You’re right, at least as long as the current contracts exist. But as soon as those contracts expire viewership numbers become very relevant for providers. If ESPN wants to gourge the providers and nobody is watching, the providers will tell them to pound sand.
Maybe, there are also part of the contracts based on add revenue as well. And don't forget there is an entire other piece of revenue that is the bowl games and the playoff. Imagine the SEC with 3 playoff teams out of 4. Clemson slips up and the PAC12 has nobody. Big12 is gone. It could happen.
I assume a 32 team ACC/SEC would demand a renegotiated deal with ESPN/NBC/Fox that could easily eclipse their current per team payout. The viewership for a Bama/ND game in October would be huge. And Vandy vs. Duke would be no worse than any Vandy or Duke game.
The ingenious thing that ESPN has done is set up all of their provider contracts to expire before important sporting times, and completely isolated form the contracts of other providers. If Dish Network tells ESPN to pound sane, ESPN can take 30% of Dish Network's subscribers to another provider. What has happened in the past is that before the contract expires, if Dish didn't agree to the terms, ESPN would advertise that college football was not going to be available on Dish and people should call Dish or switch to DirectTV. When DirecTV's contract came up at a different time, they did the same thing to DirecTV. They don't have a monopoly on all sports content, but they have enough of a lock that a percentage of any provider's subscribers are interested, or even mainly interested in live sports. I estimated 30%. I have seen estimates between 30-40% but don't know how accurate they are. The viewership numbers didn't really matter. The only thing that mattered was whether subscribers would leave is ESPN was taken away. To gain that, ESPN didn't need any one game or program that had a large audience. They just needed to have SEC sports, ACC sports, Big 12 sports, etc. that wrapped up a large subscriber base's interest.
Exactly...I worked for DISH for nine years and Comcast Business for2. Pay TV these days is driven by sports. You don't DVR a game unless you have to.
If it's a round-robin schedule, those matchups would occur once every 4 years in a 32-team megacluster.
It looks like The South has the real basketball schools. (ie. the last 3 ACC champs)
Texas and Oklahoma gets hurt moving to the SEC for basketball. If they care. Big12 is a better conference.
I was once told by someone who would be in position to know, that the biggest fear at CBS Sports was that Augusta National would one day decide that they did not need CBS to produce The Masters and could do it themselves.
Think of a world where there is no ESPN, ABC, CBS. All TV is on demand. News is streaming. Shows are subscriber based.
You're right. We're a lot closer to that reality than people realize. I grew up when radio was the only option. Every little town in GA had a Tech station and a UGa station. SAT phones and 6G are going to be amazing.
I think the claim is that ESPN is trying to get enough teams poached from the Big12 such that the Big12 isn't able to survive. The contract probably has some escape clauses for ESPN. I don't know what they are, but they could be something like fewer than half of the members at contract signing are still in the conference?
I remember many years ago Major League Baseball was struggling with the vast sea of empty seats at games and wondered if better TV contracts would come if the visuals for TV included full stands. Someone did the math and concluded you could have large sections of general admission seating and charge $1.50 per seat and fill up the sight lines for the TV cameras thus creating a more exciting atmosphere and product.
Weird to say, but I would watch a Vandy/Duke matchup. When two doormats square off it can be an intense game because neither want to lose a game like that.
New York has an Atlantic coast. It’s Pittsburgh and Louisville that make no sense.