October 6, 2024

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Good morning. I was recently with a relative who was trying to find the Thursday Night Football game and didn’t realize they could only watch it on Amazon. I found myself thinking—for the millionth time in the past decade—about how fragmented and confusing the live sports landscape has become for so many people. But TV and streaming giants alike are aware of the issue, which is why we’re seeing a creep toward a “great rebundling.” Read my weekend column below, and as always, please chime in: [[email protected]].

Elsewhere at FOS, we’ve been all over the MLB postseason, WNBA playoffs, and the return of the NHL. Head to our site and spend some time with our coverage.

— Dan Roberts [[link removed]], FOS EIC

Where Is the Dang Game? Fragmentation Is Worse Than Ever

Bill Streicher/Imagn Images

Mark Phillip quit his job to start his company Are You Watching This?! [[link removed]] In 2006 because, he says, “I hated waking up in the morning and learning there was a great game the night before that I didn’t know about, because it was on some random channel.”

The company sells “real-time sports excitement data” and gambling widgets to customers like Fox Sports, USA Today, Hearst, VSiN, and DraftKings. In 2011, he also bought icantfindthegame.com [[link removed]], which tracks every live sports event being broadcast or streamed at every moment, tells you what channel it’s on, and adds a human rating of the current action (“Ok, good, hot, or epic”). Fourth quarter, game tied? Tune in right now.

The need for such a service is obvious: Sports fans are all suffering from the same headache these days, and it’s building up to a migraine. Where can I find the damn game? What additional service do I have to pay for?

Take the NFL as the best example, though not the only offender: its games are on either NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, or ESPN … or ESPN+ (one exclusive Monday Night Football game), Amazon Prime (Thursday Night Football), Peacock (two exclusive games last year, one this year), or Netflix (two Christmas Day games). Even coughing up for Sunday Ticket gets you only the 1 p.m. out-of-market games. You’ll still need at least three streaming subs to watch the games exclusive to streamers. Paying for cable (remember cable?) wouldn’t get you all the games. To get every game without cable would run you $788 [[link removed]].

The latest sign that even the broadcasters involved in this morass feel your pain is that ESPN added a new feature to its mobile app and website called Where to Watch [[link removed]], and notably, it lists games on competitor networks [[link removed]]. It had long been an unspoken practice, by ESPN and others, to avoid directing viewers to games not on Disney networks; that practice has officially ended now, sources tell me, and it’s specifically because live game fragmentation has gotten so bad.

When Phillip saw the news about ESPN launching Where to Watch, “my stomach fell,” he says. But then he tried the product. “ESPN isn’t doing any curation. If you think about what Netflix would be without curation, it would just be a White Pages and you’d have to scroll through. You have to also curate for people.”

TV confusion is what led CBS Sports to create the oft-copied, occasionally automated “How to Watch” posts that include nothing other than a game’s time and channel. TV confusion is how the “ What time does the Super Bowl start [[link removed]]” SEO game got so big ( and silly [[link removed]]).

The broader point is it shouldn’t be this hard to find the game you want. But it’s all happening because tech giants are crowding into the room [[link removed]] when live sports rights are coming up for bidding.

NBCUniversal Group chairman Mark Lazarus doesn’t sound scared, but he should be. Tech giants like Amazon and Netflix “don’t have the combined reach that we have with broadcast and streaming,” he told me onstage [[link removed]] at our Front Office Sports Tuned In [[link removed]] summit last month. My take: Having broadcast reach might not outweigh the dollars that the tech giants will soon dangle in front of big leagues. (The NBA already chose Amazon over longtime partner TNT [[link removed]].)

At that same summit, I was struck by the realization that all of our guest speakers—from ESPN, NBC, Scripps Sports, Roku, Teton Ridge, and YouTube—are in the same business these days: live television. Separating the networks from the tech companies, in the context of live sports rights, is almost beside the point. They’re all competing with one another for rights.

Maybe YouTube is best-positioned of all, since, as the company is careful to caution, it’s merely a platform. Apart from its megadeal signed in 2022 to show NFL Sunday Ticket (which YouTube’s top sports exec Jon Cruz described more as an endpoint [[link removed]] than the start of YouTube going after more rights), YouTube TV merely shows live programming from other providers in a conveniently curated pane.

Major League Soccer took its primary package to Apple TV, so we’ve seen this shift begin. But in a future where an entire season of a major league is exclusive to Amazon or Netflix, you’ll need to leave YouTube and head to the walled gardens of other apps. The headache persists.

This was the thinking behind Venu Sports, the sports-specific pay-TV app cooked up by the triumvirate of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It was set to launch in time for this NFL season—until FuboTV sought and won a temporary injunction [[link removed]] that stopped Venu from launching. Fubo argued it was anti-competitive that these mega broadcasters weren’t willing to license out just their sports channels to other TV apps, but were going to do it for their own joint venture. (A trial is set for a year from now.)

My guess is Venu won’t see the light of day, but it was a nice idea for sports fans: far more of the games in one place. What all sports fans want, of course, is a single, simple app (tell me the price, I’ll pay it!) that shows every single NFL game. Of course, that can never happen when the rights are parceled out to so many different companies that compete with one another. Or can it?

Venu won’t be the last attempt by competitors to come together on one product that would wield huge pricing power. “The great rebundling will happen,” Phillip says. “People will be tired of dealing with all the splintering.”

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Good Week / Bad Week Baseball Beckons, Nike Tumbles

Kirby Lee/Imagn Images

Good week for:

MLB ⬆ The league reported a 0.85% gain in attendance [[link removed]] this season, a modest gain—but proof it was able to maintain its fans after a 9.6% increase last year. Average game times decreased four minutes to just two hours and 36 minutes, the shortest since 1986. MLB also welcomed its hottest superstar, Shohei Ohtani, to the playoffs for the first time in his career [[link removed]].

DirecTV ⬆ The evolving media industry has not been kind to DirecTV, but on Monday, the company reached an agreement to acquire rival Dish Network [[link removed]] from its parent company, EchoStar Corp., for just $1 and an assumed debt of around $9.8 billion. The merger will allow the combined entity more leverage in negotiations with programmers.

Bad week for:

Nike ⬇ The Swoosh announced a 10% drop in fiscal first-quarter revenue Tuesday. While the numbers are in line with estimates [[link removed]] from last quarter, the company’s stock has dropped about 8% since the announcement, as of Friday afternoon. This has virtually wiped out the gains the company made last month when it announced Elliott Hill was replacing John Donahoe as CEO.

MLB’s RSN deals ⬇ The league’s issue with local media rights continues. Diamond Sports Group, the parent company of Bally Sports, told the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Wednesday that it would drop as many as seven teams. MLB told the court it felt “sandbagged” by DSG [[link removed]].

You Might Have Missed The Big Business of Custom MLB Swag, the Calgorithm Gets Real

Bill Streicher/Imagn Images

The drama of the MLB postseason is already on full display—as is the players’ attention-grabbing on-field swag. Cleats, sliding mitts, and other custom protective gear have become a spectacle. That’s the point. FOS contributor Hannah Keyser talked to Bryce Harper, Harrison Bader, and others about the flashy looks taking over MLB [[link removed]].

Cal is having a moment. College GameDay visited Berkeley for the first time Saturday, while the school’s football fans have gone viral on social media with AI-generated memes and inside jokes for Cal’s first season in the ACC. FOS’s Margaret Fleming [[link removed]] goes deep on how the niche internet “Calgorithm” made it from the internet to real life [[link removed]]. TNT has staked its claim in college sports broadcasting. The network is the only broadcaster to have a slice of men’s March Madness and the College Football Playoff. While ESPN and Fox have gone head-to-head as rivals, FOS’s Amanda Christovich [[link removed]] reports TNT has positioned itself as everyone’s friend [[link removed]]. Advertise [[link removed]] Awards [[link removed]] Learning [[link removed]] Events [[link removed]] Video [[link removed]] Podcast [[link removed]] Written by Daniel Roberts [[link removed]], Colin Salao [[link removed]], Meredith Turits [[link removed]] Edited by Or Moyal [[link removed]], Peter Richman [[link removed]], Catherine Chen [[link removed]]

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