“Crossing the Sports Media Rubicon — Two Years Later” - John Kosner’s Latest SBJ Column with Ed Desser
Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by John Kosner and Ed Desser, December 9th, 2024
Amazon Prime Video continued to be active across sports, including Year 2 of its Black Friday NFL matchup.
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In 2022, when Amazon’s exclusive NFL “Thursday Night Football” game drew 15 million streaming viewers, we wrote that sports media had “crossed the Rubicon,” a point of no return from the “old days” of sports TV (SBJ Dec. 5, 2022). In 2023 (SBJ May 22, Dec. 11), we observed whipsawing developments, ranging from additional mega-market-cap technology companies with triple revenue streams entering sports programming (Apple/MLS, Google/Sunday Ticket), substantial live sports migrating to legacy entertainment streaming services (Paramount+, Peacock, Hulu), the Pac-12’s collapse, linear TV viewing falling below 50%, the CW’s entry into live sports, and LIV Golf/PGA Tour’s détente. In 2024, dizzying tectonic changes and increasing fragmentation continued, led again by Amazon:
On Nov. 7, its Bengals-Ravens “TNF” game drew 13.6 million viewers, outrating ESPN’s Dolphins-Rams “MNF” game (12.2 million).
Its second Black Friday telecast heralded sweeping changes in sports advertising moving toward an “ROI” approach, leveraging its 180 million U.S. Prime subscribers.
Amazon is both a customer and a competitor for traditional sports media networks. Notably, the NFL scheduled the two-time defending champion Chiefs for a Friday afternoon game that didn’t exist before last season.
Amazon also paired its exclusive NFL pact with an 11-year NBA/WNBA deal. Now each major league has at least one exclusive streaming partner.
After insisting that “We don’t do sports,” focusing instead on “long tail” content it can own, Netflix reported (spottily) delivering a global average of 108 million live viewers for Tyson vs. Paul, the most-watched boxing match ever, and is set to stream dual Christmas NFL games globally. Twelve days later, it will launch weekly “ WWE Raw” to its 278 million worldwide subscribers. A key reason for its bigger profile in sports: Growing advertising (another business Netflix wasn’t originally pursuing) and increased competition.
Nielsen tells the story: In two years, Netflix’s viewing share has grown 30 basis points. Streaming is now 41% of all video viewing (up 11%); cable and broadcast are down 20% and 8%, respectively; YouTube and Prime’s viewership have both risen 25% (both were election coverage hubs).
Years ago, broadcast network promos were the gold standard for tune-in promotion. Now, consider the power of omnipresent, viewer-targeted promotion on today’s top streamers’ prominent home pages!
The NBA went “back to future,” shifting inventory from pay TV to broadcast-heavy NBC exposure. Ironically, the new arrangement eschewed the league’s original 1979-1982 cable partner, USA Network (now about to be spun off), in favor of Peacock.
The NBA’s strategy reflects that “cord cutting” continues unchecked. Since we first published Rubicon, the industry shed another 10 million subscribers. The NBA is hedging its bets — straddling ESPN cable and its coming launch of over-the-top “Flagship,” more ABC and NBC broadcasts, plus exclusive Peacock and Prime Video streaming.
Part of settling the NBA/WBD dispute, the critically acclaimed “Inside the NBA” will move to ESPN, now a leader in licensing sports news shows (“Inside,” “Pat McAfee,” “ManningCast” and, soon, Jason Kelce’s late night program).
Amid the growing pool of “cord-cutters” and “nevers” (also concerning for leagues and advertisers), Disney, Fox and WBD announced a novel joint venture, “Venu,” to attract/bring back disaffected moderate sports fans into the pay-TV ecosystem, but launch is pending litigation.
In September, tensions flared between DirecTV and Disney. Previously unthinkable: ABC/ESPN’s networks went dark for two key weeks. Eleven million missed “Monday Night Football,” finals of the U.S. Open and two weekends of wall-to-wall college football. Of special significance, bars and other commercial establishments, which rely on DirecTV, went without just as fans returned from summer.
Viewership for the NCAA women’s basketball championship skyrocketed, generating record viewership and eclipsing the ratings for the men’s final. That momentum also extended to the WNBA. With Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark joining the W (and Paige Bueckers coming), the league experienced an unprecedented boon, also resulting in a sixfold increase in its media rights.
Perhaps no sport more foreshadows the future than college football. It’s on every broadcast network and their streaming platforms. Thus far, 2024 demonstrates the dominance of the SEC on ABC and the smart expansion of the College Football Playoff. Having surrendered WWE by way of an exchange with USA Network, Fox Sports cleverly expanded to a weekly Friday night game, and bucked convention by programming its top weekly game, not in prime time, but rather Saturdays at noon ET (sorry, Buckeye fans!), away from the strongest competition, also creating a pregame show to rival ESPN’s “College GameDay.”
Finally out of an almost two-year bankruptcy, Diamond Sports’ travails remain the cautionary tale. The transition of local/regional major league sports to whatever model is next is perhaps the biggest unsolved issue in U.S. sports.
At the Summer Olympics, Comcast/NBC broke from its decades-long “plausibly live” practice and unveiled a new multimedia, live and delayed platform strategy across broadcast, cable and streaming, drawing over 30 million daily viewers. In today’s world of content abundance, sports tentpole events still deliver. That’s why analyst Doug Shapiro observed that sports rights expenditures are increasingly coming from traditional entertainment budgets.
Finally, pickleball (yes, pickleball) is now a sports TV series on, of all networks, QVC!
We don’t expect these changes to slow or stop — they will accelerate. In Darwinian fashion, the leagues grow stronger; the big even bigger. Many questions remain: How will women’s sports capture their additional value? What’s Netflix’s next live major sporting event or series? Is college football headed for a more NFL-like layout in its top subdivision? Having crossed the Rubicon, we’re not going back. Buckle up!
Ed Desser is an expert witness and president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. (www.desser.tv). John Kosner is a former ESPN digital media executive and now investor in digital startups and president of consultancy Kosner Media (www.kosnermedia.com).
