sports rights

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.

This is the 10th year that CBS and Turner have teamed up for March Madness. While the deal provides the NCAA with its largest source of revenue, it has also turned a profit for both networks as well as benefiting fans because all of the games are available nationally. The success of the partnership, which will last until at least 2032, has exceeded the expectations of CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus.

Hockey will return in a big way to Walt Disney’s ESPN in a new seven-year deal that breaks NBCUniversal’s dominance of the sport’s TV rights and makes some National Hockey League games available for streaming in broader fashion. ESPN’s new deal with the NHL will last from the 2021-22 season through the 2027-28 season, the network announced today.

The National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, people familiar with the matter said. New agreements could be in place as early as next week, the people said.

Disney and the NFL have reached a broad agreement on a new media rights deal that will see ESPN renew Monday Night Football and ABC return to the Super Bowl rotation for the first time since 2006, according to sources. Contracts still have not been signed, but the two sides have smoothed over enough differences that a deal is very close at hand. Both the NFL and ESPN declined to comment.

The NFL is in active discussions on renewal rates with all four of its existing network partners — NBC, CBS, Fox, and Disney-owned ESPN, according to people familiar with the matter. The NFL is hoping to get its primary package renewals completed by March 17. NBC, CBS and Fox are likely to accept increases closer to 100% than Disney, which is currently paying much more than the three broadcast networks for its Monday Night Football package, said the people.

With the pandemic hurting NHL revenues, the league is expected to seek an increase in revenues, starting with its national TV deals. For a substantial bump, the deal will likely need to carve out some exclusive game content for one of the new subscription direct-to-consumer platforms, such as ESPN+ or Peacock.

Peter King explains in his latest Football Morning in America column that the NFL is “within a month” of finalizing 10-year TV deals. Those packages “could result in an aggregate increase of 70% to 100% in rights fees from the last contract.”

The Super Bowl is complete, and the National Football League is wasting no time shifting attention to its top revenue stream: media rights. The NFL is looking to finalize frameworks of new TV rights agreements in the next few weeks and wants to do so before setting the 2021 salary cap figure in March, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

ESPN and Major League Baseball are closing in on a TV deal that would provide the network exclusive rights to the first round of the playoffs. Now all that is needed is a first round of the playoffs. That needs to be negotiated between MLB and the Players Association, which is to say that, while an ESPN-MLB deal is close, they are still far from knowing when — and even if — there will be playoffs expanded from 10 to likely 14 teams to include a best-of-three first round.