More Cuts at ESPN

It is the exact thing I wrote yesterday.

Did the guy who greenlighted paying $100 million for each and every MNF game get shitcanned?

 

I still can't fathom how it can cost $100 million for a televised football game.

 

Gruden's Grunts don't come cheap.

 

ESPN was so frightened of losing guaranteed highlight tape from the NFL they wildly overbid for the worst broadcast package the league had to offer. Foolish. Their bidding strategy makes little to no sense. Case in point. ESPN's first big rights score was college hoops way way back in the '80s. They still show endless hours of the sport during the winter, then let themselves be outbid by Turner for a share of the NCAA tournament, the payoff for all those hours of very low-rated live games. Same deal with baseball. Lots of regular season games, few if any playoff games. Still have Home Run Derby, I guess that's something.

 

Just because locked-in rights fees are the biggest thing in ESPN's budget doesn't mean it shouldn't make cuts wherever possible when it's losing customers by the droves or that a few million in savings somehow isn't worthwhile for its bottom line. I love Jayson. He's a friend. He's a great talent. He's a hard worker. I'm going to miss reading him. But please understand people are not making their decision to drop or keep cable based on his presence at ESPN.

 

Fire this man:
At $1.9 billion a year, ESPN will be paying 73 percent more than the $1.1 billion a year it has been spending for “Monday Night,” the highest-rated show on cable television. ESPN began carrying Monday night games in 2006, when its previous package of Sunday night games moved to NBC....
“The value of the N.F.L. to us is the ubiquity of the sport across our platforms all the time,” said John Skipper, the executive vice president for content at ESPN. “It’s just stupendous for us. It’s daily product — we don’t have a day without the N.F.L.”

He called the new deal, even at a much higher cost, “fiscally prudent for us” and one that “we will be able to absorb and continue to grow.” For ESPN, the length of the deal, eight years, is advantageous because it will span a period in which it will renegotiate all of its deals with cable, satellite and telephone companies. That will almost certainly lead to subscriber fees exceeding the estimated $4.50 a month that ESPN now charges.

Another know-nothing consultant:
Neal Pilson, a sports industry consultant, said ESPN’s $1.9 billion annual payment was affordable in cable economics.

“Hypothetically,” he wrote in an e-mail, “if you say 50 cents or one dollar (or more) of the $4.50 monthly sub fee is attributed to the N.F.L. on ESPN (and push that forward to support future increases in sub fees), you can easily justify the rights fee given all the programming and content ESPN will be carrying.”

ESPN Extends Deal With N.F.L. for $15.2 Billion

 

Per the article above, the billions got them stuff like an extra hour of NFL Countdown. Whoop de damn do.

 

There was definitely some fat on the bone.

 

I completely understand this. And - like so many other things in my life - I'm probably wrong.

It's just that with some newspapers and magazines, I think there's an intangible value involved in the collective mass of writers/reporters involved in a product. It may be an illusion but for me, at least it's there. I still subscribe to the New York Times but while I never read the old Chess column, I notice that it's gone. And that some days I can now get through their foreign section in under an hour. It hasn't come close to a critical point yet but it theoretically it could. And then - with other media products - people stop subscribing.

 

Yeah, ESPN overpaid for the NFL and NBA, but at least those packages have delivered viewer eyeballs.

They also paid $295 million for 20 years of the Longhorn Network and are getting bupkis for it. That's the big sunken cost.

 

So baseball lost five in total, according to the Baseball Tonight broadcast -- Stark and Bowden as well as former players Doug Glanville, Raul Ibanez and Dallas Braden.

 

Katz just confirmed on Twitter that he's been let go. Dang.