Pac 12 heading to Apple?

PAC 12 Conference News
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Interesting snip from The Athletic:

When a headline about a potential broadcaster for your games draws a negative reaction, you’re not in a good place.

The Pac-12 is nearing dire straits right now. There’s no other way to put it. The New York Post’s report Tuesday that Apple TV+ is a potential landing spot for Pac-12 sports landed like a lead balloon among fans, and for understandable reasons.

It doesn’t mean the league is about to fall apart or that it can’t still secure a good enough TV deal for the short-term future. It will probably be OK. But the Pac-12 may be the canary in the coal mine for college conferences outside what is becoming the Power 2 of the Big Ten and SEC.

Streaming won’t be the answer to saving college football as we know it. We know this because streaming isn’t saving TV.

You can’t completely blame Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff. He needs to find some other interested bidders to gain some sort of leverage in negotiations with ESPN after he inherited an incredibly difficult situation from former commissioner Larry Scott. Fox, a current Pac-12 media partner, has expressed little interest in the league with USC and UCLA on their way out. NBC and CBS also appear set when it comes to college football. The Big 12’s decision to renegotiate earlywith ESPN and Fox and take a larger-but-under-market deal for the sake of security was a smart move to outflank the Pac-12 that also highlighted how far it, too, is from the Big Ten and SEC.

For years, forecasters predicted the sports TV money bubble was about to pop. They said there would be a limit to how far broadcasters would pay for live sports as cable subscribers went down. “TV Sports a Spectacular Bubble” read a Forbes headline in 2013. But as cable subscribers began to slump, it became clear that live sports were the only thing saving television from dropping even further, increasing their value. The NFL had 75 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2021, so the NFL has continued to get more and more money from the networks. The Big Ten and SEC, with their large audiences, are about to take another financial jump up with their new TV deals. The 12-team College Football Playoff will be another boost, with Fox expressing interest in joining ESPN as a potential broadcaster.

Amazon is paying more than $1 billion per year for Thursday Night Football because it’s the NFL. It made a play for the Big Ten because it was the Big Ten. Even Apple, the most valuable company in the world, reportedly let the NFL take Sunday Ticket to YouTube TV in part because Apple didn’t want to increase its price for customers.

If you’re not the NFL, Big Ten, SEC, NBA, CFP, World Series or the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, your negotiating leverage may begin to fade as the biggest leagues take up more.

Take it from returning Disney CEO Bob Iger, who on a recent earnings call expressed a desire to keep NBA rights but said: “ESPN has been selective in the rights that they bought. I’ve had long conversations about this with (ESPN president) Jimmy Pitaro. And we’ve got some decisions that we have to make coming up — not anything particularly large, but on a few things, and we’re simply going to have to get more selective.”

ESPN used to own college football. Now it lost the Big Ten and does not see the Pac-12 as such a priority as to overpay. Iger also said that while ESPN+ has grown nicely, he does not want to commit to an all-streaming ESPN or spin the company off unless it makes financial sense.

And that’s the dirty not-so-secret about streaming: It’s not actually working. The boom is over.

Disney’s direct-to-consumer business — which includes Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu — lost more than $4 billion in 2022. The financial losses continue to climb even as subscribers grow. It’s a big reason Disney stock is down 31 percent over the past year. NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost around $2.5 billion for the year, and CBS’ Paramount Plus also lost around $1.8 billion. These companies planned to lose lots of money and aimed for profitability by 2024 or 2025, but there is little sign of that yet. Dramatic cuts have come across the board.

Fox’s decision not to jump into the standalone streaming game and instead focus on the biggest live sports like the NFL, college football and the World Cup, has proven to be a more successful strategy thus far. It has increased its market share in college football, and despite the loss of cable subscribers, this year’s Super Bowl on Fox was the third-most-watched game ever and the highest in six years. As Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks put it on a Sports Business Journal podcast, speeding up into streaming also speeds up the decline of linear TV, your actual money-maker.

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Ion Television (whatever the hell that is) has entered the chat. From McMurphy:

Apple still has not made formal offer for Pac-12’s media rights, but ION television has emerged as a potential Pac-12 partner, sources told @ActionNetworkHQ. ION TV is owned by E.W. Scripps Company, which has 61 local TV stations nationwide & launched Scripps Sports this year

https://twitter.com/Brett_McMurphy/status/1629173014662111234

Sigh…

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I do think it’s hard - most of the networks and even ESPN to some extent have the inventory they generally need/want. The world has changed, esp. outside SEC/B1G and it’s just not as lucrative. I think the BIG12 deal was a smart move (jumping in early to fill inventory gap), leaving PAC a little behind and at a disadvantage on the leverage side. Late games are needed, but they just aren’t worth as much.

I also don’t think it’s as bad as media is saying - I think the silence is killing them so just trying to drum up ideas and crap. Rumors are they will announce the deal during the MBB CCT - hope they are true and we can see what it is and be done. Probably won’t be as good as hoped for and not as bad as others make it out to be. New reality and probably no one outside SEC/B1G gets as big deals anymore. Only a few sports are completely worth it - see the list in the snipit @LAUte posted above.

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This is how I view Dennis Dodd, and other pundits. And of course the “higher ups” that the Zoobs love to “know” and reference.

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ION is available on a basic DishNet package …. in standard def. :man_facepalming:t3::man_facepalming:t3::man_facepalming:t3:

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Is it the channel next to O (is that Oprah one still on)? Where do I view Wayne’s World - still public access?

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Here’s some interesting points by somebody named SoonerUte in comments on the DNews article, responding to CougFan salivations about the B12 raiding the PAC:

The Big12 gets revenue increase for expansion only if they add a P5 school. If they add a G5 like Boise or Fresno or Gonzaga, conference members take a smaller piece of the pie.

The P5 revenue increase only applies to the ESPN portion of the contract, not Fox, so they take a hit with any expansion. Adding 4 teams to the Big12 reduces the per team share to $28M.

In your example of $22M for the PAC, schools would decide if a $6M difference is enough to cover the added expenses of east coast travel for conference games.

Pac-12 media partner: Who leaked the Pac-12 was talking to Apple? - Deseret News

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I was listening to ESPN700 (Checketts) while running an errand. He had a guest (the very reliable John Canzano) who thinks a lot of misinformation is being pumped out into the sports media by people with agendas (and he hinted that ESPN was one of the entities doing that). He singled out McMurphy as doing questionable reporting. He noted that Apple would have some advantages, like airing games during the daytime (when people in Central and Eastern time zones can watch and the Pacific and Mountain fans can make a day of it seeing a game). Also noted, rather pointedly, that ESPN is not the Pac-12’s friend, and never has been.

Interestingly, he thought SMU would make a decent partner. It would give us the Dallas-Fort Worth TV market, and a loyal fan base with money. FWIW.

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Not Pac 12 but sports broadcasting news:

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Am I missing something? Or are you including SMU being added.

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It’s where old shows go to die.

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Yup. SMU adds Central.

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If I’m reading this correctly, Wilner sees ESPN as an important partner for the PAC-12 even if it’s not its only partner.

“What’s more, a financial arrangement with ESPN would help ensure that its narrative-setting studio shows discuss Pac-12 teams, coaches and players on a regular basis.”

sports360az . com/2023/02/pac-12-media-rights-kliavkoff-has-made-no-secret-about-his-strategy-and-interest-in-streaming-companies/

I agree with what you folks are saying, that it seems plausible that ESPN is trying to push the value of the PAC-12 down to get the best deal possible for ESPN. That Pete Thamel article this week was pretty devastating, and likely created a lot of fear, potentially by design.

Apple is notoriously a difficult partner, it will be interesting to see how these egos come together. If the PAC 12 can get ESPN exclusively, even if a bit less, that seems ideal.

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The Alliance lives on, sans Kevin Warren? That would be a twist.

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Personally, I’m against it. To me, tailgating is a big part of game day. Late afternoon or evening games are perfect for tailgating. Games that start at 10:00 or 11:00 leave very little if any time for tailgating. Those that say one or two hours of tailgating is enough just aren’t doing it right. :wink:

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Noted, with a solution: our cultural leaders in the 70s and 80s spoke about “partying 'till the break of dawn”. It’s time to resume that practice.

(Granted, that didn’t work too well in our Game Day noon kickoff against TCU in 2010, but… uhhh… we need to honor our cultural forefathers, or something.)

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I keep telling my wife that but can’t seem to win the battle. :slight_smile:

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The biggest problem is that, of the two hours of tailgating, at least an hour to an hour and a half would be used getting set up and the cleaning up and tearing down. I, and others in our group, like to wander around the lot and visit with friends in other parts of the lot. 10:00 or 11:00 kickoff times won’t work for that. Just my opinion. Those kickoff times would interfere with folks who have kids involved in youth sports as well.

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See this is where people lose me. Tailgating Pre and Post is where it’s at. You have a couple hours before game and then you tailgate after till the campus police throw you off campus. lol

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FWIW, the canary in the coal mine we all need to worry about came out during the NBA All Star Weekend report from Adam Silver. In short, the NBA is seeing a declining regular season viewership. Game attendance is still holding strong. Haven’t heard how the NFL did last season. A chunk of MLB lost their local regional broadcast partner to bankruptcy yesterday.

Given the overall declines in subscription to cable and satellite TV, and the timing of this negotiation, we may have just landed ourselves a front row seat to the end of “Crazy TV Rights” money. I won’t blame the conference or Kliavkoff for it, but we are negotiating in a pretty unknown situation. Hopefully a streaming contract can fill the void a bit; but I don’t believe for a minute the B1G and SEC will see a contract like the one they just got the next time around. In short, the money is not there.

One thing is for certain - if the playoff expansion results in a SOST scenario (Same Old Six Teams), we are likely going to see college football see massive declines in viewership of regular season games. In the end, it may be only the hard-core fans and a handful of gambling degenerates watching regular season CFB on tv.

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