Posts for 'Sports'

Back in our Oct. 21, 2022 podcast, “Netflix is Poised for 2023 Revenue Growth,” Colin and I articulated all the reasons we were optimistic about Netflix’s upside in the new year. Primarily we were focused on its newly launched $7/month “Basic with ads” tier and its plans to eliminate password sharing throughout the world.

Flash forward 7 months, and Netflix provided its first tangible results and commentary from the initiatives, as well as optimistic signs of where things go from here. In today’s podcast, Colin and I dig into these signs, including most prominently Netflix’s disclosure that $7/month "Basic with ads" subscribers already produce a higher average monthly revenue than do its $15.50/month "Standard" plan (ad-free) subscribers. Some basic math reveals that "Basic with ads" subscribers drive at least $8.50/month in ad revenue for Netflix, which in turn means that aproximately 55% ($8.50 / $15.50) of "Basic with ads" subscribers’ total revenue is already derived from ads, not subscriber payments.

That Netflix accomplished all of this despite 1) it still being very early days for the ad offering, 2) a massive headwind in the ad business due to recession/etc. worries, 3) all of its ad revenue being “linear TV replacement” or upper-funnel reach and frequency inventory, with nothing yet from more valuable full/lower funnel offerings, suggests the ad business is already a big win for Netflix and has huge potential.

(At this point I can’t resist noting that I have been badgering Netflix for years to launch a lower-priced ad-supported tier because of the upside…see “Why Netflix Will Launch an Ad-Supported Tier in 2020” from Dec. ’19, “6 Reasons Why Netflix Should Launch an Ad-Supported Tier Now” from Mar. ’20, and “Revisiting Why Netflix Should Launch an Ad-Supported Tier” from Mar. ’21 for a sample of my haranguing. So, in the category of “better late than never,” hallelujah, Netflix finally, finally put aside its religious objections to advertising and saw the light.)

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This week on Inside the Stream Colin and I do an “around the horn” of four significant industry topics. We lead off with the expected bankruptcy filing of Diamond Sports Group earlier this week, the largest owner of regional sports networks (RSNs), resulting in a complete wipeout of the equity-holders. Where to from here is anyone’s best guess; but I reiterate my stance that sports teams’ franchise values and players’ salaries have already peaked. When the dominant player in an industry - with over 50% market share - goes belly up, nothing good happens next.

Next up is an update on WBD’s planned pricing strategy for its combined HBO Max and discovery+ streaming service launching soon. Colin’s been all over this one for months and is really scratching his head, as am I.

In time for March Madness, YouTube TV has launched a new feature called “multiview” allowing subscribers to stream a mosaic of four pre-selected games and choose which audio feed they prefer. I think it’s really cool, and as you’ll hear in real-time I realize that it might mean YouTube TV “automagically” just quadrupled its ad inventory for multiview users. If so, that’s a neat trick; new CEO Neal Mohan is off to an even stronger start than I expected!

Finally, Colin gives a short wrap-up of the latest doings in the burgeoning FAST market. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up.

Listen to the podcast to learn more (27 minutes, 11 seconds)

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Pay-TV providers lost another 7 million subscribers (approximately) in 2022 as losses accelerated from 2021. The losses span those actually cutting the cord, plus those that simply don’t take on a pay-TV subscription in the first place.

On this week’s podcast Colin and I discuss pay-TV’s melting iceberg, and among its consequences, what’s it mean for sports teams’ valuations and players’ salaries. Since cord-cutting came along, there’s always been a notion of sports providing a “firewall” bottom on pay-TV subscribers. But with so many sports rights now leaking into the streaming domain - having been snapped up by Big Tech - the paradigm-busting question looms larger.

Another, related consequence of pay-TV’s implosion is the demise of regional sports networks (RSNs). They’re also experiencing financial turmoil due to bad deal-making, disconnects with audiences and sub-par demand. Even mighty ESPN has been the subject of M&A rumormongering as newly restored CEO Bob Iger has to pick his priorities.

All of this is to say that the economics of the sports business are changing in front of our eyes. If sports networks’ financial viability is impaired, rendering them unable to competitively bid for rights, then the question becomes, will Big Tech step in as a backstop, building on their current commitment? As I assert in the podcast, I think their commitment to becoming a viable backstop will only become known as the ultimate CTV ad monetization opportunity crystallizes. Specifically, if CTV can legitimately become full/lower funnel - bringing in buckets of cash with it - then backstop viability is far more likely. Absent that it’s jump ball. We’ll see.

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This week we go on a “field trip” to India, where a battle between multibillionaires - at the intersection of streaming, marquee sports, mobile, commerce and FASTs - provides a glimpse of the future.

First up, we discuss news that Viacom18 Media Pvt. a joint venture between Paramount Global and multibillionaire Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd., the most valuable company in India - which in 2021 won the rights, for $2.7 billion, to stream the hugely popular Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket games - and intends to do so for free to consumers.

Viacom18 Media actually poached the IPL streaming rights from Disney, which had them previously and used the games to drive Disney+ Hotstar subscriptions. Disney's direct-to-consumer strategy remains murky as Colin and I discussed 2 weeks ago.

The move underscores trends that Colin and I have discussed extensively around marquee sports moving from broadcast/cable to streaming (most recently in January, with fuboTV's CEO David Gandler) and the accelerating pace of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST).

Next, we discuss “miniTV,” a set of freely available video content that is placed front and center within Amazon India’s shopping app. While miniTV, which launched in May, 2021 got off to a modest start, apparently in 2022, its first full year of operations, it has picked up momentum. This is due to the popularity of certain original programming that Amazon has invested in.

Amazon’s strategy of purposely giving away premium video for free parallels what it has done with Prime Video, investing heavily in originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” without seeking to directly monetize them. Rather, Amazon uses its massive commerce business to subsidize the cost of content creation, because it has been able to demonstrate to itself that video drives higher levels of Prime acquisition/retention, and Prime members buy more stuff from Amazon, of course.

Jeff Bezos articulated this “flywheel” in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the Code Conference in 2016, putting as fine a point on it as one can imagine, by famously saying “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes” (start at the 36:56 mark for the segment). Amazon’s approach to subsidizing video is virtually inimitable, except perhaps by Apple and Google, and should justifiably strike terror in the heart of every media company CEO.

In India, with miniTV, we are seeing Amazon run the same playbook, except absent a Prime membership requirement, and with a more specific focus on mobile consumption, primarily by younger viewers. If media company CEOs around the world were not already on high alert from Prime Video, miniTV should put them on an immediate DEFCON 1 footing.

(As a side note, I believe that another flywheel, in CTV advertising, is also developing, as I wrote back in June, 2021. Speakers at next week’s VideoNuze CTV Advertising PREVIEW: 2023 will emphatically drive this home. Note, complimentary sign up is available.)

Last but not least, and at the risk of stating the obvious: Bezos’s net worth currently stands at approximately $120 billion, while Ambani’s is around $84 billion. In short, both of them bring essentially unlimited resources to the streaming game, free to subsidize anything they believe is in their companies’ long-term interests. The stakes in streaming have never been as high and only the deepest-pocketed need apply.

The two initiatives in India are a preview of streaming’s future. As I said, DEFCON 1.

Pack your bags for the trip to India, and listen to the podcast to learn more (27 minutes, 20 seconds)



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Cord-cutting is accelerating. Deep-pocketed Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Google) are scooping up marquee sports rights in an effort to add value to their services businesses. Linear TV viewing is collapsing. Consumers' attention is fragmenting as myriad social media and other activities beckon for eyeballs.

As Colin and I discuss on this week’s episode, ESPN finds itself at the center of this storm, as the venerable TV network gets squeezed from all sides. Adding urgency to the problem, and as we also explore this week, Sinclair's Diamond Sports Group, which owns Bally Sports, a big collection of Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) acquired from Disney as part of its Fox deal, is edging toward declaring bankruptcy.

While Diamond’s demise is closely tied to the debt it incurred by overpaying for the Fox RSNs in 2019, it raises more consequential questions about the health of the sports TV ecosystem - and therefore the value of sports broadcasting rights themselves. These rights have been funded primarily through the “sports tax” on pay-TV subscribers who are not sports fans (see “Not a Sports Fan, Then You’re Getting Sacked for At Least $2 Billion Per Year,” which I wrote back in February, 2011). Non-sports fans are getting soaked for far more than this in 2023, with huge - and mostly unknown - sums embedded in their monthly pay-TV bills (partly contributing to escalating cord-cutting).

Net, net, the delicate equilibrium in the sports TV ecosystem is under major pressure. With respect to ESPN, newly reinstated Disney CEO Bob Iger has a pressing - yet until recently unimaginable - question to address: long-term, is ESPN still a good business? And if it’s not, should Disney keep the network anyway, or seek to sell it off?

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In this week’s podcast, Colin and I do a deep dive interview with FuboTV’s CEO and Co-Founder David Gandler. FuboTV, which reported having 1.6 million subscribers at the end of Q3 ’22, has differentiated itself primarily with sports, which, as we discuss, has its advantages and disadvantages.

Specifically in the podcast, we dig into escalating and fragmenting sports rights, what impact tech giants like Apple, Amazon and YouTube will have as they stream more sports on their platforms, the role of FAST channels and regional sports networks (RSNs) for pay-TV providers, the decision to shutter FuboTV’s nascent sportsbook, how FuboTV is pursuing AI for cutting-edge user experiences and much more.

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Happy new year and welcome to the first edition of Inside the Stream for 2023. Just after recording our Top 10 streaming stories of 2022 podcast a couple of weeks ago YouTube announced its deal with the NFL for Sunday Ticket.

In this week’s podcast we dig into how we think the economics of the deal might work. Colin modeled many of the variables, which I then tinkered with. The clear caveat is that no external person, including us, really knows all the pieces of the deal, nor the terms. So we’re taking our best guesses, based on how Sunday Ticket has performed for DirecTV and the new value we believe YouTube brings to the package.

Based on all of this Colin is skeptical about YouTube’s ability to turn a profit on Sunday Ticket, while I’m more optimistic. In addition I highlight a number of valuable strategic aspects of the deal to YouTube and Google, especially gaining direct experience with the NFL for the next 6-7 years. These insights will be extremely valuable as YouTube contemplates potentially bidding for some or all of the NFL broadcast package when it’s up for renewal in 2033.

Ultimately the value of Sunday Ticket to YouTube hinges on its ability to monetize the package much better than DirecTV did - more subscribers and more advertising revenue.

Listen to the podcast to learn more (30 minutes, 36 seconds)

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On this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, nScreenMedia’s Colin Dixon and I dig into four topics: World Cup streaming quality and the lack of 4K differentiation, Netflix’s offer to refund advertisers due to inventory shortfalls, WBD’s decision to remove “Westworld” from HBO Max, and the proliferation of music-oriented FAST channels.

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On this week’s episode of Inside the Stream nScreenMedia’s Colin Dixon and I discuss whether the Big Ten (and sports more generally) can help slow broadcast and cable TV’s viewership decline. This week the Big Ten announced a new $7 billion, 7-year media rights deal with Fox, CBS and NBC, which triples the annual revenue the conference receives compared to its current deal.

Meanwhile Nielsen revealed that in July streaming accounted for 34.8% of TV consumption by Americans, beating cable’s share of 34.4% and broadcast’s 21.6%. It was the first time streaming eclipsed cable. And in Q2, the biggest pay-TV operators lost another 1.9 million subscribers, underscoring cord-cutting’s impact on the industry. All of this raises the question whether the Big Ten, as well as other major sports, can stabilize or reverse broadcast and cable’s decline.

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This week on Inside the Stream nScreenMedia’s Colin Dixon and I explore the launch of NFL+, the new direct-to-consumer streaming service the NFL announced earlier this week. The service is mobile-only and most of the content is non-exclusive, leading Colin and me to wonder who is the target customer, and how big a market is it?

But given the contraction in the pay-TV industry, in the long-term the NFL may be heading to all streaming future, either direct-to-consumer or with partners. So NFL+ gives the league a new opportunity to connect directly with fans.

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Apple has signed a ten-year deal with Major League Soccer to stream all MLS matches starting in 2023, without any local broadcast blackouts. The deal moves sports deeper into streaming, and away from traditional pay-TV.

Chris Harris, Publisher of World Soccer Talk, joins Colin and me this week to understand the significance of the deal and what impact it may have on sports going forward. Chris is an authority on global soccer and also wrote about how Apple might price the MLS subscription service. We explore all angles of the deal with Chris.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Last Sunday’s Super Bowl was viewed by over 112 million people with around 10% or more streaming the game. On today’s podcast Colin and I discuss the mostly positive experiences that streamers had, albeit with latency that ranged up to 40+ seconds.

We also discuss strong results for Paramount+ and what’s ahead for the company.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

This week Colin has been following various reports of NBA, MLB and Premier League potentially coming to streaming, courtesy of Sinclair, Apple and DAZN. Colin explains more about what this might mean for the industry, as consumers seek out new alternatives.

Then we discuss NBCUniversal’s move that it has selected iSpot.tv as its first cross-platform video certified measurement partner. NBCU’s move is the latest by the industry to find a new currency alternative to Nielsen, the long-time standard and to better compete with digital options. NBCU said more measurement partners will be announced.

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Yesterday Peacock and NBCUniversal announced that every minute of every live event at the upcoming Winter Olympics from Beijing will be streamed on Peacock. In addition, full replays of all competition will be available on Peacock immediately upon conclusion. Peacock viewers will also have access to the Opening and Closing ceremonies, the studio shows and medal ceremonies.

The announcements are smart moves and allow Peacock to clearly communicate and promote that all events will be available on the service. It’s a big improvement from last summer’s Olympics, which had incomplete coverage on Peacock and where replays and clips of concluded events sometimes were delayed and/or showed up on YouTube prior to being posted on Peacock itself. The execution fell short of many Peacock viewers’ expectations.

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News yesterday that NBC has certain advertisers willing to pay a record price of up to $6.5 million for a 2022 Super Bowl spot, 18% higher than this year, and that it has fewer than five unsold 30-second spots remaining for February’s big game, brought to mind a newsletter I wrote way back in February, 2006 entitled “The $10 Million Super Bowl Ad?” (Unfortunately link no longer available). In it I asserted that Super Bowl ads would eventually command $10 million.

For reference, back in 2007 NBC sold spots in Super Bowl LXI for $2.5 million apiece. That means the price per spot has grown by an annual compounded rate of approximately 6.5%. That is 3.5x the rate of inflation over that 15 year period, which was approximately 1.9%. If Super Bowl ad rates continue to increase at an average of 6.5% per year, then the price will hit $10 million per spot in about 7 years, for the 2029 big game.

(Note, back in 2015, when NBC was charging $4.5 million per Super Bowl spot, NBC Sports Group’s EVP of Sales and Marketing Seth Winter said “$4.5 million is a steal. We think the Super Bowl is worth closer to $10 million in incremental exposure for marketers.” Worth it or not, 6 years later NBC believes a spot is now valued by the market at $6.5 million and to be fair some of the ads’ value is tied to a packaging approach NBC is taking with the 2022 Winter Olympics).

What’s going on here?

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Colin leads off the discussion this week, explaining why he believes that Peacock’s Olympics coverage has been a missed opportunity for the fledgling streamer. In particular, Colin notes that even for paying Peacock subscribers, marquee events are not only not available live, they are not even being made available immediately upon their conclusion (note I’m deferring to Colin on this, because as a former Boy Scout, I preemptively chose to record ALL Olympics events in YouTube TV, so I’m not watching anything on Peacock).

Colin is highlighting a crucial point - that for non-pay-TV households, which have multiplied by millions since the 2016 Rio Games, especially among younger viewers - Peacock has fallen short of its potential to meet viewers’ expectations and fully resonate. We have a spirited debate about why this has happened, and what to expect going forward.

Notwithstanding all of this, Comcast reported robust Peacock sign-ups yesterday in its Q2 ’20 earnings, up 20 million to 54 million (though still no word on how many are actually paying). It was also a strong quarter for both broadband and pay-TV. But we discuss what role pay-TV is going to play for Comcast in the wake of last week’s announcement to add Hulu with Live TV for broadband/Flex users (and my forecast that YouTube TV availability is likely just ahead).

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Sports has long been considered the “firewall” for pay-TV subscriptions, with marquee events carried by must-have broadcast and cable TV networks. But new research from The Trade Desk shows that sports viewership is increasing migrating away from linear TV and toward connected TVs and streaming. In its fourth “Future of TV” report, The Trade Desk found that 57% of Americans watch sports at least once per week, and that of these viewers, 44% are watching outside of linear TV. The number rises to 65% for 18-34 year olds.

The viewership levels underscore the degree to which top tier sports have begun “leaking” out of the traditional broadcast/cable TV world and into streaming, and also the existential threat to pay-TV if a big chunk of sports eventually moves into the streaming realm. Importantly, The Trade Desk found that just 19% of TV viewers are returning to their pre-pandemic sports viewing mode, with 44% of fans saying they’re watching sports outside of linear TV (65% for 18-34 year olds).

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Welcome to the 554th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This week we dig into the NFL’s new distribution deals with Amazon, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC, in the context of major changes that are happening in the TV and video industries.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the deals bring “an unprecedented era of stability” to the NFL. But as Colin explains there are at least three key challenges that are going to buffet the NFL and the TV networks in the years ahead: diminished pay-TV subscriptions, which are the dominant way to watch games; shift in ad budgets to CTV and digital, especially as linear audiences drop; ad loads in NFL games that are far heavier than what viewers are being conditioned to expect, suggesting the games themselves need to be shortened.

With a rumored $100 billion in distribution fees at stake, what do all of these challenges mean to the NFL and the networks?


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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the fees CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN each pay to broadcast NFL games will double or more in new long-term agreements currently being finalized. Once again we are presented with the incongruity that sports rights are escalating even as the pay-TV subscriber audience able to watch these networks is shrinking.

As the Q4 earnings season wrapped up, the contraction of pay-TV was again in the news this week as analysts tallied the final losses for 2020. MoffettNathanson pegged the subscriber loss in 2020 among traditional cable, satellite and telco operators at approximately 6 million, with virtual operators (e.g. YouTube TV, Hulu, etc.) offsetting it by adding approximately 2 million subscribers.

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Welcome to the 548th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Disney turned in yet another strong quarter of direct-to-consumer streaming growth, with 146.4 million subscribers at the end of its fiscal Q1. Disney+ added 21.2 million to reach 94.9 million subscribers. The only hiccup was that Hulu with Live TV dropped by 100K to 4 million subscribers. Colin and I dig into the numbers to better understand the trends revealed in the quarter.

Then we shift to discussing this past Sunday’s Super Bowl TV ratings which were down and streaming viewers which were up. We discuss what drove each - and add a little commentary about our favorite ads.


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