sports rights

ESPN has agreed to match NBC’s offer for the Big East, agreeing to pay more than $20M per year for a six-year package, according to several well-placed sources. The two sides still are trying to work out various details about how many games ESPN will carry and where they will air. Sources said the Big East will have to take ESPN’s offer to conference presidents, who will have to vote to approve the deal.

It’s like an earthquake rattling up from the depths, a seismic shift could rock many corners of broadcasting and production in Chicago. The Cubs not on WGN-TV anymore after serving as ancestral programming since the station first signed on in 1948?! That possibility is looming as a 2015 reality now.

News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey insists he has no regrets about losing out on bidding for the Dodgers’ television rights. Rival Time Warner plunked down a reported $8 billion to broadcast the Los Angeles-based team’s games for 25 years starting in 2014, but Carey told analysts and investors on Wednesday that the deal was “too rich for our blood.”

Time Warner Cable chairman and CEO Glenn Britt on Thursday told investors that the operator’s regional sports network strategy is designed to minimize costs in the long haul. Speaking on TWC’s fourth quarter earnings call, Britt said the company’s 25-year pact to distribute SportsNet LA, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ new RSN, was a forward-looking deal. “We do not pretend that these deals are inexpensive or cheap, and our sense is that if we’re going to carry these games, they’re going to be expensive when we get them,” Britt said. “So what we think we’ve done with these deals is to minimize and stabilize the cost over a long time period.”

Per-subscriber fees for sports television networks keep going up, and the cost gets passed on to viewers whether they watch the games or not.

Few cable companies have been as vocal about the rising costs of sports programming as Time Warner Cable. But its executives’ critical words don’t match up with Time Warner Cable’s actions. As of late, few cable companies have been as instrumental in driving up sports costs as Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable Inc. has struck a deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers to broadcast the Major League Baseball team’s games, two people familiar with the matter said. An announcement of the agreement is imminent, although no deal has been signed, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision isn’t yet public. The games will be carried on a new regional sports network developed by Guggenheim Partners, which bought the Dodgers for $2.15 billion last year.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are leaning toward moving its television broadcasts from Fox Sports to Time Warner Cable starting in 2014, according to people familiar with the matter but not authorized to discuss it. The Dodgers have not made a final decision, the people said.

Unemployment is high, growth sluggish, confidence hamstrung. A debt default and pointless austerity are just around the corner. Meanwhile, in sports it’s raining money, package by multi-billion-dollar rights package. Talk about running up the score. TV has been there every step of the way, lavishing contracts increasingly incomprehensible in the context of a financial crash followed by a recession and a weak recovery.

The Dodgers and Fox would launch a new regional sports network under the tentative deal, which Dick Clark Productions may manage. Major League Baseball is still negotiating for its cut of the entire $6.1 billion package.

Hoping to find a solution to the dispute between the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles over the value of the Nationals’ television rights, Major League Baseball has asked a private investment bank to seek potential new owners for the rights that are now held by the regional sports network controlled by Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

After negotiating exclusively with Fox Sports on a new TV deal to keep the team on its Prime Ticket network, the Dodgers have taken a meeting with Time Warner Cable, which wants the team on its SportsNet and Deportes channels.

Michael Powell, a former FCC chairman and now the cable industry’s top lobbyist, warned that if the cost of sports programming continues to rise it could lead to government intervention.

The new owners of the Dodgers are expected to get $6 billion-plus for the TV rights to their team’s games. That may be a big win for the home team, but consumers won’t be doing high-fives once they see their pay-TV bills.

Fox Sports is close to clinching the exclusive TV rights for the Los Angeles Dodgers by paying between $6 billion and $7 billion over 25 years to put the team on its regional sports network in Southern California and, of course, its national Fox Broadcasting Co.

The deal, which begins next season, will provide more than 100 hours of programming across NBC and cable channel NBC Sports Network.

The National Football League reached agreement with Time Warner (TWC) Cable Inc. to carry the league-owned NFL Network and RedZone Channel, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said. The multiyear accord may be announced later today, according to the people, who were granted anonymity because the contract hasn’t been signed.

In TV rights negotiations, Fox has told Major League Baseball officials that it not only wants to renew its current rights, but also acquire those that Turner now holds, according to sources. Fox needs the extra games to implement plans to convert Speed into an all-sports network. Fox would continue to air league championship games and World Series on broadcast network. Fox is not alone in the bidding. Turner and NBC are in the game, too.

Depending on how the rights negotiations play out, CBS could have baseball for the first time in almost two decades or Fox could acquire rights to even more games and use them to launch a cable sports channel that would look to challenge Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN.

At an average of $700 million a year, the new eight-year is twice as rich as the current deal. Major League Baseball now turns its attention to the rest of its media package, which includes Divisional playoff series, Championship playoff series and the World Series, as well as a Saturday Game of the Week.

Since baseball returned to Washington in 2005, the Nationals and Baltimore Orioles have tried to develop a rivalry on the field, even as — until this season — both languished at the bottom of the standings. But off the field, a more important and far more bitter dispute rages over the Nationals’ television rights and how much they are now worth.

The Big 12 is on the verge of a blockbuster TV contract that will put its media revenue among the top tier of college conferences, despite losing several marquee programs in the last two years. The Big 12 and ESPN are nearing an extension that will earn the conference — combined with its Fox TV contract — $2.5 billion over the next 13 years, according to industry sources. The ESPN extension would run through 2025 and sync up with Fox’s deal.

I am quite troubled by the soaring price of monthly cable and satellite TV bills fueled by hyperinflationary increases in TV rights fees won by the NFL and many other sports organizations. Non-sports pay TV subscribers are massively subsidizing sports viewers by an estimated $3 billion annually. A sports tier designed to reflect actual consumer demand for NFL games, golf tournaments, and baseball doubleheaders has the potential to allocate programming expenses more fairly within the pay TV universe.

ESPN has the exclusive rights to 24 championships across various college sports.

Although NBCUniversal, Fox Sports, and Turner Sports expressed keen interest in the new bundle, the bidding process has been put on hold, a casualty perhaps of the NFL’s failure to get the players’ union to agree to an expanded season.

ESPN is answering critics who publicly accused the media company of wild, indiscriminate spending with its eight-year, $15.2 billion deal to extend its rights to Monday Night Football.

In the wake of ESPN’s deal to keep the NFL on its network at an average price tag of $1.9 billion a year, CBS CCO Leslie Moonves said he also anticipated paying more, but hopefully nothing approaching what the sports cable channel will be shelling out.

The networks combined pay about $3.1 billion a year for the rights to the 16-game season, up 35% from their last deal. Although the NFL’s contracts with CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN still have two years to run, the league would like to have new deals wrapped up by the end of this season, in February. The three broadcast networks could end up joining ESPN in paying 10-digit dollar figures per season in their next contracts.

Media buyers say that there are plenty of advertisers ready to back a possible new TV package of eight Thursday night NFL games. If the NFL moves foward with the plan, they say, the games would most likely end up on cable — ESPN, Turner (TBS, TNT or Tru TV) or Comcast’s Versus. They can draw on the hefty programming fees from the cable and satellite operators to subsidize the games. Nonetheless, the buyers believe the broadcast networks would be remiss if they just conceded the package to cable.

More bidders, solid ratings, attractive demos and ‘TV Everywhere’ fuel a red hot market, but could the bubble burst?