BearSD said:
CNHTH said:
golden sloth said:
If Cal had a weekly nationally televised afternoon game we too would have viewership that large. Which is why I ignore it. It is not linear to anything other than who fox wants you to watch.
I'm not happy about it, but what matters more than anything else in college sports is money.
Who Fox wants you to watch matters because Fox pays billions to the Big Ten and engineered the contracts by which CBS and NBC will also pay billions to the Big Ten. Cal and Stanford would be in the Big Ten if Fox wanted you to watch those teams.
Cal and Stanford are fortunate that ESPN thinks they are worth ACC-level money. UU, CU, UA, and ASU got similarly lucky. OSU and WSU did not. So yeah, what the TV bean counters want us to watch matters, unfortunately.
I don't disagree with you on most but the glaring issue for me is…
The big ten sold its gor to fox, nbc, and cbs for a collective 1.1 billion per year.
The big ten has 98 games that qualify for that each year. Each game is 4 quarters. Each quarter has roughly 4 commercial breaks. Each commercial break has an average of 3 network (not local commercials). Fox commercials on cfb saturday (the prime time national slot are 110k per)… so even if we use the high end for commercial revenue on national games… we get 510 million in ad revenue across 4704 commercials split between 3 networks meaning the valuation is half of what those 3 paid.
In the case of fox they paid 300 million for 16 games my guess is they will all be prime time so 110k per ad seems fair. Let's say they have 5 commercial breaks per quarter. That's 141mm in ad revenue in those games. And again (and even worse) it appears on paper that they paid more than twice the assessed value. Imagine being the poor guy who has to run the fox networks audits?
Presently they turn a slight profit because of the money they get from Comcast and other regional providers for subscriptions which are bundled with all of the fox channels. There is no fox sports stand alone option you have to buy the whole shebang.
And in a streaming scenario. Which is inevitable. They don't get the extra money from regional carriers so they would have to pass on that bill to consumers. Which in the case of the big 10 is about 2 million viewer average per school. So essentially even if they unbundled and sold fox big ten as a stand alone they would have to sell it to all 2 million viewers for 25 bucks a pop and force the viewers to sit through even more advertising than thru already do just to turn a profit. But that's actually not the reality.
You would have fox, cbs, and nbc separate; with fox having to charge viewers for streaming separately.
And the reality with fox is that if you include the bundle model they use they are in the hole 4-5 billion a year without regionals. Which means they would need to charge viewers 80 dollars a year for Fox News and fox sports.
I dunno. It doesn't seem like it pencils from what I've seen and at face value it appears they paid double the gors actual value which is ironic because the big ten gor was sold for roughly double the value of every other p5 gor. Meaning the big ten isn't actually worth double, fox just paid double.
Which if I was an auditor would be a huge red flag in addition to the rise of streaming live media.
