Well, now.
If you don’t think Greg Sankey’s hearing about this from some of his presidents/athletic directors, you’re dreaming.
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Category Archives: Big Ten Football
This financial aggression will not stand, man.
Filed under Big Ten Football, It's Just Bidness, SEC Football
What Jim Delany hath wrought.
While this article may be a sad read, when you bring in a school for the sole purpose of making your conference broadcast product more attractive to cable companies, it shouldn’t be a surprising one.
This is the kind of crap I beat on when I post about college football ignoring its traditional strengths in its chase for the almighty dollar. Well played, Jimbo.
Filed under Big Ten Football
Today, in broadcasting
You may have heard ESPN has breathlessly released The Next Big Thing.
ESPN+ is the most aggressive step to date by ESPN to recapture the consumers that are dropping its channels along with the rest of their pay TV subscriptions.
For $4.99 a month, the new service will give users the kind of all-you-can-watch buffet they have enjoyed on Netflix and other streaming video platforms, but with live sporting events.Pitaro previewed ESPN+ last week at the ESPN Technology Center, where visitors are greeted by a message on the wall that reads “Where Innovation Takes The Field.” The streaming service, a top priority at the facility over the last eight months, is kicking off what Pitaro called an “era of innovation” at the company.
ESPN+ subscribers will have on-demand access to thousands of live events, including Major League Baseball, NHL hockey, collegiate sports, Major League Soccer, boxing, PGA golf, Grand Slam tennis events and even cricket. It will also offer the entire library of ESPN’s critically acclaimed “30 for 30” sports documentaries and new exclusive original programming that includes a weekly basketball analysis show hosted by retired Los Angeles Laker great Kobe Bryant.
The programs and live events will have commercials…
Such a deal. It’s really a balancing act for Mickey.
Pitaro, who became president of ESPN last month after the sudden resignation of John Skipper, is careful to emphasize that the new service is not a replacement for the cable and satellite subscriptions that still bring in about $8 billion annually.
“We are really doing this as a service that is complementary and additive and not competitive with the pay TV business,” he said. “What you see on linear [TV] will not make its way on the subscription service. And what’s on the subscription service will not be on television.”
Therein lies the balancing act that Pitaro has to perform with ESPN+. He needs to push ESPN further into the digital TV future while preserving the traditional cable and satellite model that continues to make a substantial profit, even though it eroded.
Good luck with that, fella, because it really seems like all the big monetization is coming up front.
The first result of the marriage of a tech startup and legacy content provider is a newly updated ESPN app and the ESPN+ subscription option, which arrived nearly two years after it was originally announced. Disney hopes that consumers will pay $4.99 a month, or $50 for a year, to access a long list of games and other content to which it has the rights but is not showing on the channels for which cable subscribers pay roughly $8 or $9 a month through their cable bills.
Many of those games were already available, however, as part of a digital channel known as ESPN3 that will live on, according to the company. ESPN has long had an app, called WatchESPN, that offered live streams of all of its channels as well as many ESPN3 games it was not airing on its TV stations. ESPN+ bundles many of those streams it offered to subscribers in WatchESPN with other previously free services and some niche sports and original programming for a fee, and offers that service in the same app as streaming versions of ESPN channels available only to cable subscribers.
”Those subscribers are already paying more than $100 a year for ESPN content,” BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield said in a telephone interview. “Now, they’re being asked to pay another $60 a year for the least compelling parts of that content.”
To reiterate, such a deal.
Meanwhile, Jim Delany’s gig running a broadcast network took a hit.
Unfortunately for Big Jim, Comcast doesn’t roll over like the Sun Belt Conference.
Comcast will drop the Big Ten Network from its cable television system in states where there are no teams in the conference.
The Big Ten Network will remain available on Comcast Xfinity in Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Comcast is not available in Nebraska and Iowa.
Note that New York is missing there — the raison d’etre for adding a pathetic Rutgers athletic program to the conference in the first place. Nice how that’s working out. It’s also nice to see that the Big Ten apparently couldn’t care less about making sure folks in Nebraska and Iowa who are Comcast subscribers can get Comcast to watch their teams. Jim probably thinks if those folks want it badly enough, they can just move to New Jersey.
Filed under Big Ten Football, ESPN Is The Devil
Room with a view
Check out the vantage from Northwestern’s fancy new IPF.
I have to admit that might get my ass out of bed in the morning to get my workout done. Nice.
Filed under Big Ten Football
This monetary aggression will not stand, man.
With the Big 12’s release of its tax return, here’s a summary of where the P5 conferences stand in terms of financial distributions to their members:
- Big 12: “The conference reported nearly $371 million in revenue for a fiscal year that ended June 30, 2017… the per-school payouts to roughly $34.3 million…”
- SEC: “… the 14-team Southeastern Conference’s returns showed $650 million in revenue, or an average of about $41 million per school.”
- ACC: “… $373 million for fiscal 2016, distributing that money among 14 full members and Notre Dame…”
- Pac-12: “The Pac-12 reported that it distributed an average of $28.7 million per school in fiscal 2016.”
- Big Ten: “Citing a document from the University of Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reported in June that it was projecting revenue from the Big Ten of $51.1 million for the 2018 fiscal year (the one that’s ongoing), up from $36.3 million for 2017.”
As the cliché goes, one of those numbers is not like the others.
A $10 million a year revenue gap between the SEC and Big Ten? I’m sure Greg Sankey’s bosses will shrug that off, just like they did before… oh, wait.
Thursday morning buffet
I haven’t taken the chafing dishes out in a while, so here goes…
- No matter how you slice it, Georgia’s 2018 signing class is stellar.
- Which makes it no surprise Kirby’s decided he can live with the early signing period.
- Gene Smith bitches about head coaching salaries out of one side of his mouth, but talks a very different game when it comes to assistant coaches. Again, it’s not what you think your guys are worth that matters. It’s what your competitors think your guys are worth.
- Looks like Jim McElwain’s got himself a new gig.
- It’s amazing to see the level of navel gazing going on in the Alabama media with regard to the Tide’s 2018 class. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Kirby’s really got those folks shook up.
- “Who’s been the top recruiting team of the entire internet rankings era? The answer will probably surprise you.” Number two on the list certainly did.
#57,342
Nebraska, following the sale of 57,342 spring game tickets in one day just to season ticket holders, has now completely sold out the game.
Check out the insanity on StubHub:
That sound you hear is Greg McGarity stroking his chin.
Filed under Big Ten Football
