A (Sports) Streaming Wars Truce

ESPN, Fox, and WBD shake hands on a power throuple

I had a couple options for the first newsletter back. You sure can miss a lot in two weeks.

I did catch the big game on what was instead Super Bowl Monday Morning for us. Laura (of North Brooklyn Baddies volleyball fame) stuck more to the pool than the broadcast, but until the 4th quarter, it was hard to blame her.

The fact that a blocked extra point ended up sending that game to OT was almost too much for me to resist, but I’ll refer you to my earlier diatribe on this matter and stick to the business pages today. Vacation’s over, pal. Time for brass tacks.

Three major broadcasters — ESPN, Fox, and my former employers at Warner Bros. Discovery — announced plans for a sports streaming triumvirate last week.

This is a big deal. I’m about to explain why I think it’s a slightly less big deal than it’s been billed, but I don’t want to downplay it altogether. This isn’t something that would’ve happened ten years ago, maybe even five.

They’ll each have an equal 1/3 share of whatever this unnamed service is, which is kind of interesting in itself as an aside. Surely they don’t actually think that what they’re each bringing to the table is exactly equal in value, but hey. These are the big picture folks putting out this announcement, right? Save the details for the back office.

Along with ESPN+, where you can catch all the obscure college sports you’d ever want (and plenty you wouldn’t — Iona putting the smackdown on my Colgate rugby squad comes to mind), this thing will provide fourteen linear channels all under one roof: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, FOX, FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network, TNT, TBS and truTV.

That’s a whole lotta juicy content. So much so that you may have already seen takes like this one:

“To me, this goes a long way in solving the sports dilemma that many viewers have,” former Fox Sports Networks president Bob Thompson told USA TODAY Sports. “They would like to cut the cord (to cable television), but if you are a sports fan, it is very, very difficult to do and get all of what you want. This goes a long way to remedying that situation.”

How so, Bob? Easy. By re-bundling the shamefully un-bundled, righting the wrongs of our disaggregated forebears, reclaiming our destiny. For God and Country, Bundle it:

Because we haven’t seen enough of that Mahomes guy lately, am I right? Talk about the American cultural bundle these days.

On this proposed streaming service, you’d even be able to combine all the sports stuff with Disney+, Hulu, and/or Max. I’m sure you’ll see it offered as an additional subscription within all of those apps for the many people who already have them.

Here’s my issue, though. Two big networks are notably not a part of this agreement. NBC and CBS are on the outs, and they have a lot of stuff that the typical American sports fan watches pretty regularly.

The only major pro league this new triumvirate has on lock is the NBA. They’d have a good amount of MLB and NHL as well, which, great.

But let’s be real. There’s only one big fish, and that’s football. This service will have Monday nights, thanks to ESPN, but they won’t have Sunday nights (NBC), a whole slew of Sunday day games (CBS), or even a big chunk of the new Big Ten slate (also CBS, with a reminder that the second-most watched sport in America after professional football is college football. More on that coming soon).

Oh, and they’ll be missing NFL Thursdays too (Amazon), not that anyone’s that jealous of that lineup. It just so happens to still beat basically every other sport.

Industry watchers have been pointing out that this sports merger could accelerate the downturn for linear and cable television, which a lot of viewers might not be thrilled about.

Remember the playoff game that aired exclusively on Peacock? The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay referred to that as The NFL’s Digital Buttfumble, which seems about right. That’s going to continue, and Amazon will have one of their own this next season.

That poses some obviously bothersome hurdles for viewers, but it’s also a slippery slope for the league.

For my own sake, I often fall prey to the eternal curse of the journalistic prognosticator: overstating how quickly change is coming. Don’t get me wrong. Much of America has already “cut the cord,” but much of it still hasn’t, per a Morning Consult survey last year.

41% of adults watch linear or cable TV everyday. Of that group, 35% of them were either Millennials or Gen Zers. Obviously, this trends older, and the bulk of the remaining 65% comes from the Boomers, but these are big numbers.

With the passage of time, linear TV will matter less than it does now. People aren’t wrong about the trend. But right now, it still happens to matter quite a lot.

So what we have here, for viewers, is what we in the blacksmithing business call a double-edged sword. (How many swords are single-edged anyways? Is that a dumb question? Or is that a dumb idiom?)

Paying $40+ a month, or whatever this is going to ultimately cost, is still going to leave considerable gaps for a lot of viewers. It’s still not the old-school bundle, whereby you could reliably assume that you had access to all three main channels (NBC, Fox, and CBS) as well as ESPN, TNT, and TBS if you were paying for cable.

So I’m not sure this goes as long a way to solving the Where The @#$% Is This Airing problem that many of us are now familiar with, both when it comes to sports and any given movie. Where is 1987’s Broadcast News airing these days? STARZ? You tell me, Google. Laura fell asleep for that one, and I still haven’t forgiven her.

In other words, this whole bundle idea strikes me as a half measure masquerading as a whole one. And here I thought we were putting a moratorium on those?

Compounding matters, if this merger does hasten the demise of linear — and it seems like it will, just on a longer timescale than we might expect — then that poses whole new issues.

More people getting paywalled out of watching sports = bad outcome. Much of the NFL’s cultural sway comes from how broad a following it enjoys around the country. Cutting into that probably isn’t a good thing for the league, which was reportedly “blindsided” by the triumvirate’s announcement.

Finally, color me skeptical that this partnerships lasts very long once these companies feel out a new business model and remember they’re competitors again. For all three parties, this is at least partly an act of desperation.

If they ever get to feeling comfy again, I expect the re-bundled to de-bundle once more. All shall be bundled in the kingdom of streaming. Ashes to ashes, bundle to bundle.

Also, An Announcement

• I’m proud to say I’m finally rolling out the audio docuseries I’ve been working on intermittently for much of the last year, covering this fascinating inflection point in college sports. I’ve mentioned it a few times in this newsletter, and now the time is nearly here. So stay tuned for more on The Option, and I hope you’ll all listen when we start dropping episodes in March. It even has a nifty logo! Look, guys!