ESPN Holes Eight-Year British Open Deal
Addition of BCS Games Could Follow Golf Acquisition
By Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 11/13/2008 10:42:00 PM
ESPN officials can hoist the Claret Jug, as the sports giant has inked an eight-year deal for exclusive coverage of the British Open, beginning with the 2010 tourney.
The rights agreement with The R&A means that Open championship will become the first of golf’s four majors to appear solely on cable. ESPN, for a reported $25 million annually, will televise 34 hours of the live coverage over four days, including six hours of highlights that will appear on broadcast brethren ABC.
The British Open isn’t the only rights ESPN may put in its bag. Fox Broadcasting has until Monday to match what Sports Business Journal first reported was a $500 million, four-year ESPN offer to retain the rights to four of the five Bowl Championship Series games -- the Fiesta, Orange and Sugar Bowls, plus the championship contest.
As has been the case with just about all of the contracts, ESPN has secured of late, the new pact with The R&A will also provide the sports behemoth with broad and comprehensive rights for digital platforms, notably broadband, mobile and video-on-demand, plus expanded television and digital media rights for ESPN International.
Additionally, the deal, which was handled by IMG, affords ESPN exclusive domestic coverage of the Senior British Open and the 2011 and 2015 Walker Cups
Turner Sports, which will wrap up its seven-year pact with the R&A with some 28 hours of coverage of the Open 2009 tournament from Turnberry, Scotland on July 16-19, said it declined to extend its rights to the championship on Wednesday. Turner provides exclusive U.S. coverage on the British Open on Thursdays and Fridays, as well as in early hours -- 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. -- on the weekends.
“We are disciplined in our approach to negotiating programming rights,” said Turner Sports president David Levy in a statement. ‘While we were unable to reach terms on future rights that made economic sense for our company, we respect and value the R&A and our partnership of the past six years, and look forward to TNT's final year of covering The Open.”
Meanwhile, ESPN could be near tackling the aforementioned BCS games and the rights to televise what amounts to college football's championship. In addition to shelling out $125 million annually for those four games, the other BCS game, the Rose Bowl, already airs on ABC. However, the “granddaddy of them all” could also migrate to ESPN, starting in 2010.
Fox is in the final year of a four-year, $330 million contract for the four BCS games.
The BCS acquisition would not only put another major sports on cable’s air, but allow ESPN to up-sell its and ABC’s expansive regular-season college football packages to the advertising community.
What impact the addition of Open championship, and potentially the BCS games and the 2014 and 2016 Olympics Games, which ESPN is also expected to bid on, would have on subscriber license fee is unclear.
The total sports network, with fees well above the $3 mark, already garners far and away the highest monthly per subscriber license of any basic-cable network. It's that dual revenue stream that gives ESPN a major leg up when it comes to ponying up top rights dollars.
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