ESPN pay cuts?

Very puzzled as to why ESPN is jumping in here. If you’re not buying DK, FD or Caesars, there is very little share.

FOXBet made many mistakes and one of them was putting front-facing people on the graphics. I would never do that. Sportsbooks take money. You don’t want people to associate losing money with Howie, Terry and Colin.

The Barstool “skin” is meh. Same odds provider as BetRivers, Unibet, etc. (Most of the books don’t set their lines — they subscribe to a service that does it. It gets each to spot when you see the same lines at five different books.)

 

Maybe some kind of bonus payout if you are holding a ticket for one of Stanford Steve’s Bad Beats?

 

Very good report on Is ESPN for sale? on NPR yesterday. They laid it all out. The problem is the high rights fees and getting the value out of those rights in an ever fracturing media landscape. Iger calls it "a broken distribution model." The distributors aren't getting the content to enough eyeballs.
The report said consumers have wanted choices, and that's resulted in cord-cutting and more streaming. The problem is not enough people will pay the high price to make streaming work if cable goes away (VERY similar to the problem newspapers had transitioning from print to digital - only to find digital wasn't paying the bills). The takeaway was that rights fees, whether the NFL, NBA or college sports, will be parcelled out into ever smaller bits. The big prize will be the Championship game and the top games, second prize maybe a playoff series or three, third prize exclusive national rights for a particular night of the week. It's pretty much what the NFL had done in order to maximize value.

ESPN seems to be looking for a partner to share these rights with that might unlock some value in them that ESPN simply can't. But this also seems to be nearing the ceiling of the cash cow of sports. If major sports end up giving everyone a taste just to make the number they want (like the NFL had done) - they might be quenching the supply. Musical chairs isn't interesting if everyone gets a seat. Ask the Pac-12.

 

I still don't see the appeal of streaming culture.

Let me pay $10 a month for ESPN Plus, $10 a month for Peacock for soccer, another $20-30 for the local RSN. And whatever you want to spend on Netflix, Max, Hulu, whatever. That's another $30 a month.

Then I need high-speed Internet so I can stream them all. A decent package here costs you at least $60 a month, usually a bit more. Or at least $60 on your cellphone plan, if you decide to trust Verizon or T-Mobile's 5G and not splurge on Comcast or Spectrum or Fios or Cox.

And forget about switching between the services no matter what connection you have, because you're sitting there with a five-minute lag. No gambler (hi, ex) wants to deal with that.

So there's at least $140 a month right there, $110 if you only go with what you need/want for sports.

I might as well spend $200 — a high price, but reasonable compared to the streaming necessities — on most of the above, a helluva lot more channels, the ability to easily flip back and forth between games, and not being at the mercy of a cell tower three miles away that can easily be cut off if bad weather comes through. And if I'm trying to stream local TV during a major emergency via my 5G, good luck. Lots more cell towers and lots better technology today, but does no one remember what happened on 9/11?

The subscription culture is very short-sighted. The only one I have is for HVAC filters every other month. I'd forget to ever swap the thing out otherwise, and I'm convinced it cuts my electric bill by at least the amount I pay for the filter ($18ish). I'm not spending $10 a month for unlimited drinks at Panera only so I can spend another $100 on their meh food. All for the sake of a black raspberry noncaffeinated tea or guava pear lemonade.

 

This is precisely how I feel. Cable is imperfect and blows (especially if you're stuck with the Dolans running your cable company), but I can find anything I want at any time. People complaining about Netflix, et al limiting the number of episodes per series and/or pulling series off the platform...folks, there are thousands of shows running forever and ever and ever in reruns on cable!

Of course, my wife and daughter are fully invested in streaming, so I often have to fend off the "we should drop cable" charge. Me, I'd be fine with just Netflix. And the only streaming service I really need as a sportswriter/fan is ESPN+, and I usually cancel that after the NHL regular season (I should check to see if I did that!). With a discounted mlb.tv package (hello Father's Day special), I have everything I need thereafter.

If anything, every sports league trying to suck at the teet of streaming makes me more committed to cable. Fuck off MLB, I don't need a Sunday morning or Friday night game, even if one of the locals is playing. And I'll have no trouble figuring out an alternative when the NFL sends a wild card game to streaming,

 

Streaming becomes destination TV. You have to make an effort to find what you're looking for. With cable, I can flip channels and I may find an interesting game I hadn't planned to watch. Switch to ESPN, see two random college football teams in a 42-39 game with 2 minutes left and stick around to see the outcome. No one is randomly flipping to a game on a steaming service. Of all the Apple and Peacock games, I've only watched my local teams.

Are streaming-only baseball fans going to Apple for a Red Sox-White Sox game or are they only watching their favorite team?

 

Hi, I’m no one.

 

To me, it’s just not a user-friendly experience. I’d love to read your thoughts or tips on improving my experience.

 

Oh, it sucks for changing channels on the fly, as does YouTube TV. (Damn I’m going to hate having that bill again in a couple of weeks.)

For college football season, I use it as my second screen. If there’s a good finish brewing or just a dead spot in my primary game, I can flip through the ESPN app choices pretty quickly. And if it is late in a busy window and I really want to max out my choices, I can have the YouTube TV app going on my phone as well to pull up a third game (including Fox/CBS/NBC stuff) and then toggle back and forth between apps. Or if shot is really going wild, I can have the YouTube TV on my phone playing and then scroll through to see a silent preview screen of another game by browsing channels.

For college basketball, I can do something similar but I’m more apt to stay with ESPN app for that one. If I don’t have a game I’m devoted to on a random weeknight, I’ll often start watching with the second half of the early East Coast games and flip through matchups of interest until I settle in between a couple of games that look promising. If one starts getting out of hand or dragging with reviews, I’m using the scoreboard app to tell me what else is available. On a good weeknight I can find up to a half-dozen games that grab my interest. It helps that I really enjoy mid-major basketball as well as the SEC. Also if the Predators are on that night, they get added to the mix, since I’m somehow a zip code or two away from blackout territory.

 

This is what I don't understand about the Apple deal. I was only compelled to watch Apple when the Mets or Yankees were playing last year (and when Pujols got no. 700...fucking joke that the Cardinals guys had to give that one up). This year, I'm not even bothering b/c it's not free. Thus. I am absolutely not looking for Apple when the locals aren't playing, and that'd be the case even if last year's broadcasts weren't, uhh, a work in progress. Who is seeking these games out? MLB is basically a niche sport now, thanks largely to the ineptitude of its "leadership" the last 30+ years. If younger viewers more accustomed to streaming aren't baseball fans, there is no way they are trying it out on Apple. All MLB is doing is making it harder to find games. Between YES, ESPN, Fox, Apple, Amazon & Peacock, the Yankees are sometimes on four different networks in a week.

 

I think there are eight different places that show Yankees games. Stuff like that is exhausting