowed to continue to play after these acts perpetuates a culture of rape and violence.
He's about to be. He just signed a lifetime deal with Nike[0] which will undoubtedly make him a billionaire, in a similar vein to what Jordan did with the "Air Jordan" brand.
[0] http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2596728-lebron-james-nike...
Remember that just because both your passion and someone else's passion are vaguely related to "sports" does not mean they're the same. There are other things people get out of it.
As another example, no one can quite explain the allure behind "Let's Play" videos, for example. Why would someone watch someone else playing videogames?! But they're still growing in popularity.
The one thing that does differentiate the mountains from organized sport is that there are situations, both obvious and subtle, that will harm or kill the uninformed without warning or recourse.
Steck and Honnold are absolutely getting paid; they're under intense social and fiscal pressure to perform. I hope they're both still climbing thirty years from now.
Alex Lowe's, 'The best mountaineer in the world is the one having the most fun,' is still true today. At some point, perhaps after an injury or losing a friend, risk for risk's sake loses its appeal, and the search for sustainable joy begins.
But, to reach my real point, if you stroll past a church-league softball game, you'll discover the soul of American sport. It's fun.