sports rights

Apple is about to take a, well, something out of the NFL’s rights portfolio. The tech behemoth reportedly has emerged as the favorite to land the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, according to Matthew Belloni of PUCK.news, via Sports Business Journal. An unnamed source told Belloni that the deal is actually done, and that it’s being kept under wraps at Apple’s request.

Major League Soccer and Apple may soon be finalizing an agreement to bring the top domestic soccer league to Apple TV+, according to a report from Sam Stejskal, who broke the story on Twitter.

The NCAA championships package — which includes the women’s tournament and 28 other title events, though not the men’s tourney — expires in August 2024. That means the bidding process for whatever packages the NCAA decides to market would likely begin next fall.

The new streaming deal between Major League Baseball and Apple is worth $85 million annually over seven years, according to several sources familiar with the agreement who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the terms.

NBC Sports will televise USFL games along with Fox Sports when the pro football league returns in a new incarnation next spring. Starting in April, NBCUniversal will carry 21 USFL games in 2022, with eight on NBC, nine on USA Network and four on Peacock. Fox will have 22 games, 12 on its flagship broadcast network and 10 on cable’s FS1. The USFL’s 20 national over-the-air broadcast windows will exceed the number for any regularly scheduled sport in the first half of 2022, according to the league.

The Premier League announced the deal on Thursday. NBC will pay more than $2.7 billion to continue showing the world’s richest soccer competition. A person familiar with the deal told The Associated Press it almost triples the value of the U.S. English- and Spanish-language broadcast rights.

The English Premier League is nearing the sale of its U.S. television rights for about $2 billion, setting a new overseas record, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

AEW is WWE’s first real fight in decades. It may change the face of pro wrestling in the U.S. Though the television contracts are just below those of professional sports leagues in the United States, the money spent on broadcasting pro wrestling is serious. AEW is in the middle of a $175 million television deal with WarnerMedia to air matches on Dynamite and Rampage twice a week on TNT, before moving to TBS next year.

The Walt Disney Co. and the National Football League reached a five-year deal that will put a new Monday night wild card playoff game on ESPN and ABC, starting at the end of this year’s regular season. The Disney networks plan to use the game as part of a megacast that will include a simulcast on ESPN and ABC, with Peyton and Eli Manning hosting their popular alternative telecast on ESPN2 and ESPN Plus.

NBCUniversal, Disney and ViacomCBS, along with tech giants like Amazon, are shifting resources to snap up live programming from major leagues in a new arms race to fuel direct-to-consumer services.

Major League Baseball and Barstool Sports have had significant negotiations about having national midweek games on the site’s platforms. The discussions are what Barstool founder Dave Portnoy was referring to last week when he mentioned his company has had talks with “major leagues.”

A committee of Texas senators heard testimony from university leaders at Baylor, TCU and Texas Tech on the monetary and academic losses that conference realignment would mean for the Big 12 and its members once Texas and Oklahoma leave for the SEC in 2025.

Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby alleges conference media rights partner ESPN conspired to damage the league by luring Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC as detailed in a cease and desist letter sent to the network on Wednesday.

IndyCar’s current deal with NBC Sports is in its final season and contract negotiations are unclear. There have been reports Penske will take a higher rights fee from a new partner and that NBC has fallen out of the running on a renewal. Sam Flood, executive producer and president of production of NBC Sports, said Wednesday the network wants to keep the racing series.

The streamer has inked a multi-year deal with the league to run 16 regular season games, including the inaugural Commissioner’s Cup title matchup.

The multibillion-dollar market for sports broadcasting rights is wreaking havoc in Europe, where soccer teams are suffering heavy losses due to pandemic-shuttered stadiums as new media players enter the field. In Italy, billionaire Leonard Blavatnik’s live sports streaming service DAZN, with backing from local telco streamer Telecom Italia, plunked down more than $1 billion per season for a three-year contract for the bulk of Italian Serie A soccer rights, displacing Comcast-owned pay TV operator Sky. The deal marked the first time a streamer has nabbed exclusive rights to a major domestic league in its native territory.

The network said Tuesday it had reached a six-year agreement with the South American governing body CONMEBOL for English-language U.S. rights that include this year’s tournament in Colombia and Argentina from June 13 to July 10 and the 2024 tournament, likely to be played in Ecuador.

The National Hockey League has completed its next TV rights package — and for the first time in 16 years, NBC Sports won’t be a part of it. NBC pulled out of negotiations for the partial rights for the league’s next TV deal. WarnerMedia’s Turner Sports will pick up the remainder of the package, sharing rights with ESPN for seven seasons beginning with the 2021-22 seasonth.

A start-up men’s basketball league, with plans to pay college students up to $150,000 and compete with the NCAA, has inked a media rights deal, setting the stage for its debut later this year. The Professional Collegiate League reached a pact with Next Level, a network owned by a former Obama administration official, that will air its games both on linear TV and streaming platforms.

The latest round of lucrative NFL rights renewals with programmers will likely lead to a rise in cord cutting for both MVPDs and virtual MVPDs. Deana Myers, research director at Kagan, broke down the new agreements with ABC, Amazon, ESPN, CBS, Fox and NBC, which her firm estimates are worth more than $107 billion all told. She said that programming costs are sure to rise from this, in terms of both affiliate and retransmission fees.

Major League Baseball is considering a rule change that cord cutters can cheer. After years of relying on traditional distribution of local games via cable and satellite (plus, to a limited extent, over-the-top streaming), MLB is now urging its regional sports networks to explore direct-to-customer possibilities for local fans.

NFL Media and Hulu announced a new multi-year carriage agreement to bring the NFL Network and NFL RedZone to Hulu’s live TV subscription streaming service Hulu + Live TV. The NFL Network and NFL RedZone will be available to Hulu + Live TV subscribers by Aug. 1, just in time for the 2021 NFL season. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Super League may not yet be a stone cold reality, but the proposal to band together 20 of the top European soccer clubs could generate billions of dollars in rights fees for football clubs across the pond, potentially attracting several major cable networks and broadcasters to compete for TV rights to the games.

Broadcasters anted up $100 billion for 10 years to show football — but the league can pursue a new path after seven years.

The $113 billion deal

announced by the NFL and media companies last Thursday spreads professional football content broadly, with CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN and Amazon all getting pieces, and locks it in at a time little else can attract such a wide audience. “If you think of the future of network television, there is nothing more important to it than the NFL,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst for LightShed Partners, an industry research firm. During the current television season, the eight most-watched recurring programs are football.

Shelly Palmer: “Whenever I’m asked about the fate of the television business, I always answer, ‘As goes the next NFL deal, so goes TV.’ Well, as everyone with even the slightest interest in the subject already knows, the NFL/TV deal is done—but times have changed. The NFL deal makes it very clear that it is time for the FCC to think seriously about reclaiming the spectrum gifted to the local broadcast industry. It is also time for Congress to craft policies that not only respect the state of today’s technology but aspire to leverage the technology of tomorrow.”

The new rights deal that include streaming rights “ends the retrans gravy train,” says analyst Rich Greenfield, while Moffett Nathanson says the biggest losers “will be the non-O&O affiliates of NBC and CBS.”

“The NFL is following the path we have seen first in scripted TV, then original films, followed by kids and unscripted content, and increasingly news and now sports,” writes one Wall Street expert.

The league took in $5.9 billion a year in its current contracts. It will get $113 billion over the 11 seasons of the new deals that begin in 2023, an increase of 80% over the previous such period. Amazon has partnered with the league to stream Thursday night games since 2017, but it will take over the entire package from Fox, which has had it since 2018. Games will continue to air on CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN, while ABC will have a limited schedule of games as well as returning to the Super Bowl rotation for the first time since the 2005 season. Above, CBS, with lead anchors Tony Romo (l) and Jim Nantz, will continue to carry its traditional package of games.