After Super Bowl, the TV Games Begin
By R. Thomas Umstead, Programming Editor -- Multichannel News, 2/12/2006 7:00:00 PM
The ridiculously long and superficially hyped up Super Bowl XL is finally behind us.
So what’s everyone talking about now that the football season is over?
Why, the National Football League, of course.
Not because league officials made questionable calls during the Pittsburgh Steelers’ win over the Seattle Seahawks, or because league censors bleeped Mick Jagger during the halftime show.
Instead, the discussion among sports-television executives is about the NFL’s decision to hand off its new package of Thursday night and Saturday late-season games to its own channel, the NFL Network.
The surprise decision all but spikes Comcast Corp.’s chances of truly competing in the same national cable sports arena as ESPN. I know, I know — Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has consistently punted away any discussion about his company’s desire to line up helmet to helmet with ESPN.
But Comcast didn’t pay several visits to the NFL’s New York City offices over the past few months with what was reported by industry analysts to be a $300 million proposal for the eight-game package — one which would have given the league a financial stake in OLN — just to keep that network in the cable sports minor leagues, alongside College Sports Television and corporate sibling The Golf Channel. Comcast was hoping to push OLN into the major leagues of sports television with the acquisition of the NFL package.
The NFL scores big, from a television standpoint, on both ratings and advertising. What other sports entity could command around $2.5 million for a commercial spot featuring a wrinkled Leonard Nimoy giving the Mr. Spock “live long and prosper” hand sign for the millionth time?
Comcast was hoping its own NFL package would give OLN instant street cred, much like ESPN’s $4.8 billion deal in 1998 for a full season of Sunday-night games, which placed it within the elite of sports television. Or like the deal in 1993, when the Fox broadcast network got NFL games, which, in terms of public perception, put it in the same league as ABC, CBS and NBC. Comcast even overpaid for the rights to telecast live National League Hockey games with the hope of baiting the NFL in an effort to build a serious competitor to ESPN.
Now, aside from possibly acquiring a small package of Major League Baseball regular season games and potentially slicing some Professional Golfers Association events from The Golf Channel, Comcast will have to wait until 2008 when the television rights to Kobe, LeBron and the rest of the National Basketball Association become available to have a shot at another marquee pro sports property.
I’m sorry, but OLN’s recent acquisition of U.S. Davis Cup tennis matches just doesn’t cut it. Meanwhile, operators who worried about Comcast rushing their offices with a sizable OLN rate card increase because of the NFL package can now breathe a temporary sigh of relief.
I say temporary because that knock on the door will soon come anyway — from the NFL itself.
With a package of live games in tow, the NFL Network will undoubtedly look to significantly increase its current license fee of 20 cents per month, per subscriber. More disconcerting for distributors, the league itself may suit up to challenge ESPN.
NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has said in the past that the league wants to create more than just a league-dedicated channel. He wanted the league to compete head to head with ESPN for the rights to marquee pro sports properties. While NFL officials last week downplayed those lofty aspirations in light of the live NFL game package, the league obviously sees the financial windfall that Disney is enjoying from ESPN and wants to score as well. Can you say booyah?
But first it has to get the NFL Network distributed in more than 35 million homes, which shouldn’t be hard, given the popularity of the sport. ESPN didn’t place 15 of its Sunday Night Football telecasts among last year’s top 20 highest-rated shows in basic cable by accident. A lot of somebodies watch live NFL games on cable.
Even if operators get blitzed with a whopping surcharge for the games, it will be very difficult for Time Warner, Cablevision Systems and others to continue to keep the network off their lineups without suffering a major backlash from consumers or, worse, a mass subscriber exodus to DirecTV.
Super Bowl XL may be history. But for the NFL and cable, the game has just begun.
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