John Kosner Spoke with Chris Bumbaca of USA Today about Peacock’s Exclusive NFL Playoff Game

Original Article: USA Today, by Chris Bumbaca, January 13th, 2024

On multiple occasions during the final game of the 2023 NFL regular season, NBC play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico offered viewers a variation of the same promotion over and over.

“And don’t miss the first-ever exclusively streamed playoff game Saturday night,” Tirico said as the Buffalo Bills battled the Miami Dolphins with the AFC East on the line. “Available only on Peacock.”

Downloading a streaming app to watch an NFL playoff game? For some, the idea seems ludicrous. For another type of media consumer, it’s normal. For the NFL and NBCUniversal, it’s a forward-thinking way to stay ahead of the curve – and make more money.  

“We know and we see the continued evolution in the media landscape, and we want to be where our fans are,” NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder said on a conference call. “We know they’re increasingly, especially younger fans, on different screens.”

Why did an NFL playoff game end up on Peacock?

The addition of a seventh playoff team in each conference – and the elimination of a bye for the No. 2 seed – added two extra games to the wild-card slate. With that increased inventory, the NFL saw an opportunity to diversify its media presence on one of the biggest weekends of the football calendar.

“Considering cord-cutting and the soft TV ad-sales market, I think they have no choice but to pursue streaming because that’s where the growth is gonna be," John Kosner, the president of digital media and sports consultancy Kosner Media, told USA TODAY Sports. "That’s where media companies are investing.”

NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said the window was presented as a streaming-only game as part of the new media rights deal that went into effect prior to this season. NBCUniversal put together a pitch for the Saturday night game to air on Peacock. That, plus a reported $110 million, was all it took for Peacock to score rights to a matchup that resulted in the No. 3 Kansas City Chiefs — "Swifties," meet "The Office" — and No. 6 Dolphins.

“It’s not as if we shifted any games from linear to stream,” Cordella said. “This was an additional game that was available to us.”

In the past two years, an extra game was given to another broadcast partner, such as CBS or FOX, while the other went to ESPN on Monday.

The Chiefs-Dolphins game will still be available on the local NBC channel in the teams’ respective television markets.

“It’s historic, right?” Kosner said. “(NBC) also got a terrific game."

NFL fans becoming familiar with streaming

The NFL had 93 of the top 100 broadcasts in 2023, according to Nielsen ratings. That’s in large part due to their reach over cable, Kosner said. The league is able to offer a greater percentage of games available for free on TV than any other league.

In its second year of exclusively streaming “Thursday Night Football,” Amazon saw a 24% increase among total viewers (11.86 million) compared to the previous season (9.58 million). Kosner could see Amazon entering the postseason mix as early as 2025.

An international game was exclusively available on ESPN+ this year for the second straight season. And the NFL introduced NFL+, which allows fans to watch local and prime-time games for a monthly or yearly subscription rate.

All “Sunday Night Football” games on NBC are streamed simultaneously on Peacock (CBS does something similar with its NFL package and Paramount+). Peacock currently has 30 million subscribers, according to NBCUniversal. Comcast president Mike Cavanagh said in December the platform took on $2.8 billion in losses in 2023.

"It’s going to be fascinating to see," Kosner said. "I would be surprised if there wasn’t a lot of consternation among NFL fans as to they don’t know where the game is, they’re annoyed they have to pay $5.99 to see it. But this is how you seed new markets and new platforms."

The deal between NBCUniversal and the NFL for the streaming-exclusive playoff game is for this season only. Schroeder said future postseason games available digitally will be evaluated during the offseason.

"That really was at the top of our list as we thought about the major media partnerships we did a couple years ago," Schroeder said, "making sure all our partnerships had broad digital distribution and that we are growing in that important place for our fans."

What will ratings look like?

NBC did a version of a dry run by airing the Dec. 23 Bills-Los Angeles Chargers game exclusively on Peacock. According to Nielsen data, the game averaged 7.3 million viewers, peaking at 8.4 million from the 10:45-11 p.m. ET.

The expectation is that the first wild-card game Saturday between the Houston Texans and Cleveland Browns, which starts at 4:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, will draw in excess of 20 million viewers. NBC is betting on the lead-in to drive viewers toward Peacock and that first broadcast will be filled with self-promotion and reminders of how to watch Chiefs-Dolphins during that Browns-Texans matchup.

“We’re going to take a lot of learnings from it,” Schroeder said. “Certainly, viewership will be one of them. That will be just one of the criteria we think about and look at the opportunities we have going forward.”

Why NBC wanted to put an NFL playoff game on Peacock

Simply put: subscribers. Paying customers.

Cordella said that success won’t be judged Sunday morning or by the ratings. The long-term behavior by customers who signed up for the game – and can cancel at anytime – will be the lasting impact.

“We did this for a reason. It’s not just to get people to watch on Saturday night,” Cordella said. “It’s to get people to watch and experience all this various content that we have across the Peacock service.

“It’s down the road – did people behave how we thought they would behave once they get inside the platform?”

Additionally, Cordella pushed back on the idea that the game amounted to a $6 pay-per-view (the cost of a monthly subscription – with ads). He cited the growing men’s and women’s college basketball presence on the platform, with the top-ranked Purdue men losing Tuesday night followed by Iowa star Caitlin Clark playing the next. WWE, Premier League, MLB and other sports leagues have presences on Peacock. The Paris Summer Olympics later this year will also be featured on Peacock.

“There’s a wealth of content that people may be unaware it exists,” Cordella said.

And those are all reasons for sports fans to keep paying a monthly bill for Peacock.

“They’re very sports-focused, between EPL and college football," Kosner said. "So they’ll have to tell that story, along with ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and all that content they have. But I think it’s going to be a challenge to keep the many, many fans who really were subscribing just to watch this particular game.”

Still, Kosner predicted "millions" of sign-ups from Saturday alone.

“That’s going to be great for Peacock," the longtime ESPN executive said. "I can’t imagine what other content Peacock could offer that would give them the boom they’re going to get on Saturday night. The test, of course, is how many of the fans are going to stay with the service next month?”

The Taylor Swift effect

Kosner wondered whether the choice of Kansas City was a factor (Schroeder provided a non-answer about a holistic approach to scheduling wild-card weekend).

“You have Taylor Swift, her factor here,” Kosner said. “That’s going to attract women, that’s going to attract younger, tech-savvy fans. Was that a choice made on purpose? Because that’s an audience that Peacock would like to have.”

Who are the announcers for the Chiefs vs. Dolphins on Peacock?

Chiefs vs. Dolphins is one of three games to air on NBC properties this weekend. Tirico will be the play-by-play announcer for two, starting with the Peacock game. He will be joined by Jason Garrett as the game analyst and Kaylee Hartung as the sideline reporter.

Meanwhile, NBC opted to go with its top college football broadcast crew of Noah Eagle, Todd Blackledge and Kathryn Tappen to call the early game – leaving Al Michaels, he of “emeritus” NBC status, out of the picture. Tirico will then travel overnight to call the Los Angeles Rams at Detroit Lions on Sunday (8 p.m. ET, NBC).

Kosner expects the early Saturday broadcast to use the lead-in as an advantage and heavily cross-promote Peacock sign-ups.

What will be different about Peacock playoff game?

Like the first Peacock game, the fourth quarter will have no commercials. Cordella said they learned a lot three weeks ago during the first experiment about when to toss to the studio or stay with the break in the action on the field with the broadcast booth.

Chiefs’ Charles Omenihu offers to buy Peacock subscriptions

Chiefs defensive end Charles Omenihu reacted to the playoff schedule announcement by posting on social media: “Us playing on peacock ONLY is insane I won’t lie.”

For Chiefs (and Dolphins) fans who are considered out-of-market viewers, that’s the reality of Saturday’s game. But Omenihu wanted to help out the members of “Chiefs Kingdom” who were displeased with the situation.

“I saw the comments and want y’all to be able to watch us play," Omenihu wrote on social media. "So, I’m giving away 90 3-month Peacock memberships! To enter to win, reply to this tweet with why you should get picked. Picking winners Friday!”

The winners of the Omenihu sweepstakes will enjoy Peacock beyond Saturday night, which is what NBC wants. Everybody else better pony up that credit card information – if they haven't already.

John Kosner Spoke with Ira Boudway of Bloomberg about The NBA’s Media Negotiations

Original Article: Bloomberg, by Ira Boudway, January 8th, 2024

It’s been almost a decade since the NBA went to market with its national TV rights. In fall 2014, the league agreed to a pair of nine-year deals for a combined $24 billion with Walt Disney Co. (home of ABC and ESPN) and what’s now Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (owner of TNT). At $2.7 billion per year, almost triple the annual value of the previous agreements, the deals helped the National Basketball Association grow rapidly—pushing player contracts into the hundreds of millions of dollars and franchise values into the billions. With those rights set to expire in 2025, the NBA will announce new landmark TV agreements this year.

Yet it’s been a tumultuous 10 years since the league was last at the table. Legacy media companies are being squeezed between the decline of the traditional cable bundle and the high cost of building subscription streaming services. In 2014, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, more than 100 million US households had a multichannel pay-TV subscription. Now that number is below 75 million. The streaming apps created to recapture those lost viewers, meanwhile, are collectively racking up billions of dollars in losses each year for media giants such as Comcast, Disney, and Paramount.

This time around, industry observers say, the NBA will be hard-pressed to triple its TV money. And the league won’t be able to simply cut and paste from past contracts. “These deals are going to look and feel different,” says John Kosner, a sports media consultant and former ESPN executive.

The process officially begins in March when Disney and Warner enter an exclusive 45-day window to negotiate possible extensions. But the two incumbents aren’t likely to wait until then to submit bids. Possible newcomers, including Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., have already begun positioning themselves to grab a piece of the NBA.

Currently, Disney gets 100 regular-season games, split between ESPN and ABC, plus a piece of the playoffs and all of the NBA Finals. Warner gets 64 regular-season games and a share of the playoffs. Most observers anticipate that both networks will continue carrying NBA games. “I wouldn’t expect either of the incumbents to fumble the opportunity,” says Ed Desser, a sports media consultant and former NBA executive. The shape of those packages is likely to change, however, as the league looks to carve out space for partners that can reach younger audiences and help keep the sport relevant. “The NBA has a younger-skewing fan base that is more liable to be accessed via a streaming platform,” Desser says. “You’ve got to fish where the fish are.”

In the past three years, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer have all done TV deals with the tech giants. The NFL sold Thursday Night Football to Amazon for more than $1 billion per season and its out-of-market Sunday Ticket package to Alphabet’s YouTube TV for $2 billion, while Apple Inc. bought Friday night games from MLB for a reported $85 million and then spent about $250 million to become the streaming home of MLS.

The NBA is almost certain to bring in a nontraditional broadcaster, too. To maximize revenue in a fractured landscape, says Daniel Cohen, a media rights consultant at Octagon Inc., the league will need to expand its partners to three or four. “If they do that with the right packages, then I could see $2.7 billion going to $6 billion,” Cohen says, referring to its annual haul. (Such a setup might look like this: a reduced number of games on ESPN-ABC and TNT; a weekly exclusive game on Apple TV+; and the league’s new In-Season Tournament going to Amazon.)

For fans, that could make following the NBA costlier and more complicated, with additional paywalls to jump over. But such is the life of sports fans these days as the cable bundle unravels.

John Kosner Spoke with Ben Portnoy of The Sports Business Journal About ESPN’s New NCAA Media Agreement

Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by Ben Portnoy, January 5th, 2024

That quaking you feel beneath your feet is coming from Indianapolis.

The NCAA this week announced a landmark eight-year deal with ESPN worth $115 million annually ($920 million total) for the broadcast rights to 40 championships — including women’s basketball, volleyball, gymnastics and more.

The move is a major one for NCAA President Charlie Baker, ESPN and those involved with the discussions. What does it all mean?

Here are a few takeaways:

NCAA avoided temptation to split up its TV package

Speculation in college sports circles in recent months centered on whether the NCAA would consider breaking out the women’s basketball tournament or the men’s and/or women’s College World Series into their own media bundle in some capacity.

Baker and his team decided against that. Why? Let him explain:

“What we had always said was we wanted the best deal for all of our championships,” Baker said when asked if the NCAA considered packaging the women’s basketball tournament separately. “If you think about it, it’s [2,300] hours of programming, which over the eight years of the deal will take place in an enormous number of settings with a whole variety of challenges and on the ground circumstances [making] this something where if you can get a production partner who’s willing to bite the whole thing of at a price that we believe is more than market competitive, we thought that was a better way to go.”

The decision to keep things bundled largely as they had been is layered. While there was a public narrative that the women’s basketball package could be healthy on its own, there was at least some fear that breaking of the most lucrative pieces of this package could devalue the remaining sports and leave them out to dry. In many media circles, both consultants and network sources shared that the value of the package was far greater with it being bundled and maintained. There are also the simple complications of having potentially more than one broadcast rights partner on these championships — more cooks in the kitchen, etc.

This isn’t to say there was lack of interest. Hillary Mandel, executive vice president and head of Americas for media at IMG, suggested there would have been plenty of interested parties should the rights have hit the open market (ESPN had an exclusive negotiating window on this deal).

Sources told Sports Business Journal that Fox Sports was among the parties that might have been interested in the rights to NCAA women’s basketball and volleyball if they were broken of, given the network’s investments in both sports in recent years.

“If you were to unbundle, the top of the package would be grabbed by everybody,” said Mandel, who consulted on the deal alongside Karen Brodkin, executive vice president and co-head of WME Sports. “But what would happen to everybody else? That’s not who the NCAA is. They don’t want to leave anybody behind.”

What does it mean for women’s basketball?

It’s a win for a number of women’s college sports, but if there’s a crown jewel in this collection of rights, it’s the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.

Baker told SBJ the NCAA valued the women’s basketball tournament at $65 million annually, or roughly 56% of the total value of the media rights included in this package. That’s a big number considering the entire last deal signed with ESPN in 2011 was only worth about $40 million annually.

“The trajectory of this property, in particular women’s sports, over the past few years, is extremely positive,” said Nick Dawson, ESPN’s senior vice president of college sports programming and acquisitions. “To have the entirety for eight more years is, in our view, a great place to be.”

Detractors will say the NCAA didn’t get enough in this deal. Media consultants Ed Desser and John Kosner, who provided analysis for the “Kaplan report” on gender equity published in 2021, estimated the women’s basketball championship could generate between $81 million and $112 million in annual rights fees and suggested it would be best sold as its own entity.

Kosner said ESPN is set up to manage the tonnage of the overall rights package “and although I think both Ed and I would argue that it would be a fascinating opportunity for one of the top digital companies, it’s not clear that any really got deeply involved.”

NCAA women’s basketball viewership has grown exponentially in recent years. The NCAA women’s title game between LSU and Iowa last year drew 9.9 million viewers on ABC, compared to the 14.69 million the men’s title game featuring UConn and San Diego State brought in on CBS. The LSU-Iowa contest was also the first women’s basketball title game to air on broadcast TV under the current media rights agreement with Disney/ESPN, which began prior to the 1996 tournament, and the title game will continue to air on ABC under the terms of the new deal.

The media rights market is a tight one, with a clear bifurcation between top properties getting a rights increase and others weighing not-so-attractive options, but the NCAA still netted a deal worth three times the previous one.

“We’re seeing the fruits of many, many years of labor coming to fruition in women’s sports,” Desser said. “If you go back 25 years, women’s sports was really almost an afterthought. I think it no longer is. It’s now in the mainstream. If you can generate a [almost] 10 rating on a women’s college basketball game, then you’ve really come a long, long way.”

ESPN stays frugal, but keeps its hands in everything

Despite the issues facing Jimmy Pitaro, the leader of ESPN didn’t flinch when it came to maintaining the company’s relationship with the NCAA and its belief in college sports, and ESPN now controls the domestic rights to virtually all of the NCAA’s championships — the massive exception being the men’s basketball tournament.

The deal is set to include 2,300 hours of championship programming, 800 hours of which will be on linear ESPN platforms. That’s certainly helpful in filling air time across its various platforms, but it shows that ESPN is committed to amplifying the coverage across its networks.

“What we bring to the table here, yes it’s the studio, it’s our megaphone, it’s our brand, it’s our production quality,” Pitaro told SBJ. “But it’s first and foremost our multiplatform approach.”

ESPN has been prudent with recent deals. The network passed on the Pac-12 deal, yet it’s currently working to re-up its rights with the College Football Playof, which expire after the 2025 season. ESPN also has upcoming negotiations with the NBA and UFC.

The new deal with the NCAA is set to expire in 2032, the same year the men’s basketball rights are scheduled to hit the market. That should give the NCAA ample flexibility then, but could grant ESPN that same ability.

“Most of the time when you’re involved in a negotiation, there’s what people say at the beginning and then there’s what people say when they come back for the third time,” Baker said. “One of the things that was really impressive to me about this was ESPN, they wanted this and they were willing to work for it.”

A win for Charlie Baker and the NCAA’s forward thinking

Barely nine months into his role, Baker, the former Massachusetts governor, has been resolute in trying to bring the NCAA into the 21st century. The proposal regarding athlete compensation he unveiled at the SBJ Intercollegiate Athletics Forum last month was a monumental moment for college sports and a profound shift in thinking. Helping nab a media rights deal in a tight market is another impressive feat early in his tenure.

“We think this is a terrific opportunity and a great deal,” Baker said, “and a chance to give a ton of additional visibility through some of the elements of the agreement beyond just the money for a variety of our sports.”

The NCAA has plenty of chaos to sift through in the coming months. Myriad lawsuits regarding athlete compensation could result in major settlements and the college athlete employment debate rages on.

Still, Baker is garnering attention in a positive way — that’s significant in its own right.

Parks Associates Names John Kosner One of the Top Leaders in Video and Entertainment

Original Article: Parks Associates, Top 2023 Leaders in Tech - Video and Entertainment, December 28th, 2023

International research firm highlights industry leaders in entertainment and streaming, energy, connected health, multifamily, and connected home and security.

Parks Associates, the research authority on digital lifestyles and technology, today released its 2023 Top Leaders in Technology, an annual list that recognizes leading technology executives who are featured speakers at the firm’s annual executive conferences. Parks Associates recognizes these leaders for their pivotal roles in market growth and their dedication to expanding industry knowledge. The research firm reports that 90% of US internet households now own a smartphone, surpassing the television for the first time to become the most ubiquitous device among US consumers.

John Kosner and Ed Desser Appeared on the Sports Media Watch Podcast

Original Article: Sports Media Watch Podcast by Jon Lewis and Drew Lerner, December 27th, 2023

On today's episode, Jon and Drew are joined by industry veterans John Kosner and Ed Desser for a big picture look at sports media. John Kosner previously served as the NBA's VP of Broadcasting during the Dream Team era and most recently served as ESPN's Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital and Print Media before beginning his consultancy firm Kosner Media. Ed Desser served as a senior executive in the NBA's Commissioner's Office and as President of NBA Television where he negotiated numerous media rights deals for the league and has run his consultancy Desser Sports Media since 2005. The crew covers the NBA's upcoming media rights negotiations, the state of linear television and the transition to digital, fragmentation in the industry, Disney's trial balloon for divesting ABC, and possible strategic partners at ESPN.

From the latest Sports Media Watch Podcast, industry veterans John Kosner and Ed Desser join Jon Lewis and Drew Lerner to discuss the upcoming NBA media rights negotiations, the future of Disney, and more.

John Kosner on the upcoming NBA deals

People keep realizing just the intrinsic value of sports. And from the early ’80s until today, that value has only increased. Just stepping away from the NBA for a second, sports — you have to watch it live, it’s content that’s not replicable. As a matter of fact, we would argue it’s the only content that unifies people. People watch habitually. Sports is evergreen and yet it’s different every year.

When you take an asset like the NBA, in the current environment where there’s almost unlimited video options for people — some of them are paid some of them are free — it’s a differentiated product. As everything moves to streaming, as things move to direct-to-consumer, individual months matter in a way that they didn’t, say, earlier in my career … Now when all of the sudden almost all of these programmers are in the month-to-month churn business, a six month NBA regular season is just a bigger asset than people might have thought in the past world. It’s a reason to subscribe, it’s a reason not to churn.

Ed Desser on expectations for the amount of NBA media partners

I’m not sure that it matters. Whether somebody has two partners or four partners doesn’t change the character of their product. It’s probably the case that more partners, given what’s going on economically, will be appropriate and necessary. There’s no question in my mind that the NBA’s value as a programming packager has materially increased. That gets reflected in the deals both in terms of the amount for each and the number of them. I think there is room. I mean if we look at the historical approach of the NBA, it has been to have fewer partners. You’d have to go back to before 1984 to a time when both USA and ESPN and CBS all had rights.

It just may not be that that works anymore in a more constrained environment where the various entertainment companies that have traditionally bought rights aren’t as flush and aren’t growing the same way. And at the same time you’ve got the tech companies that are looking for how best to move forward.

Kosner on how to combat decline of linear television

Last month in the SBJ, SSRS Research Group had a piece and they said that today 2/3rds of the U.S. has a paid television subscription at home. That’s down from 75% five years ago and 85% a decade ago. And the key point they made is that access for young kids to live sports in the home is much diminished. Ed and I have spent a lot of time talking about FAST channels because FAST channels represent — almost everybody has a device in their home, almost everybody has a sufficiently fast connection to see video on a device — and it could be that utilizing FAST channels in the future is going to be one way that sports can get visibility to kids. And if you don’t build that fan base in an environment where kids are growing up with unlimited supply of video, video games, any number of other things, you’re playing with fire if you’re running a sports enterprise.

Desser on potential strategic partners for ESPN

I think that you have to ask yourself, “what is it that ESPN needs that it doesn’t already have?” It has relationships for programming, it has excellent relationships on the programming side. It has excellent relationships on the advertising side. It is well positioned with its app and its website on the digital side, to an extent. But obviously there are a lot more digital parties that could have an association.

The challenge is also, beyond the investment, it’s who is not going to be a problematic partner for Disney and ESPN. We saw ESPN finally getting into betting recently and that was something they had resisted doing for quite a long time. Is this something that is consistent with the Disney brand, for example. Are we going to make an association with PENN and is it going to cost us relationship with DraftKings and others? Finding the sweet spot of somebody who is motivated enough to want to come in, bring something more than just money, because obviously ESPN could do something with private equity or something like that, but that doesn’t make ESPN better necessarily.

So you’re talking about on the one hand, a large number of potential parties, but not very many I suspect that check enough boxes that it’s gonna make sense to do. Now having said that, there are a lot of entities out there that would have an interest in what ESPN is and has achieved. And so I can see it happening, it’s just hard to know … it’s a broad list of possibilities and it’s hard to anticipate exactly who the party or parties would be.

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John Kosner Spoke to Ben Thompson of Stratechery About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance

Original Article: Stratechery, by Ben Thompson, Thursday, March 2, 2023

An Interview with John Kosner About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance

Good morning,

I am pleased to welcome John Kosner for a Stratechery Interview. Kosner was a long-time NBA and ESPN executive who oversaw the growth of ESPN.com, the ESPN app, fantasy sports, streaming, and podcasting. Since leaving ESPN in 2017 Kosner has been a venture capitalist, advisor, and consultant, and writes a regular column for Sports Business Journal.

We discussed Kosner’s career both at and after ESPN, how he always dreamed of building ESPN.com and how reality differed from his expectations, why Bill Simmons had such an impact on ESPN and the sports ecosystem, and why Twitter sent a chill down his spine. We also touched on the same topics I wrote about this week, including how to fix the NBA and whether sports will appeal to the next generation of fans (this interview was recorded before I published What the NBA Can Learn From Formula 1, and helped influence it).

To listen to this interview as a podcast, click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player. On to the interview:

An Interview with John Kosner About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance

This interview is lightly edited for clarity

Background

John Kosner, welcome to Stratechery.

JK: Thank you Ben. I used to listen to Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN here in New York City, and the callers used to say things like “Longtime listener, first time caller”. So I’m a longtime reader, but first time caller.

Well, I appreciate it. You are one of my regular correspondents, which I’ve always appreciated, and it’s a very timely time to talk to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about sports and sports rights, and not just because I’m a sports fan. On Dithering we like to get into sports and some people get grumpy about it because they’re like, “Oh, I want to talk about tech.”

JK: Not me!

Well, yeah, but right now in particular, one of the first topics I ever wrote about on Stratechery was the cable bundle and entertainment and this period we are going through where it’s been one of those things where people have seen this coming for literally twenty or thirty years — and this kind of goes back to your time at ESPN, which we’ll get into — but right now it’s all happening.

Things are changing in a major way and so I want to get the chance to talk to you because you were there, as I just alluded to in the early days, working at ESPN, helping launch ESPN.com, ushering it through not just the initial launch, but the shift to mobile. I’d love to dive into that history and also get some of your takes on what’s happening now and where we’re going. So if that sounds good to you, we can dive in.

JK: Sounds great, Ben. Thank you.

So let’s start with your background. I think people in sports media obviously know who you are, probably far fewer people in tech. So what’s your background? How’d you get into sports? What’d you do at ESPN and what are you doing now? Let’s go through the whole thing.

JK: Great. So I’m one of the few people you’ll ever meet who has had the privilege of doing the jobs he dreamed of doing as a kid. I grew up in New York City, which is where I live now, and I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s and I was obsessed with sports on television. My idol was Roone Arledge, the famous executive producer of ABC Sports who invented up-close-and-personal style of journalism. He pioneered the Olympic TV coverage that we still see to this day in ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Anybody who loves Drive to Survive would appreciate Roone Arledge.

I learned about geography, math, storytelling, and character all through watching sports on TV. It was mesmerizing to me. It was worth noting too, when I was growing up, that three of the biggest sports were Major League Baseball, boxing and horse racing. As much as I loved sports television, I always dreamed of something that was even more. I wanted a product that could combine live sports telecasts with sports writing of the caliber of Sports Illustrated magazine, which I read every week, which would include video highlights, photography, audio, and realtime scores and stats. Essentially, I dreamed about ESPN.com about 20 years before the Starwave crew created it and it’s probably not coincidental that ESPN.com is the product with which I am most associated with decades later.

I grew up in an era of media scarcity. There were three broadcast networks, there were a handful of gatekeepers and limited bandwidth. Today’s landscape and media is the opposite of my childhood and to use a Stratechery theme, there’s now unlimited supply and so the world that I observe later is totally different. My career, I had the good fortune to intern at NBC Sports when I was in college.

When I graduated from college, I got started at CBS Sports where I worked in TV programming. That’s TV programming, not computer programming. I moved on from there to be head of broadcasting in the US for the National Basketball Association. This is truly a dream job for me, I’m sure you relate, as always, an NBA fan growing up, my favorite teams are the New York Knicks and the Phoenix Suns, and in your case the Milwaukee Bucks.

One of the topics of our conversation is Bucks versus Suns, which have a nice little burgeoning rivalry over the last few years.

JK: Interestingly, when I was at the NBA, one of the stars in the sports media business was Bob Iger. Bob Iger really came to prominence during the 1988 Calgary Olympics and then he was passed over to be president of ESPN, to his chagrin. He got over that because shortly thereafter they named him president of ABC Entertainment, which in those days was a much, much bigger job.

And he managed to get control of ESPN in the end. So I guess it all worked out for Bob.

JK: Yeah. I worked at the NBA for eight seasons, then I went to Sports Illustrated Magazine and then for over twenty years I was at ESPN, the last fifteen of which I ran digital media, so that’s ESPN.com, the app, streaming, fantasy games, podcasting and I got to oversee editorial, product development, I ran the P&L. It was truly a dream job. There was another sort of dream team of people that I got to work with, many of whom are still at the company. I left ESPN in June of 2017, and the first person to call me after my news was public was David Stern, the late NBA commissioner. And after — if you know David — after several insults, he suggested to me that we should combine to be investors and advisors to sports tech startups. He had retired from basketball in, I think in 2014.

Yeah, I was going to say 2014, somewhere around then.

JK: Yeah, and he had become a VC. So we got together and we created a little unit called Micromanagement Ventures, and if you know David, you’d appreciate the humor of that.

Yup.

JK: We invested in fifteen different sports tech startups, some of which proven very successful. WHOOP, WSC Sports, which does video highlights, Overtime, which now has a basketball league.   Two of the companies got acquired, another one, fuboTV went public. Sadly, David suffered a   cerebral hemorrhage in the fall of 2019 and he died on New Year’s Day 2020, and that was just a tremendously sad time. Like so many who know David, I miss him, I think about him all the time, I feel fortunate to have had really two experiences working with him. But in any case, I decided to stay in with the little companies. I have added a couple of other investment advisor positions with  companies that are sort of the profile that David and I were looking at. I also consult for a couple of different companies. I consult for Apple, I’ve done projects for the LA ’28 Olympics, done projects    for a cloud database company called Snowflake, I do expert witness work, and my friend Ed Desser from the NBA, he and I write articles for the Sports Business Journal.

That’s an excellent framing because I want to get to a couple of your articles. I do have a David Stern question. But there is a couple things you said in your introduction that were really interesting to me. Number one is I love the bit about how you weren’t obsessed with sports, you were obsessed with sports broadcasting or media.

JK: Right, exactly.

Because I’ve always felt like a weirdo because from day one I was fascinated with tech business   and I had no business background. It was just that the implications of it seemed super interesting  to me and I was interested in the tech part of it, but the products were less interesting than the business bit. And so I feel like you, I got to do the job that I wanted to do. But the second bit is you talk about how you witnessed this shift from scarcity to abundance, which is the dominant shift in everything, right? That’s what is undergirding what’s happening now. When you talk about envisioning ESPN.com basically 20 years before it happened, was that abundance bit in your worldview then? Or was it more like, “Oh, this is going to be a magazine online,” and then you  came to appreciate that abundance over time?

JK: I had no idea that the abundance was coming, it just shows you how things changed. I remember when ESPN got started, I was a college freshman, I thought it was one of the stupidest things ever. They were showing reruns of college football games. I remember Nickelodeon got started, “Well who wants to watch that all day”? So I was on the total opposite side, but I’ve always been focused on the creation of great products, the surprise and delight, and I just thought if you could combine these things, wow, that would be something you would have. I remember when CNN Headline News    started running scores on the ticker below their headlines, that was a big cultural moment in my life. There used to be a phone service in New York City called Sports Phone, 212-976-1313, and my parents used to strangle me because the phone bills would have incessant calls looking for Suns scores.

That’s amazing.

JK: So like a lot of things this was kind of self-serving, but it struck me that there was beauty to what was done in sports television. There was artistry to Sports Illustrated, and it made so much sense to be able to put those things together. One of the things that you talk about in your columns is what really connects isn’t a revamp of something you’ve already seen, it’s something that’s brand new. And when I got to ESPN and ESPN.com was two years old, I really felt like Nirvana.

ESPN.com

When you look back at the evolution of ESPN.com, there are a couple things I want to get to in that regard. To what extent do you think, just big picture, looking back over what has it been — twenty, thirty years now? — is ESPN.com a triumph for the company versus a, “In the long run, actually all that matters is sports on TV”? To the extent it’s a triumph, why? And to the extent it’s just something off to the side, were there opportunities that were missed or is it just that because of this abundant/scarcity thing, it’s just a completely different product than linear television?

JK: If I’m honest with myself, I think it’s somewhere in between how you describe it. I remember early research among young sports fans saying they really liked the offline version of ESPN, which always cracked me up. The offline version was the television. ESPN has always seen itself as a TV company first, that really hasn’t changed. But ESPN.com established itself as a truly unique service for fans and I think part of it was that it was created outside of ESPN, it was originally a joint venture between Paul Allen’s company, Starwave, and Disney. So it wasn’t started in the core ESPN, and you had some really brilliant people, Mike Slade, Tom Phillips, Geoff Reiss, Aaron LaBerge, who were pioneers with this experience before ESPN was truly integrated into it and it benefited from the point that many in ESPN management really just didn’t focus on it at the time, so we had a chance to experiment.

Right, which was a good thing.

JK: We had the chance to take chances and create something new. We also had, because of the Starwave heritage, a bunch of engineers who were big sports fans, which is really, really unusual and really benefited us during that time. It’s like you’re outside and it’s really foggy and then progressively over time it just gets clearer and clearer and you just begin to understand what to do. When I got started, it was probably the way people feel about blockchain and crypto today, that’s what the early days were like.

I’ll give you one story back there, which I think is kind of telling for how things went. In 2009, Apple was up in Bristol and Eddy Cue, who’s the head of Apple TV Plus and Services now, was in the meeting and he found out who I was and what I did and he came up to me and he said, “Hi, I’m Eddy from Apple and your scores, they suck.” And he took out his second generation iPhone and top left on iPhone was Yahoo Sports. So I said, “Okay, duly noted, you have my attention.”

I get back from the meeting to my desk in Bristol and I called up a fellow named Ed Macedo, who was the head of Stats and Information for ESPN. So I said, “Ed, I just met Eddy from Apple and he says our scores suck” and so Ed Macedo says to me, “Well, I use SportsLine for scores.”

Oof. 

JK: So, this is like a Dave Portnoy moment, I called an emergency staff meeting and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new priority — scores,” and people looked at me like I was a Luddite and they said, “Well, we do scores.” And I said, “Yeah, but Eddy says our scores suck,” and this is part of the beauty of the ESPN opportunity, is we had tons of bright people, we had a lot of money and resources, at least compared to others, and the fun part about being a leader is occasionally you can change the roadmap.

So we really dug into this challenge around scores, and the reason was, and I told the group, not trying to be flippant, “Here’s my theory, scores are a reason to come to the site every day and come multiple times and if we do a really good job of that, we can get people to read our recaps, we can get people to watch our video highlights, it becomes a sort of virtuous cycle”. And we invested, we ran high speed lines to every pro and college stadium and arena. We pioneered technology that had a score reveal itself, countdown reveal itself right in a webpage and within fifteen months, we had scores that were qualitatively and quantitatively better than anybody else, at least among our competitive set. The cheeky part of this is I sent the internal reports to Eddy at Apple, and the internal reports were really funny. “Holy smokes, Eddy’s right, we’re seventeen seconds behind Yahoo on this” and whatever, and I don’t know if you remember, but Apple used to take out these full page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and it’d be like the homepage of an iPhone and you’d have OpenTable and Facebook and New York Times.

“There’s an app for that” — they want to sweep that campaign under the carpet when they’re in court and saying they deserve all the App Store money, but anyhow, continue, that’s a side note.

JK: But fifteen months after Eddy’s visit, the ad came out and top left was ScoreCenter, the new scores app from ESPN, and it was like an inside joke between the two of us, and we’ve become friends since then. By the way, for the record, Eddy was absolutely right, because the site traffic really took off once we really embraced scores and real-time information, and it became a reason to come. Also, unlike ESPN in general, I insisted that we cover everything important in sports. It was like a pyramid. What’s the most important thing happening?

I’ll never forget before the Arizona/Pittsburgh Super Bowl, I forgot what year that was, I got a call, it was a Thursday night, and there was a big front page story on Troy Polamalu, who was the terrific cornerback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a big profile, beautiful art, and the editor calls me up and is really excited and says, “What do you think?” So I said, “Not much.” And he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, the Lakers and Celtics…” and this was the team with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and Paul Pierce, “…the Lakers and Celtics are playing tonight and it’s a war, and where’s that game?” So the editor says to me, “Oh, the game’s on TNT.” I said, “I don’t care that it’s on TNT, it’s the most important thing going.” And so the editor says to me, “Well, I guess that means you expect me to put the Dallas/Utah game up next.” And I said, “If that’s the most important thing happening, absolutely.” I said, “We have all day long when games aren’t taking place to do features.”

The other super important thing, which is a differentiator here, was Bill Simmons.

I wanted to get to that because this is what’s really interesting about your focus on this scores bit. It’s fascinating in all sorts of respects, on one hand, kudos to you and ESPN for leaning into this because there’s an aspect, you mentioned the Olympics earlier, where real-time results kind of really fundamentally damaged the Olympics product to a certain extent, right?

JK: Right.

Bill Simmons

But, then in the complete opposite direction, in the feature direction, you were involved with two of the more incredible web properties in my estimation, which were number one, Page 2, where you sort of brought Bill Simmons in and you also had Hunter S. Thompson. I’d love to hear the story behind that, and then we can get to Grantland down the road, but tell me about Page 2 because this was something that was so unexpected from ESPN. You tell me about it for our  young readers that don’t remember what that was.

JK: Page 2, I would say I didn’t mess it up, but the key architects in my memory were John Walsh,   who was executive editor of ESPN, who moved over to the website when John Skipper took over as the head of ESPN Digital, and John Skipper moved on to bigger jobs, and so by 2003, I was running the website and John Walsh was there, but John had an idea that we were going to bring a bunch of the best writers to bear. So, there was also Ralph Wiley, who was a terrific writer who passed away.  He had Norman Chad in there, he had had Hunter S. Thompson, and I couldn’t really follow a lot of what Hunter was writing, but the idea that Hunter was writing on ESPN.com was stupendous.

And again, there was just a level of surprise, but the breakthrough star in this, and I believe was also discovered by John Walsh, was Bill Simmons, and Bill Simmons to me was the defining sportswriter of our generation, and somebody who really changed the industry, really enhanced what we were doing at ESPN.com, both in terms of his writing and of course in terms of the development of his podcast.

I’d go further, I think he’s one of the defining writers period. The funny thing is everyone  universally sort of agrees that Bill Simmons is the father of blogging, even though he never technically blogged, but what people are tapping into is he pioneered the voice of blogging that ultimately manifested through the blog format, but you started with obviously his newsletter and AOL and then coming to ESPN, and it was just such a completely different approach to sports writing and writing in general, where you are going to lean in and own the subjectivity, the first- person approach, to ignore any column limits, or word limits, or whatever it might be. It was abundance, it was abundant writing as opposed to scarcity writing. It’s hard to appreciate now when he’s such a fixture how transformative and incredible it was when he popped on ESPN, what is it, 2000, 1999, somewhere around there.

JK: Somewhere around there, and he pioneered this approach of sports and popular culture. He wrote unabashedly as a fan. The thing that I really appreciated was he worked really, really hard. He spent a lot of time agonizing and preparing for the columns, they were well-researched both in terms of the calls that he place on different things and the stats that he put into it. He was truly obsessed, and it was kind of similar to Howard Stern in a way. He was his audience, he understood what his audience was looking for, so he was really tremendous.

It became kind of obvious to me over time, because he was so popular, that you weren’t really going   to have Page 2 with Bill Simmons, you were going to have something big with Bill Simmons, and that’s sort of what Grantland became. And, I remember John Skipper called me up, he and Bill had been laying out what Grantland could be, and John was almost kind of sheepish on the phone because I think he thought, “Well, Kosner is not going to like this. We already have a plan for this. It’s going to change everything,” but to me, it was like an IQ test, and Grantland took what Bill had done, he added  a bunch of terrific contributors, he expanded what he was doing. It was very, very popular, and the truth is, there were other interesting voices in Page 2, but nobody who really broke through, in my opinion, the way Bill did.

So, this is really interesting because I think the Bill Simmons ESPN experience, particularly in the context of ESPN, is really interesting to me almost from a labor relations perspective, because what’s interesting is one thing that makes the web different is the ability to measure. Say you’re at CBS, and everyone’s going on and on about Tony Romo being the best thing since sliced bread.

JK: Mediocre today.

Exactly, but how do you tease apart audience interest in a game because it’s a football game, and football’s very popular, and the quality of the game, versus the play-by-play guy or the announcer, whatever it might be? Whereas on the web, you can measure exactly who’s getting how many clicks, who’s getting read, and if it feels like that sort of gets at one of the challenges of digital for broad-based media companies generally, because the talent, the people that actually drive it, it’s much more apparent to them and to you who’s actually driving value, it shifts a huge amount of bargaining power to the talent to the detriment of the overall company. Whereas in the analog world they sort of got to ride on the backs of super popular talent who didn’t necessarily know how much value they were contributing, and it was more of a socialistic enterprise broadly speaking. Is that something that resonates with you?

JK: It does. I kind of feel that it’s complicated, and the best managers, I think can figure that out. Meaning, I always thought in my job, we were lucky to have that problem. We were lucky to have somebody who’s becoming so popular that you’re going to pay him a lot of money, and sometimes people would ask me about Bill’s relative stature to other people, and I’d say, “Well, if other people were doing what Bill was doing, then we’d have another conversation.” It was more a challenge, I think, in those years of the fact that there wasn’t really a good sort of commercial strategy around the website. John Skipper loved the idea that we had sort of boxcar numbers of traffic and he loved trumpeting that, but we probably could and should have charged for some of what we did earlier.

There wasn’t a good ad model. It was all sponsorship. Everything that we did was a sponsorship because that was the way ESPN sold, and it was a big business. So, if you went to the homepage and you saw AT&T on the homepage, it was probably because AT&T had bought a huge package from ESPN that included, say the college football playoffs, and as part of that, they got a certain number of ESPN.com homepages. We weren’t really selling the medium for the medium, we weren’t really selling Bill for Bill.

When Bill became a really popular podcaster, I remember he was talking about the podcast network that Adam Carolla had built, “Why couldn’t we do it?” And the reason was I couldn’t really get people’s attention around it. In these big successful companies, you get the tyranny of big numbers. “Yeah, that’s great, but it’s small, I’ve got to focus on something else”, and I suspect Bill probably had more frustration based upon that, the inability to commercially take advantage of what he was doing than some of the other stuff that happened.

Competing With the Internet

That’s my impression too, is it was really aside from of this drama stuff, it was like, “Why can’t you make money on this podcast or why don’t you even try to make money?” This ties back to my question earlier, and it’s very interesting to me, I’ve thought about in the context of tech companies in general. We talk about this even now in terms of the ChatGPT and search and all this sort of thing, there is sort of a bias amongst observers that these big companies ought to dominate every sort of space around them, every sort of adjacent space. It goes back to ESPN.com, what did it actually do for ESPN in the long run? Is this a sort of thing where — look, ESPN at the end of the day, it’s a cable channel, that’s what it is, and it’s inevitable you’re going to be constrained in exploring these opportunities, and it’s easy for Bill to say, “Oh, you guys messed this up,” or sit the outside and say, “Why didn’t Grantland become a bigger success or a subscription product?” And in reality, that’s actually the way the world works like new models of new companies.

JK: I don’t know, Ben. I think it’s all about decisions that get made one way or another and what gets prioritized. The last year that I was at ESPN, I remember November 2016, we had 141 million global uniques. We were number one in the world for the first time in a metric that I really care about. We were the number five daily digital property for millennial males 18 to 34 using their smartphone. I thought the wind was at our back, and had I stayed and maybe had more authority, I certainly would’ve prioritized more what we were doing. Would that have made a difference in the long run? I don’t know. We can only judge by what happened.

I’ll tell you that when Twitter got started, it sent a shudder through me, even in the early days of the fail whale and everything, because Twitter was about real-time information and the most valuable real-time information I was convinced they were going to have in time was sports. Even with all the challenges around that company today, I would say Twitter is an indispensable service to most sports fans, and it has taken up some real estate that ESPN could have or should have wanted to have. And so you can only judge by results. So, ESPN.com and the app remains very popular, it’s probably in that competitive set it’s probably still the number one service.

I still check it every day.

JK: As do I as well, but it also operates in a much more competitive environment.

It operates in a world of abundance, that’s sort of the problem.

JK: But also, if you’re a young sports fan, are you looking to ESPN and SportsCenter for sports video highlights, or are you looking to YouTube and Instagram?

Yeah, House of Highlights.

JK: I mentioned Twitter. On the television side, I remember, and Bill was one of the key people worked on this, the 30 for 30 documentary series really sort of supplanted HBO in sports documentaries. But if you look around today, it looks to me more like Netflix has taken the mantle. By the way, there’s a nice sort of through line here from Roone Arledge to what they’re doing at Netflix. But the big documentaries people are talking about, those series, are the F1, PGA Tour, and now the pro tennis one.

Well, actually, the Twitter point is a really interesting point, because I have two questions about ESPN at this point in time. So number one, to your bit about Twitter appropriately sending a shudder through your spine, I think one of the most remarkable things about the Big Ten story last summer, or them basically leaving ESPN, on one hand, there’s the ESPN angle which is like, “Well, I guess we’re going to finally find budget discipline”. But on the other hand, it used to be that it was insane to leave ESPN because ESPN basically had a pricing advantage, relatively speaking, because you needed to be on SportsCenter, and you needed to have ESPN talking to you. To the extent that that gets stripped away because all the talk is somewhere else, it’s interesting how that actually circles around to impact the core business. That’s where ESPN made a lot of money was on SportsCenter, that gave them a bargaining advantage when it came to rights and now it’s a much more direct sort of relationship, which increases the bargaining power of whoever you’re bargaining with because you don’t have these extra points of leverage.

JK: Right. And the decision to split the previous Big Ten package with Fox and Fox’s investment in the Big Ten Network, over time that became really, really significant and the Big Ten determined that it didn’t need, as you said, to be on ESPN, and that’s a big event in the industry. Now, I also think that ESPN’s acquisition of CBS’ SEC football package and the strengthening of that, Texas and Oklahoma coming in, may have convinced them that the Big Ten, as great as it is, is kind of a nice-to-have if you weren’t going to get the kind of games and rights that they wanted.

Right. They have inventory. You only have so many slots on a Saturday.

JK: Right, exactly. One of the reasons that I think there still will be a Pac-12 deal is the value of the late West Coast windows that the Pac-12 offers. Some of their fans hate it, but to me, live games really matter and that’s the window that — you could fill a Big Ten window with ACC, or SEC, or Big 12, perhaps not as well, but you could fill that window. But at 10:30 Eastern time, there are relatively few places that you can play, Pac-12 has most of them.

Another connection to this, do you think, and you’ve been out of it for six or seven years so I think it probably really does more apply to ESPN in recent days — do you think that they are, in some respects, too online? There’s an aspect where ESPN is the way to reach casual fans, but when you’re online, and I’ve noticed this mostly in the NBA because that’s what I pay the most attention to, but it feels like it’s trying to have a conversation with Twitter, or show how hip they are to the current takes or whatever it might be. And at the end of the day, the money comes from a broader audience tuning into these games, not the lunatics, like me, that are online tweeting about stuff. Is there an aspect where ESPN, it almost would be good to step back from real-time in the sense of what’s happening online right now, and refocus on real-time as in, “Hey, what game is actually on our channels”?

JK: I believe that less getting into the hot takes of things would be a better, that would be a content approach that I would favor. It’s not just ESPN, I think if you look across most websites, if you look across most TV news shows, they’re increasingly programmed by Twitter, either reflecting what’s on Twitter, or the breaking news that’s happening on Twitter, or trying to gin up more heated discussion that takes place on Twitter. It’s very popular. I find it to be a trap.

Yeah. I love your point about Drive to Survive. The documentary angle, that’s where ESPN — that was the missed opportunity. ESPN is actually benefiting from Drive to Survive actually more than anybody, more than even Netflix, right? The ratings are way higher, and if they had Drive to Survive, that’s great inventory. They learned this with 30 for 30, you have this inventory sitting on the shelf, you can drop in at any time. The game ends early, gets canceled, put a documentary on. They have all these daytime hours and what’s interesting about that is it’s anti-Twitter in a way, right?

Drive to Survive just came out this weekend about events that happened a year ago, but it’s something that Twitter could never do. It’s the production, it’s the cutting it all together, that seems to be a much more productive use of resources. One of the things I get so mad about is I feel the NBA and ESPN both do a very poor job of building stars, of building history. You contrast this with the NFL, and NFL Films, which I think is just an unbelievable product and has been for decades, where you have to build up tradition, you build new things, so that people feel invested and that’s a production of decades of investment.

JK: Well, one thing I will say is I believe that one of the unique aspects of the NBA is that its players are like Marvel superheroes for lots of kids and young people. So they may have gotten to it a different way, but the confluence of sports and music and fashion and popular culture is really centered around the NBA. Personally, I’m much more interested in the stories of the players. A friend of mine said, “Every NBA player is an amazing story, but we rarely hear the stories.” In addition, as a big fan, there’s a whole background about the strategy and the way the game is played, and how defenses work.

Why is that not there? ESPN does so much on the strategy and stuff of the NFL, and it feels like the NBA, it’s just Twitter televised.

JK: I feel in general that the national broadcast of the NBA, whether they’re on ESPN or Turner in the US, are substantially similar to the national broadcast when I worked at the NBA. The picture quality is fantastic, the replays have really come a long ways. However, it’s still basically two people in a booth, someone on the sideline, it’s still kind of keys to the game. The whole dialogue around basketball that exists online and specifically on Twitter and on YouTube, et cetera, is not reflected at all on these shows.

To me, that’s a tremendous missed opportunity and something that I believe is inevitably coming. And I would just say, as a Phoenix Suns fan, you appreciate that if you look at the coverage of the team, it’s mostly done by people who aren’t journalists, they’re super fans and they’re bloggers, they’re on Twitter, they do podcasts, they’re on YouTube, they’re heavily influenced by the whole analytics movement around basketball. There’s a whole reality, I’m sure this exists for Bucks fans too, but there’s a whole reality in terms of how the game is analyzed, the best of these people will rewatch a game afterwards, it’s a smorgasbord that is not at all reflected. My point of view is not that there’s anything wrong with a core broadcast, it’s just that so much choice could be added and would be really valuable because no one necessarily wants a one-size-fits-all.

It’s a great point. There’s an opportunity for a whole host of sports fans that know ESPN, where this is basically user-generated content, you’re getting content for free and the experience of finding that content on Twitter is terrible. There’s an opportunity to pull this all in into one place and be like a portal where you could get all this sort of stuff, but whenever any of these big companies try to dip into UGC, they’re scared. They don’t want to have the controversial opinion, is that just sort of the limiter there, it’s too risky?

JK: It’s a real limiter. We did a lot of work on trying to set up sort of community features on ESPN, and each of them were disastrous in their own ways.

(laughing) Everyone who tries to do community online realizes how hard it is very quickly.

JK: We had comments on Bill’s page and I could still pick out the email he sent me, he was so mad about it, there’d be all this racist terrible stuff. I used to be relieved that no senior managers ever looked at that section of the website because I just thought it would be the end. Nonetheless, the way things have evolved on Twitter or on all the different group message features that fans use is such a part of the fan experience, and ESPN doesn’t really participate in that at all.

You know what? My take is that’s actually probably fine, I go back on my recommendation. I think you got to do what only you can do. This goes back to things like documentaries, things like leaning into your production capabilities, the stuff that fans can’t do, I think is more compelling.

Fixing the NBA

One quick question on the NBA. There’s a lot of angst that you sort of hit on. The All-Star ratings were way down, the rights negotiations are coming up again, players asked for trade demands, et cetera, et cetera. You knew David Stern better than almost anyone. What would David Stern do today? I’m in some NBA group chats, and they would kill me if I didn’t ask you this question, so here it is.

JK: Well, I mean, David would be very, very unhappy about the All-Star game. I was at the All-Star game, and it was a low point in a lot of ways, just in terms of the apparent effort from the players, and it was a desultory exhibition. Now, Adam isn’t frequently as public in whatever his point of view is as David is, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel similarly or hasn’t had some communication behind the scenes.

I think it comes down to the incentives that are out there, and what it takes to motivate people to do different things. The fact is the All-Star game has this rich history and tradition. Even when the ratings are down, it still gets a very significant audience, it’s a very profitable game for TNT. I’ll also say, the reality is this is a game that’s exclusively on TNT now, so how much of the country is that still really attracting? So the ratings are down. Well, okay, but you’re putting it on a platform now where you’re only reaching a certain set of sports fans. You’re not necessarily reaching young fans who just getting into the NBA. I just felt that there’s a certain expectation that fans have, there’s a certain expectation that people who paid to be in the arena have, as to what they’re going to get at the All- Star game and I think almost everybody would agree that that’s not what was delivered. All that said, I’m bullish on the NBA and what’s possible, and where I think their media rights are going to go up. I think I’m more bullish than you are.

Well, I mean the number one thing the NBA has going for it is they are good inventory for a relatively dead time of year. If the NBA season was in the fall, that would be big problem.

JK: Yes, totally. Think about it: in a subscription world, which is I think where we’re headed to, months matter. So you have an NBA regular season, that’s October through March, let’s say. You get into April, you have the Play-In Tournament, you have the playoffs and Finals and the Draft takes you through June. You have Summer League ball now, which is a more popular feature, in July you have international competitions.

And from the network perspective, you carried us to the NFL. Thank you, we appreciate it.

JK: Correct. So I think the real delivery of value or increased value for the NBA is about the regular season. What’s the biggest difference between the NFL and the NBA? It’s the fact in the NFL the regular season matters, and there are far fewer games. But to me, this is also a model, and what I mean by that is in the playoffs, every game matters, every game is nationally televised. There’s something amazing that happens in almost every game. Not all the games are great, but there’s always something at stake.

In the regular season. I would make an argument that something amazing happens almost every night, we just don’t know where that’s going to be. Okay. Last night, Damian Lillard hits 13 three pointers, scores 71 points in a game against the Rockets. I can guarantee you there’s no scenario on Earth where TNT or ESPN in their summer NBA schedule would’ve selected that game. So what I think is coming is going to be more like an NBA nightly approach.

Think about it, think about just the commoditization — you write about this all the time — the commoditization of subscription, VOD, and free ad-supported VOD. Everything now has been reduced to a series of horizontal tiles that you scroll through and on those horizontal tiles, you can have The Godfather and you can have Cocaine Bear and everything is available anytime you want to watch it. Whereas I believe a real alternative is, “Let’s watch the NBA tonight”, but let’s watch it in a way that you have a bunch of choice and there’ll be a curation function that will make sure you see something that’s really unique. I mean, the cool thing about the NBA is just this ongoing soap opera. You talked before about programming by Twitter and the limitations of that. This combined effect of modern media is you have a nightly soap opera. So who knew that Kyrie and Luka Doncic were going to be teammates, but I want to watch them play.

Right. But the schedule is already made so they can’t come back and remake it. That’s interesting. So you’re basically saying they need to shift to instead of, “I’m going to tune into X, Y, Z game.” Maybe that happens once a week because it’s clearly a big game, but the rest of the time it’s like the nightly NBA show and it’s like Red Zone or something and there’s commentators bouncing around.

JK: And my point is that today, I would argue sports is linear television.

Yeah.

JK: Sports is, specifically the NFL, and I believe when the NFL is not playing, the leading product for those sets of months, I think is the NBA and has room to grow, and that’s an alternative. I remember Must See TV and we had to watch 60 Minutes at seven o’clock on Sunday, but that’s largely gone now. The only thing that generates tune-in at a specific time are big sporting events.

Is this an area where the RSN collapse could be a benefit going forward? One of the limitations on just bouncing any game into the national TV slot or dipping in for ten minutes or fifteen minutes is RSNs have these exclusive rights, and if that goes away, on one hand, it’s going to be very painful for a lot of teams because that’s a third of the NBA’s television revenue, on the other hand, it does give much more latitude and freedom of movement to make it a destination. This is the sort of thing — I meant to have an article out before we talked to you, so I’m previewing it now — but the big shift you’re seeing generally in sports as an example of this is it used to be you just had to be there and get space, like the old model. If you were just in the cable bundle, you made money.

Now customers have to actively choose you and that’s a much harder business, but maybe the NBA because of the RSN collapse is coming along just in time so they can at least start building that.

JK: There’s an important distinction too, which is that this RSN collapse affects NBA baseball and hockey, but baseball and hockey have already made their national TV agreements, and those are in place through 2028. The NBA is still to negotiate theirs, which will start in ’25, ’26 so they have more flexibility as to what they might do than those other two leagues now. It feels a little to me, Ben, and I’ve read your coverage, it feels to me a little bit like what happened in the music industry is now going to be visited into sports media. What I mean by that is we come out of an era with the best of all possible models.

Everybody’s paying for the games, even if they’re not watching the games.

JK: Everyone’s paying for the games, that gives birth to a robust ad business around it. I’m very optimistic about what will come in time, but that has to be built and it’s not built now. Even when new things are built, there’s a period of time it takes for sports fans to adopt to that. Young sports fans are much different than when I was growing up. One of the conundrums, I think, with the RSNs is the product itself —

Is terrible.

JK: Is mediocre.

No, it’s terrible. I’ll say it.

JK: But it hasn’t changed in 20 years. Now maybe YES Network or the Dodgers or the Cubs, the big market teams, maybe they’re investing, nobody else is investing. And how do you take a product like that and make it interesting and relevant to young fans? It’s not compelling.

The Next Generation

You wrote an article about Amazon streaming the NFL. You called it We’ve officially crossed the sports media Rubicon, and that was after the initial broadcast where the numbers were phenomenal. I think those numbers did come down a bit over the season. On net, the Thursday Night football was less watched than last year. But on the flip side, there were more young people watching it. Do you still feel the Rubicon was crossed, and why was that so important?

JK: One interesting note is that Amazon submitted to having Nielsen rate their games, I think, in part to generate ad sales. But you had that odd modern moment of comparing the Nielsen sample, which has been a staple of sports TV since I’ve been in, with the actuals that Amazon was purporting to share. When you talked about Bill Simmons before, you could see the actuals.

Right.

JK: So I thought for one thing it was interesting, somebody’s wrong. I figured that the Amazon rating this year was going to be considerably lower because it was new, because there was some subset of fans for whom Prime Video, “What’s that?”

They’re just not going to watch it, it’s too much work.

JK: So the audience was lower. One of the points in that piece is that Amazon, unlike the sports media networks that I worked at, Amazon knows who the viewers are. There’s a connection between the viewers and the program that never existed before, Amazon did this on a scale in terms of their production values, not matched in a normal regular season context.

It basically showed that, look, big sporting events can be streamed. That was basically an open question before, and that’s the most important takeaway.

JK: It was an open question certainly of that size and scale. I believe that if you had asked NFL people, people in the league office before they made that deal with Amazon, I think they would’ve expressed a bunch of skepticism that it would’ve happened. I also feel like Marie Donoghue, who’s a former ESPN colleague and now the person who runs Prime Video Sports, I thought it was shrewd for her to make the deal with Al Michaels — as unhappy as he seemed to be at some of those games — just because they got off to a really — and they had Fred Gaudelli in the truck — they got off to a really good professional start.

There was a level of familiarity. If you’re already changing so many other things, let it at least feel like a normal game.

JK: Right. Everyone would’ve been wait to criticize them if they didn’t do that, so I thought that that was a success. I’ll make two points, and I’ll make them in reverse. The important thing about Amazon and YouTube and Apple is that while they all want into sports, they don’t have to be in sports the way companies like ESPN and others that I worked at. It’s this a symbiotic relationship.

Right. It’s like Turner, no one believes David Zaslav when he says, “Maybe we won’t get the NBA.” It’s like we see your debt load, you need the cash flow, you’re going to be buying the NBA. That’s the big question and people in tech are certainly looking at this. I mean, you see everyone’s like, “Oh, look at Apple and MLS.” Well, it’s like, “Well, no one watched MLS, so Apple’s not really paying anything”. They get to prove out their model X, Y, Z that’s not necessarily applicable to these big sports.

On the other hand, you clearly have someone like Adam Silver hoping and praying that the tech companies will come in to bid up the rights. At the end of the day, because of that, when it comes to the biggest sports, given the fact that the tech companies don’t need it, does that mean that we’re probably not going to get many more deals? On the other hand, how much do sports executives need to be worried about the next generation of fans? I mean, that’s why the Amazon young people numbers are interesting. The scale of these streaming services, Netflix has way more US subscribers than cable generally does, right?

JK: Yeah. Right, and Amazon Prime video, its reach will exceed broadcast within this NFL deal. Keep in mind, one big factor with the NBA that will play to their benefit is it’s truly a global sport. That actually matters a lot more to tech companies than it does to US sports media companies.

Yeah, we’ll see. I feel like that’s been the pot of gold at the end the rainbow for the NBA for a long time and it’s worth remembering, they still make all their money in the US and it’s an important point.

One final question that has nothing to do with sports, but it’s a fascinating story. You have to tell me the story of your son becoming the most unexpected rockstar in the world. How does that work?

JK: So thanks for asking. My son Walter has a band and they’re called The Walters and in 2014 in Chicago, they wrote a song called I Love You So and they posted it on Reddit and it developed a following. The band got to tour, the band got to play Lollapalooza, and then they broke up. My son was driving an Uber in the summer of 2021, out of nowhere, high school girls started doing covers of I Love You So on TikTok and everything for them exploded.

So they reformed the band.

JK: Yeah, the band got back together. I Love You So is a platinum song. They got a record deal with Warner. Last year, last summer they played before 34,000 people in Jakarta. I sent you stats before, they have a bigger following on your side of the world than they do here and I bring it up only because it’s something that’s only possible —

Well, you bring up number one because you are an appropriately a proud father. But sorry, tell me number two.

JK: But number two is it’s something that only the Internet makes possible. You talk about your career and that you live online, only the Internet would make that possible. Lots of fantastic musicians all over the world, but this specific thing cracked for them. One of the funniest things is that the band members are all late twenties, early thirties and it was my son, Luke, who’s now 15, who actually found it on TikTok.

None of them are on TikTok. Yeah, that’s amazing, it’s an incredible story. It almost brings your story full circle in a way. You’re starting out wanting to create this polished product and then realizing actually we have to have live sports or live sports scores and then dealing with the issues of abundance and talent and all these sort of things. Then you circle all the way around to your son where it was because of abundance that he was even out there and then talent can really come from anywhere. That has implications for competition, for what resonates, for what things that are out there.

I mean, I guess the big existential question, just to wrap it up here, is sports has been such a defining feature of your and my life, and I think anyone of GenX or early millennials, there was nothing else to do, so you watched a lot of sports. Today, I love watching sports because there’s the inherent drama in it, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You might sit down to a big game and it might stink, but that’s because it also might be incredible. But in fifty years, is that still going to resonate or is the media environment going to be so fractured and people are going to all be in their little AI bubbles or whatever it might be that it just won’t mean anything anymore? Or will that make it even stronger? Which arguably has happened with the NFL.

JK: My answer is the parade in Argentina after the World Cup where everybody was in the streets, that sports is the only thing that unites people for all the reasons that you mentioned. I just feel, and this is a passion of my career and a bunch of the brilliant people I got to work with, is you have to create better, more compelling products. I believe everything is now aligned to get the sports leagues, the networks, the tech companies to combine to do that. That’s what I believe. I’m optimistic about technology. I’ve had ups and downs and I’ve experienced different things, but I’m optimistic about what’s possible. I believe that sports is going to be a huge beneficiary of all this. Even if the progression is not necessarily linear, we have ups and downs.

It’s clear where it needs to go, the question is how do we get from here to there? But that bit about products, I completely agree. It’s about this shift in customers have to choose you, you don’t get stuff for free anymore. The sooner that leagues and networks figure that out, the better off they’ll be.

JK: But the sports algorithm is coming and there’s now real reason to build it and if we have a chance to do another one of these in another couple years, I think we will be impressed at some of the new services that we see.

Well, we will have to do that. I look forward to it. John Kosner, thank you for coming on. As demonstrated, I could dive into the history of ESPN for easily hours, but I appreciate you putting up with all the questions. Yeah, we should definitely talk again soon.

JK: Thank you, Ben.

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Crossing The Sports Media Rubicon — One Year Later. John Kosner’s Latest SBJ Column with Ed Desser

Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by Ed Desser and John Kosner, December 11th, 2023

Sports media “crossed the Rubicon,” a point of no return, with last year’s exclusive Amazon NFL Thursday streaming deal (SBJ, Dec. 5, 2022). Our May 22, 2023, SBJ column noted more tectonic changes that had taken place early in the year. And Amazon Prime Video’s first NFL Black Friday game provided a fitting bookend to a year of increasingly interconnected, furiously changing events … or perhaps it came with news that Mark Cuban is selling a majority stake in his beloved Mavericks?

Witness all that happened in 2023:

• On Black Friday, Amazon sported dynamic ad insertion, live commerce with an NFL shield QR code, AI overlays, multiple synced 4K feeds (including targeted “altcasts” — e.g., Dude Perfect), generating an audience seven years younger than the other NFL carriers. Amazon’s bold reinvention of sports (now adding exclusive NASCAR Cup races too) reminds us of Fox’s 1994 NFL coverage debut.

• Thus, it’s not coincidental that Apple (with MLS … and Lionel Messi!) and Google/YouTube (with NFL Sunday Ticket) finally staked out their exclusive positions in sports media. Among other things, Google wanted NFL IP for its 15 million YouTube creators, an entirely new criteria for rights negotiations.

• On Nov. 14, Netflix got into the act … kind of … streaming a live celebrity golf event. More profoundly, SBJ’s John Ourand reported that the world’s leading streamer is interested in the NBA’s In-Season Tournament, and Amazon wants NBA playoffs. Are these digital giants aggressive rights buyers or … more likely, eager to use their vast user bases and online video stores to be tax collectors for fans and rights holders searching for each other in an increasingly fragmented landscape? Certainly, they’re all after the growing pie of sports TV advertising, the last bastion of scale audience for marketers available simultaneously and universally across all age, ethnic and economic demos. On Nov. 19, Disney’s Hotstar drew a record 59 million concurrent viewers for its free coverage of the Cricket World Cup.

• In July, Nielsen ominously reported a first: Broadcast and cable TV dropped below 50% of total TV usage despite its addition of out-of-home measurement, helping goose sports TV ratings (by 40% for NFL Thanksgiving). Meanwhile, Amazon and Netflix each have more subscribers than cable (almost as many homes as broadcast nets). Still …

• Charter shocked us by dropping ESPN and ABC in several markets, including New York, during the U.S. Open and at the start of college football season, yet ultimately hewing to the old script by settling for a new deal by the debut of “Monday Night Football,” giving it access to certain Disney streaming assets but maintaining ESPN’s packaging. Nonetheless …

• Cord-cutting accelerated as higher prices and lower quality hurt traditional pay TV ( Comcast lost 12% of its video subscribers this year, 490,000 last quarter).

• With traditional linear pay TV (for four decades, sport’s bank and megaphone) in jeopardy, rights holders and buyers wonder where the money and exposure is going to come from now (hint: almost all leagues now have exclusive streaming packages).

The fallout was swift and brutal:

• The 108-year-old Pac-12 conference imploded in August; Pacific coast mainstays Cal and Stanford decamped to the Atlantic Coast Conference, and rendered the Rose Bowl collateral damage.

• Bankrupt Diamond Sports, and the RSN economic model (other than major market networks) teetered with MLB retaking local rights for the Padres and Diamondbacks. WBD threw in the towel on its four RSNs. The Suns, Jazz, Coyotes and Golden Knights moved to a combination of over-the-air (with multicast and low power) TV stations and streaming.

Will Rubicon 2024 mark the end of the 60-plus year MLB, NBA, NHL local broadcast model?

• Enter Saudi riches. The kingdom invested over $100 million into MMA upstart PFL and then staged the stunning Tyson Fury-Francis Ngannou boxing/MMA crossover fight. In June, they signed soccer megastar Cristiano Ronaldo to a reported $220 million contract, elevating the Saudi Pro League. Now they are set to become FIFA’s biggest sponsor ($1 billion annually with Aramco) and likely 2034 FIFA World Cup host. Most shocking, LIV Golf and the PGA Tour agreed to agree to stop fighting in court and form a joint venture on the course and boardroom.

• LIV’s first rights holder, the CW broadcast “netlet,” added the ACC, NASCAR Xfinity, “Inside the NFL,” WWE’s NXT and now has more live sports hours than any broadcaster other than the Big Four.

• Just as the 1999 Women’s World Cup put U.S. women’s soccer on the map, so did last summer’s WWC for the rest of the world. Spain won but England’s Lionesses almost stole the show. Meanwhile, the NWSL forged new agreements with CBS, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps.

• The NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship Final drew a stunning 9.9 record rating on an April Sunday afternoon on ABC. Holy NIL! Caitlin Clark now has her own Allstate commercial! The WNBA is the ultimate beneficiary.

• Hagiographic athlete “documentaries” and all-access series flooded streaming services. Today, sports is practically “The Truman Show.” It’s meta. Want to see the actual “behind-the-scenes” moment when golf pros found out about the proposed PGA Tour-LIV-DP World Tour merger? Season 2 of Netflix’s “Full Swing” was shooting then!

At the recent SBJ Media Innovators conference, our former NBA colleague Bill Koenig said, “What’s exciting — and a bit daunting — is I think that over the next five years, you’ll see more change than you’ve seen in the last 30 years in media.”

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Ed Desser is president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. (www.desser.tv). John Kosner is president of consultancy Kosner Media (www.kosnermedia.com). Together they developed league TV strategy and ran the NBA’s media operations in the ’80s and ’90s.

John Kosner Spoke with Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic about NASCAR’s New Deal

Original Article: The Athletic, by Jordan Bianchi, November 30th, 2023

NASHVILLE — NASCAR’s media future is now clear.

NASCAR on Wednesday announced its new media rights deal that will take effect beginning with the 2025 season, maintaining an alignment with traditional partners Fox Sports and NBC Sports while bringing in new partners Amazon Prime and Warner Bros. Discovery (via its TNT and B/R Sports platforms) as part of a seven-year deal worth an estimated $7.7 billion dollars, according to industry sources. The deal signals NASCAR’s first foray into streaming its premier Cup Series races and follows other sports like football and baseball onto both traditional TV and streaming services. 

For a sport in a constant quest to build its audience, what does the big picture look like? Let’s take a look.

What is the breakdown in the number of races each of the four partners will cover? Any idea exactly on the specific races they’ll have on their respective platforms?

Both Fox Sports and NBC Sports have rights to 14 races annually, with Amazon and Warner Bros. each having five apiece. How the still-to-be-determined 2025 schedule lays out will determine which races will air on which platform, though a few things are known — or can at least be surmised.

As it has since 2001, Fox’s portion comes at the beginning of the season, starting with the Clash exhibition and then the subsequent 13 races. Amazon’s first race is the 15th on the schedule, which is likely to be the Coca-Cola 600, according to industry sources. TNT/Warner Bros. follows Amazon, and appears likely to get the Chicago Street Race, if it returns in 2025, given its spot on the calendar and NASCAR’s desire to give all partners a signature race.

“I would say both (Amazon and WBD) are interested in embracing major tentpole events, and so we will make sure that we have major tentpole events for all of our partners,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps said Wednesday. “I’m not sure how long we’ll be doing the Chicago street race — I hope we do the Chicago Street Race for seven years — but we’ve got to make sure we have some flexibility today.”

NBC will take the final 14 races, including the entire playoffs.

Phelps also confirmed that the Daytona 500 will continue as the opening points race for the “foreseeable future.” Fox will also retain rights to the All-Star Race, NASCAR’s other exhibition race, which traditionally has been the 15th race on the schedule, meaning that race will move up.

Looking at how the schedule typically is put together, summer races at Gateway, Pocono, New Hampshire, Sonoma, Iowa and Nashville are expected to be among those carried by either Amazon or Warner Bros. NBC retains the regular-season finale, the Southern 500 on Labor Day weekend and staple playoff races such as Bristol, Kansas, Talladega and Martinsville.

“What happens in 2025 and beyond, I don’t know, schedule-wise at all other than where we are going to start our regular season,” Phelps said. 

Why did NASCAR emphasize aligning itself with streaming services?

NASCAR is one of the few major professional sports properties that didn’t already have a streaming deal, something industry experts contend factored in the league struggling to adequately market itself toward a younger demographic. 

“Ever since the pandemic hit, people have been leaving video subscriptions on pay TV, and as a result, if you want to reach a growing number of homes that are younger, that are tech savvy, that are your next generation of fans, then you have to have a robust streaming presence for at least some of your content,” said Lee Berke, president and CEO of sports media consulting firm LHB Sports, Entertainment & Media Inc. “You still want the broad reach you get in broadcast, and you still want to be included on pay TV in some respects, but your platforms increasingly need to include a substantial streaming component.”

NASCAR knew it needed to do a better job capturing the attention beyond its older core audience. The hope is that Cup races becoming more accessible beyond television will help introduce the sport to a younger audience. And that point has obviously been made to its new partners.

“We really want to go innovate,” said Jay Marine, Amazon Prime Video vice president and global head of sports. “We look at this as a seven-year-plus partnership, and we’ll talk about the renewal later, but that’s how we want to invest so that we can innovate for the long-term, and we’re excited to do that. We’re excited to reach a younger audience who may have cut the cord and (is) not watching as much, which we’ve been able to do with ‘Thursday Night Football,’ as an example. We’re excited to be part of it and excited to work across this partnership group, as well.”

Both Phelps and RFK Racing president Steve Newmark noted Wednesday they have college-aged children who consume programming primarily through their mobile phones or tablets. 

“My kids in college are consuming more from streaming than they are probably from broadcast, so to me, this gives us that right blend,” Newmark said. “And I don’t think any of us knows what the media landscape is going to look like in 10 years. But what this does is this gives us kind of covering all the bases, and so I actually think our (sponsors) are going to be excited about it.”

What else jumps out about this deal?

The money, of course. Securing a deal that brings in $7.7 billion is nothing to sneeze at, especially in a marketplace that has seen several notable sports properties either recently sign new deals or about to come up for renewals, and all while media companies are scaling back their expenses and becoming more selective on what they bid on.

So, yeah, NASCAR faced plenty of hurdles during this prolonged process that took longer to complete than anticipated.  

“We wanted to make sure that all the innovation we’re doing from a sport perspective that we were getting in front of new demos and that we were setting ourselves up well for the future,” said Brian Herbst, NASCAR senior vice president of media and productions.

That NASCAR navigated the changing landscape and landed a deal worth nearly 40 percent more than its current deals is a success, industry experts note.

“NASCAR had a successful, long-term renewal along the lines that most had predicted,” said John Kosner, president, Kosner Media and former executive vice president of ESPN Digital. “If there were surprises, it’s that the process took longer to finalize and that it required four partners (and two streaming partners) to complete the deal. This is a negotiation trend we are seeing where more broadcast parties are necessary for a league to achieve its revenue and reach goals.”

Said Ed Desser, a longtime media consultant: “NASCAR got a nice raise, but not as large as in prior deals. This has more to do with where NASCAR started (very strong prior deals) and the changing marketplace (streaming, cord-cutting, etc.) than any meaningful change in the underlying product itself. NASCAR has addressed its recent issues like most major professional sports organizations do periodically.”

How will longtime NASCAR fans likely react to this news?

Undoubtedly, some fans are going to be annoyed that they’ll have to subscribe to Amazon and also have another platform that provides access to live programming for the Fox, NBC and WBD components of the deal — an understandable complaint as such expenditures can quickly add up.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that this is now the life of a sports fan. Almost every league is spreading itself among multiple platforms, necessitating multiple subscriptions if you want to watch every game/race. It’s tough to swallow, but it isn’t changing anytime soon. 

If you’re looking for a silver lining, it’s that having a partner like Amazon allows for flexibility in how a race is presented to viewers. In addition to a traditional broadcast, the opportunity is there to bring viewers alternative streams providing an array of options. For example, maybe a stream focused solely on in-car video or offering in-depth technical data geared toward the hardcore, technical-minded fan? 

In a sponsorship-driven sport where companies want as many eyeballs on their brands as possible, is there a risk for NASCAR in shifting races to a streaming service?

The Athletic has asked numerous people within the NASCAR industry and experts in the sports media landscape and, near universally, the answer is: This was something NASCAR needed to do. If the league wanted to grow its fan base, it had little choice but to pursue this avenue.

“The reality is every sport out there, if they’re going to have some long-term perspective on what they need to do, they need to come up with their next generation of fans,” Berke said. “And if you’re not being seen by them growing up, then they don’t know about you. They don’t become fans. You’re not born a NASCAR fan. You have to be exposed to it.”

No wonder team executives, many of whom can be described as “risk averse,” were praising the deal on Wednesday, both publicly and privately, after learning the specifics of the financials and what it means for NASCAR’s future.

“I think the new arrangement is fantastic,” Newmark said. “From our perspective, what we like to see is kind of the might of those four media companies will all be behind promoting our sport. I think the access and the distribution is really going to help us take it to the next level and fits with the vision of our sport of being aggressive, and bold. We’re really excited about what that brings.”

On the subject of the teams, what does this mean for the ongoing negotiations between them and NASCAR over a new charter agreement?

Before extending its charter agreement with teams, which expires at the end of the 2024 season, NASCAR first wanted to secure its next media rights deal so it had a better idea of the financials it had to distribute. 

With this box now checked, all attention turns to the last big, pressing domino facing NASCAR on the business side. Neither NASCAR nor team executives were keen Wednesday to discuss their ongoing negotiations and how to best divide revenue, preferring instead to focus on the completed TV deal.

There is no timeline for when an extension to the charter agreement will be finalized, Phelps said, though he did state that NASCAR was committed to striking a deal. 

Where can fans watch practice and qualifying?

For the most part, practice and qualifying sessions can be found on either Amazon or B/R Sports. Amazon will stream the first half of the 38-race schedule, B/R Sports the second with some airing on TruTV. The only exceptions are the Clash, the Daytona 500 and NASCAR All-Star Race, all of which Fox Sports will televise.

What about the future TV deals for the Xfinity and Truck Series?

Fox announced Wednesday it retained exclusive rights to the entire Truck Series schedule through the 2031 season, though the specific terms weren’t disclosed.

The Xfinity Series will have its entire 33-race schedule broadcast on The CW beginning in 2025. Similar to the Cup deals, NASCAR signed a seven-year contract with the network that is available nationwide via over-the-air television.

John Kosner Participated in “The New Sports Video Experience” Panel for Parks Associates

Original Article: Parks Associates, November 15th, 2023

In a world driven by dynamic changes in the entertainment landscape, Parks Associates' Future of Video event emerges as a beacon of insight, gathering industry leaders to chart the course of the video and connected entertainment industries. With speakers hailing from TikTok, Tubi, VIZIO, and more, this event is poised to illuminate the present and future of video consumption! 

SHIFTING DEMANDS IN VIDEO SERVICES

As the digital tapestry of video services continues to evolve, Parks Associates' latest report, "Video Services: Shifting Demand," has uncovered a groundbreaking statistic—31% of households have embraced ad-supported AVOD or FAST streaming services in the last 30 days. This paradigm shift underscores the transformative potential of the Future of Video event. 

EXPLORING THE EVENT

From November 14-16, 2023, the Marina del Rey Marriott will be the nexus of the video industry's luminaries, converging for the Future of Video event. This executive conference is a culmination of insightful presentations, interactive panel discussions, and analyst insights, all poised to unravel the latest trends shaping the video and connected entertainment sectors. 

KEYNOTE VISIONARIES 

Distinguished keynote speakers include:

• Matthew Durgin, VP Content and Services, LG Electronics

• Albert Lai, Global Director, DTC/OTT Streaming for Media & Entertainment, Google

• Stefan Van Engen, VP, Content Programming and Partnerships, Xumo

PANEL POWERHOUSES

Bringing their expertise to the forefront are esteemed panel speakers:

• Scott Barton, Chief Product Officer, MyBundle.TV

• Isaac Bess, Global Head of Distribution, TikTok

• Jake Cohen, Head of Business Development and Strategy – Content, Verizon

• Aileen Del Cid, Head of Marketing, Samsung TV Plus

• Akinwole Garrett, VP, Business Development and M&A, REVOLT Media & TV

• Ken Gerstein, VP, NAGRA Anti-Piracy & NexGuard, NAGRA

• Chris Glover, VP Marketing, FreeWheel

• Dan Goman, CEO, Ateliere

• Samuel Harowitz, Vice President, Content Acquisition and Partnerships, Tubi

• Blair Harrison, CEO & Founder, Frequency

• Anthony Jiwa, CMO, OUTtv

• Becky Jones, Chief Marketing & People Officer, Viamedia

• John Kosner, President, Kosner Media

• David Mühle, CEO, PlayPilot

• Marty Roberts, SVP, Product Strategy and Marketing, Brightcove

• Brij Shah, Head of Strategic Growth, Comcast Advertising

• Geir Skaaden, EVP & Chief Products & Services Officer, Xperi

• Chris Tanquary, Senior Director of Business Development, Strategic Accounts, VIZIO

• Jason Tyrrell, General Manager, Kanopy, OverDrive

John Kosner Participated in “The Future of Sports Journalism” Panel for The Aspen Institute

Original Article: The Aspen Institute, November 15th, 2023

Sports both reflect and shape our society. Journalism unpacks those relationships, along the way making the games that we play more interesting and relevant. The New York Times, HBO Real Sports, and Los Angeles Times helped set the standard. Now, each outlet is changing how it covers sports – and Real Sports ended its run after 29 award-winning years.

What happened? And what does the future hold for enterprise and investigative journalism in sports? Could the public get less, or more, coverage of important topics as the media landscape evolves? What are the most promising business models to support this work? And what do we lose if longform sports journalism gets deprioritized in a streaming world?

Veteran journalists addressed the topic from two angles, with two panels:

What Happened to Sports Journalism, with speakers including:

• Andrea Kremer, NFL Network chief correspondent, CBS Sports Network co-host, HBO Real Sports correspondent

• Ben Strauss, Washington Post sports and media reporter

• Jon Solomon, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program editorial director, former investigative sports reporter (moderator)

Where to Go From Here for Sports Journalism, with speakers including:

• David Boardman, Temple University Klein College of Media and Communication dean and professor, Solutions Journalism Network vice chair

• John Kosner, Kosner Media president, four-decade veteran of sports media

• Iliana Limón Romero, Los Angeles Times sports editor

• Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program executive director, former investigative sports reporter (moderator)

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Future of Sports is a conversation series, hosted by the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, that helps stakeholders think through key questions shaping the future of our games, the sports industry and its impact on society. Past events examined the future of football, a series on college athlete pay including the government’s role and the future of name, image and likeness rights, sports betting, athlete activism, coaching, the U.S. Olympic movement, women’s pro sports, children’s rights in sports, and the future of sports in the climate crisis. Contact Sports & Society Program Editorial Director Jon Solomon at jon.solomon@aspeninstitute.org with questions or inquiries.

John Kosner Spoke with Oliver Barnes of The Financial Times about ESPN Bet

Original Article: The Financial Times, by Oliver Barnes, November 14th, 2023

Over the course of more than two decades with ESPN, anchor Scott Van Pelt has endeared himself to viewers by commentating on the iconic 18th hole at the US Masters golf tournament and delivering breaking news on the broadcaster’s flagship SportsCenter programme.

In an advert released to promote Tuesday’s launch of ESPN Bet, the Disney-owned sport network’s betting venture with casino group Penn Entertainment, Van Pelt, known affectionately by viewers as SVP, pumps his fist as a notification flashes up on his phone declaring him a “winner!”

The 15-second commercial is a glimpse into why Penn agreed to pay ESPN $150mn a year to secure a 10-year licensing deal, wagering that its broadcast stars and 200mn-strong monthly audience will help crack the duopoly of DraftKings and FanDuel, which together control more than two-thirds of the $9bn US online sports betting market.

“People that think this battle has been fought and won are way ahead of where I think the market is,” said Steve Bornstein, ESPN’s former chief executive who runs betting data group Genius Sports’ North America division. “Obviously there are some very dominant players . . . but we’re still in the go-go growth stage, the market is not calcified.”

For ESPN, Penn offers expertise in the gambling sector and the technology to power the new app, which the casino group acquired in its $2bn takeover of Canadian gaming app theScore in 2021. Penn also operates more than 40 bricks-and-mortar casinos.

Penn will pump an additional $150mn a year into marketing ESPN Bet, which is launching in 17 states.

ESPN Bet is not the only latecomer hoping to break into a market that has rapidly consolidated in the five years since the US Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning sports betting. In August, sports merchandise company Fanatics launched its betting app in four states, hoping an offer of a free sports jersey after placing $50 worth of bets would attract fans.

But “first-mover advantage”, combined with the fine-tuned technology used by DraftKings and FanDuel, mean “it’s going to be pretty difficult for any other companies to break 10 per cent market share”, predicted Chad Beynon, a gaming industry analyst at Macquarie Group. In the 26 US states, as well as Washington DC, where sports betting is legal, companies that have launched even just months after the legalisation date found it “incredibly difficult to acquire customers”, noted Beynon.

Since the start of the NFL season, Fanatics and its sister app PointsBet, which the sports merchandise group acquired for $150mn earlier this year, have been downloaded 371,000 times by smartphone users, the fourth highest for any sports betting app over the period, according to JMP Securities. But the Fanatics app has so far failed to achieve higher than a 3.5 per cent market share in any state.

“Ultimately, we’re a second mover . . . we embrace that as permission to frankly move more methodically,” acknowledged Matt King, chief executive of the Fanatics betting app, who previously ran FanDuel between 2017 and 2021. He added that “the quest for short-term market share bumps” had historically led betting apps “to light a lot of money on fire”.

By next spring, Fanatics will have migrated all of the PointsBet customers over to its app, enabling customers in as many as 20 states to access the new app. “Our view is let’s take time to get our product right,” added King.

But Penn does not have the luxury of time to make a success of ESPN Bet. Three years into the partnership, ESPN can activate a termination clause on the arrangement if the app fails to gain significant market share. ESPN Bet “needs to come out of the gates firing”, said Bernie McTernan, a senior analyst with Needham & Co. The deal also grants ESPN the ability to eventually become a significant shareholder in Penn.

In investor meetings, Penn and ESPN executives have talked up a Jefferies survey of more than 1,400 casual sports bettors, which showed that 53 per cent were open to trying ESPN Bet and 25 per cent expected to make it their primary betting platform, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Tuesday, Penn will send a prompt to the 2mn customers on its Barstool sportsbook to download the ESPN Bet app. But the bigger hope is that the app will appeal to ESPN users who use the sport networks to check scores but currently “have to leave ESPN’s ecosystem” to place a bet, Jay Snowden, Penn’s chief executive, explained at a launch event this month.

Snowden has previously pointed to the success of the UK’s Sky Bet, which uses broadcaster Sky Sports’ brand identity and now has the same parent company as FanDuel, as a blueprint for ESPN Bet. “There’s only one worldwide leader in sports so this was the opportunity of the century,” said Snowden.

ESPN Bet branding will be rolled out across ESPN’s TV shows in the coming months. On the app, ESPN’s hosts, such as Van Pelt, will recommend bets for users.

Since sports betting was legalised, Disney has toyed with the idea of launching an ESPN betting brand as a means of returning the broadcaster, which generates $2.9bn in annual profits, to growth, but chief executive Bob Iger was initially cautious.

Iger said on an earnings call in 2019 that he doubted ESPN would be “getting into the business of betting” any time soon. But in his second stint as Disney chief executive, that position has changed as ESPN considers selling some of its 80 per cent stake to a strategic partner that can help it prosper in the streaming era as revenues from cable subscriptions fall.

Sports betting was always ESPN’s “manifest destiny”, said John Kosner, a former ESPN executive in charge of its digital products who runs industry consultancy Kosner Media. “What it means to be the worldwide leader in sports is different in 2023 than it was in 2013,” explained Kosner.

ESPN held advanced talks with major sports betting operators, including Caesars Entertainment and DraftKings, with whom it had promotional agreements that did not prove successful, according to a person familiar with matter. “It seemed like we were on the 10-yard line . . . for several years with a bunch of different people,” said an executive close to the talks.

ESPN chief executive Jimmy Pitaro opted for Penn as a partner after first meeting Snowden at the sports network’s headquarters in Connecticut earlier this year. Reflecting on the meeting, Snowden said: “It was very clear to Jimmy that this isn’t something that ESPN wants to do, this is something that ESPN has to do because sports fans are demanding it.”

But the entrance of Disney — the entertainment giant behind Mickey Mouse and Pixar animation studios — into gambling, a product linked to addiction, is not without risks. “I’m not sure we’ve heard the end of people complaining about gambling in the States,” warned a former senior ESPN executive. “There are going to be negatives because there are people dead set against it, there’s certainly problem gambling.”

However, the prize for new entrants is a tantalising one. The US sports betting market is set to grow a further 60 per cent by 2027, achieving annual gross gaming revenues of nearly $18bn, according to industry consultancy Eilers & Krejcik Gaming.

Will the US sports betting industry remain a duopoly in the long term? “Forever is a long time,” said David Katz, an analyst at Jefferies. The two dominant players “cracked the code” of in-game accumulator bets, the most profitable and popular product, added Katz. “But there’s going to be some next big thing and whether FanDuel or DraftKings get there first, or whether it’s somebody else, I think is a fair question,” he said.

For a long time after its launch in 1979, ESPN “was not taken seriously” as a sports network, recalled Kosner, formerly of ESPN, but it flourished into the world’s biggest and “the rest is history”. “I wouldn’t bet against ESPN Bet either.”

John Kosner Spoke with Robert O’Connell of The Wall Street Journal about The NBA’s In-Season Tournament

Original Article: Wall Street Journal, by Robert O’Connell, November 2nd, 2023

The NBA Created Another Championship. Is It a Gimmick or Genius?

There’s a new import to the NBA, and this one, unlike Victor Wembanyama, doesn’t block shots or dunk alley-oops. The inaugural “In-Season Tournament,” which will unfold over the first quarter of the league’s calendar, is a novelty among major U.S. team sports. But it borrows from the way the rest of the world has long done the business of competition.

“Whether it’s international soccer, international basketball, individual sports here in the U. S.—golf, tennis, racing, fighting—the idea that you can raise multiple trophies within a calendar season is incredibly common, and appreciated by fans,” said Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics.

“There’s an untapped opportunity here,” Wasch said, “a chance to be a pioneer.”

The experiment begins on Friday night. Seven matchups will raise the curtain on the tournament, which will end with a trophy—the NBA Cup—lifted in Las Vegas on Dec. 9. The league’s objective is to enliven an early stretch of its season, to boost ratings and amplify chatter, to grab up a greater share of the sizable audience for live sports.

But the question is: how much will anybody—players and fans, advertisers and prospective media-rights partners—care about a competition manufactured out of thin air?

“We’re looking to create a new tradition here, and as the saying goes, new traditions aren’t created overnight,” commissioner Adam Silver said in September. “It will be the fans and the coverage,” he added, “which will be telling us whether this is working or not.”

This bid for attention comes at a moment when the NBA’s ability to attract eyeballs holds particular significance. The league is negotiating new mediarights deals, which will go into effect after the 2024-25 season. Current partners ESPN and TNT are in renewal talks but aren’t looking to significantly increase the estimated combined $2.6 billion they spend to broadcast NBA games, and streaming providers Apple and Amazon are interested in taking on packages of games.

The specifics of the tournament have more in common with soccer’s World Cup and college basketball’s March Madness than with the NBA playoff format that decides the championship each June. The league’s 30 teams have been sorted into six groups, and the winner of each group—plus two wild-card entrants—will land in a eight-team, single-elimination bracket. The semifinals (airing on ESPN and TNT) and final (airing on ABC) will take place at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena. Schedule maneuvering will let every game but the final swap in for a regular season slot; only the two teams competing for the trophy will play an extra contest past the usual 82.

The league and its partners hope that the single-elimination model will bring enough of a spark to convince two crucial groups—fans and players—to buy in. Most NBA players haven’t appeared in a string of winner-take-all games since their collegiate days; the setup could bring NCAA Tournament-esque chaos and one-night-only star turns that run counter to the more predictable best-of-seven playoff model.

“Seasons are long,” Craig Barry, executive vice president and chief content officer at TNT Sports, said. “Creating a little bit of excitement, finding ways to eventize regular season games and get fans excited is important.”

A successful In-Season Tournament could demonstrate that the NBA isn’t merely a bankable property—a rare, reliable deliverer of live audiences to advertisers—but also an evolving one, willing to break with tradition in pursuit of growth. Wasch and Silver have both acknowledged that some fans feel the league’s regular season has lost some of its intrigue, with teams regularly resting players to keep them healthy for the playoffs. In 2021, the NBA debuted its play-in tournament, a competition for the playoffs’ final spots that has energized the sometimes drowsy period just before the postseason.

“In the current environment,” said John Kosner, a consultant and former ESPN executive, “if you’re not constantly improving your offerings for fans, TV networks, sponsors and advertisers, you’re falling behind.”

Still, the new event has been met by a mix of curiosity and skepticism from basketball fans. Many observers online have cracked jokes about the garish, striped courts teams will lay down for tournament games. Some have also noted that the In-Season Tournament doesn’t quite meet the standard of the contests it takes inspiration from.

In European soccer, the Champions League brings together top teams from across top domestic competitions: the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga and more. Tennis players and golfers compete across surfaces that have much more substantial variations that paint color.

“The reason people like the Champions League is because we get to see Real Madrid against Manchester City, which doesn’t happen all that often,” Tobias Moskowitz, a Yale professor who teaches sports analytics, said. “We’re not getting that in the NBA, right? It’s more, maybe the Bucks end up playing the Suns one more time than we thought.”

The NBA will incentivize its athletes with a monetary reward—the winning team will receive $500,000 per player—and, Wasch said, the possibility of legacy-boosting achievements: All-Tournament team nods and MVPs, the trophy itself. “If we’re seeing early indications of success, you’re going to see a little ratcheted-up intensity than you see during a typical regular-season game,” Silver said.

The league’s current network partners likewise hope that adjustments to their presentations, such as never-before-seen camera angles, bring viewers into the fold. “Differentiation is always of interest to fans,” said David Roberts, ESPN’s head of event and studio production.

Executives at both ESPN and TNT said that the ongoing negotiations around the next media-right deals—and the possibility that the tournament their networks help produce and publicize will fall in the hands of a streamer in a couple seasons—haven’t affected the enthusiasm with which they have worked on the project.

“It’s inevitable that there’s potentially going to be more platforms and companies interested,” Barry said. “That’s a good thing, because that means it’s healthy.”

Silver has emphasized taking the long view of the In-Season Tournament, noting that format changes could come in future iterations. Cachet is impossible to fasttrack. Time will tell whether players’ investment brings about Wasch’s vision of a competition that “comes close” to the traditional playoffs, or whether they treat tournament games as normal contests on flashier floors.

“It will take an identity of its own over time,” Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry said over the summer. “It’s hard to kind of predict what it’s going to feel like or look like from a fan perspective, a player perspective…It’s still 82 games, it’s just under a different narrative.”

John Kosner Spoke with Ben Mullin of The New York Times About The NBA’s Media Negotiations

Original Article: The New York Times, by Ben Mullin, October 29th, 2023

The National Basketball Association’s season tipped off on Tuesday with stars like LeBron James and Nikola Jokic beginning the long quest for a title. But the action that will have longer-term ramifications for the league, and the media and entertainment landscape, is happening off the court.

The companies holding the rights to show N.B.A. games — Disney, which owns ESPN and ABC, and Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT — are collectively paying the league $24 billion over nine years for that privilege. But their contracts expire after next season, and the N.B.A. hopes to more than double the money it receives for rights in the next deal, according to several people familiar with the league’s expectations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.

It won’t get that without a fight. After decades in which sports leagues garnered ever bigger piles of money for the rights to show their games, there are signs that media and technology companies are under increasing pressure to justify the exorbitant amounts they spend on broadcast rights. Interest rates are high, Wall Street is demanding profitability over growth, and streaming has reconfigured the entertainment industry.

The result of the N.B.A.’s negotiations will say a lot about the future of broadcast networks, the cable bundle, streaming services and the sports media ambitions of technology companies.

“I think in this era that we’re coming out of, this is the last of the big deals,” said John Kosner, who advises sports media and tech start-ups after a two-decade career as an executive at ESPN.

The National Football League, the most valuable sports league in the world, did not quite double its rights fees when it signed new agreements in 2021. And that was before the stock market declined, interest rates rose and wars began in Europe and the Middle East.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, which have televised N.B.A. games for more than two decades, aren’t necessarily in positions to shell out lots of cash, either.

Disney has carried out extreme cost-cutting and layoffs this year, and its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, has said the company is considering “strategic options” to sell equity in ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery has also cut costs, and said in August that it had a debt load of nearly $50 billion following the merger of the two companies last year.

The most likely scenario, according to the people familiar with the negotiations, is that Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery will sign new agreements with the N.B.A. to televise fewer games. The N.B.A. declined to comment for this article.

The two companies together show about 160 regular-season games each year, as well as the playoffs and N.B.A. finals. Most games are shown on cable (ESPN and TNT), with a handful on ABC.

For both companies, N.B.A. broadcast rights still represent a valuable bargaining chip in negotiations with their biggest customers: cable and satellite companies. Those distributors pay billions of dollars to Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery for the rights to show their cable channels, including TNT and ESPN, based in part on the expectation that those channels will air sports like N.B.A. basketball.

An N.B.A. package would also help both companies shift to a streaming future. Warner Bros. Discovery recently added a live sports package to its streaming service, Max, while ESPN has been vocal about having a stand-alone streaming offering for its flagship channel in the near future.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are not likely to be the only companies showing N.B.A. games, though. If those companies end up showing fewer games in the new deal, the league may create a third rights package, perhaps even a fourth, of the games no longer included in the first two packages, as well as the league’s new in-season tournament.

The most likely buyers for those packages of games are Amazon and NBC, according to the people familiar with the negotiations.

Top executives at Fox, CBS and the Google-owned YouTube have said that they are unlikely to put in serious bids for broadcasting rights. The intentions of Netflix and Apple are less clear, but Netflix has long said it is uninterested in paying the kind of prices the N.B.A. is looking for. Apple has largely committed itself to a sports strategy of buying up all of a league’s domestic and international rights, like in its recent deal with Major League Soccer. That isn’t possible with the N.B.A.

Amazon and NBC are attractive partners to the N.B.A. for very different reasons.

For a generation, most N.B.A. games have been watchable only with a cable package. But the collapse of the cable bundle — from around 100 million households with a cable package a decade ago to around 70 million today — has made old-school broadcast networks, the most widely distributed television channels, more attractive. With CBS and Fox as unlikely bidders, the league could want games to be shown on NBC’s broadcast channel.

As for Amazon, it is seen as highly unlikely that the N.B.A. — a league that is proud of being forward-thinking regarding technology — would sign a new rights agreement with only traditional media companies, according to some of the people familiar with the negotiations. Amazon has long been interested in broadcasting the N.B.A., according to a person familiar with the league’s negotiation history, and it has won plaudits for how it has handled Thursday night N.F.L. games.

The media and technology companies declined to comment for this article. CNBC, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have all previously reported on parts of the N.B.A.’s media-rights negotiations.

The league has a number of other media assets it could leverage. Most N.B.A. games are not shown nationally. Instead, they are broadcast in their local markets, with individual teams controlling the rights to sell those games. Teams have traditionally sold those rights to regional sports networks, but those are collapsing, leaving teams looking for alternatives.

If Diamond Sports, which is in bankruptcy proceedings, collapses, the N.B.A. could suddenly regain control of the local rights for about half the teams in the league. If that happens, it might sell some of those rights to a national partner. But that would require the league to work with its team owners — as well as current rights holders — for the complicated task of navigating roughly 30 different local agreements.

It would also leave out a number of high-profile teams, like the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers, which have long-term local rights agreements with successful regional sports networks.

The N.B.A. could also sell some international rights. The rights to show N.B.A. games in some basketball-mad countries like China could be extremely valuable, especially as domestic streaming companies seek new markets. But the league — unique in American sports in that it sells all its international rights directly rather than working with third parties — is seen as more likely to sell those rights country by country to the highest bidder.

The real wild card if the N.B.A. looks to do something groundbreaking could be its old stalwart: ESPN.

Disney and ESPN executives have spoken in recent months with private equity firms, tech and mobile companies and sports leagues, and have concluded that if they are to give up equity, it should be to a league, or leagues, as part of a long-term partnership, according to two people familiar with ESPN’s plans.

Analysts have valued ESPN at $25 billion to $50 billion, meaning a potential partner would have to trade billions in value for even a small stake. While a partner could pay Disney for a stake in ESPN, what the company is really looking for is exclusive content, some of those involved in the negotiations said.

Disney executives have spoken with a number of sports leagues, including the N.B.A., about selling them equity in ESPN and what the company would want out of such an arrangement. According to one of the people, the benefits sought by ESPN in a partnership could include more closely integrating a league’s social media operations with the network’s, content like documentary rights and more in-game audio from players, distributing games it does not have the broadcast rights to within its apps and working together on marketing.

John Kosner Spoke with Mike McCarthy of Front Office Sports About Streaming in the Next NBA Media Deals

Original Article: Front Office Sports, by Mike McCarthy, October 22nd, 2023

During an industry conference last year, NBA commissioner Adam Silver admitted he was “fascinated” with the job Amazon Prime Video is doing with “Thursday Night Football” — the ratings-challenged NFL package from which longtime broadcast partners like Fox Sports and CBS Sports had walked away. 

With “TNF” averaging a linear TV-like 12.9 million viewers year to date this season, Amazon wants to create an exclusive night of streaming NBA action, sources told Front Office Sports.

According to sources, after agreeing to pay $1 billion yearly for “TNF” through 2033, the eCommerce giant is eying an NBA game package on Tuesday or Thursday nights. 

The goal: create the NBA’s version of “TNF,” said sources. According to sources, the NBA is also intrigued by Amazon’s ability to draw an audience seven years younger than the NFL’s legacy TV partners.

Beginning with the 2025-26 season, the NBA will seek an estimated $50 billion to $75 billion for its next cycle of long-term media rights. 

The league is still negotiating exclusively with incumbent media rights partners: The Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports’ TNT.

But both the NBA and Amazon have been dropping hints they’re interested in a billion-dollar NBA streaming partnership. 

“I fully expect the NBA to have a streaming element as part of their next agreement,” predicted Bob Thompson, retired president of Fox Sports Networks turned principal of Thompson Sports Group LLC. 

“Whether it is part of a linear package, say with ESPN/ESPN+ or WBD/Max/Bleacher Report, or a standalone package with a streaming-only outlet such as Amazon, is the bigger question.”

The NBA could negotiate deals with three to five media rights partners, said sources. The goal: maximize rights fees for its next media deal that will likely stretch into the 2030s.

This year, Amazon sports chief Jay Marine coyly signaled the $500 billion giant’s interest, saying they will be “aggressive” yet “rational” in pursuing the NBA and other league rights.

“Sports are unique; they are uniquely valuable. Because of that, they’ve also been uniquely expensive,” he noted. “Having said that, they can do things that other things can’t because it’s a guaranteed audience.”

Plus, Amazon is already in business with the NBA in South America. Last fall, the league and Prime Video announced a deal to stream games in Brazil starting with the 2022-23 season.

Another interesting wrinkle: The NBA has embraced streaming in China. The league boasts a $1.5 billion-a-year deal with Tencent Holdings, reaching over 500 million basketball fans. 

The clock is ticking on ESPN’s and TNT’s exclusive negotiating windows. Their window expires in early 2024. Once that closes, all bets are off.

But it won’t be a piece of cake for Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.

Fresh off their triumph with Major League Soccer and Lionel Messi, Apple is likely to be in the NBA hunt, said sources. 

Then there’s Google/YouTube, expanding via the NFL’s Sunday Ticket out-of-home game package. During a recent NFL meeting in New York, media czar Brian Rolapp said YouTube TV has driven “Sunday Ticket” to its best subscription levels in five years.

Meanwhile, Netflix is suddenly throwing its hat into the ring, as chief executive officer Ted Sarandos just declared: “We are in the sports business.”

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix could simply use their enormous checkbooks to outbid other suitors. The league’s current legacy TV partners will also push their streaming capabilities.

Another package ripe for a potential streaming partner could be the league’s new In-Season Tournament.

On the TV side, ESPN and TNT could face a fierce challenge from NBC Sports, which held the league’s media rights from 1990 to 2002.

As a result, the NBA’s next media partners could feature a hybrid mix of legacy companies and streaming giants, according to John Kosner, the ex-NBA and ESPN executive turned investor and advisor.

“They want to reach their entire fanbase — so they’re unlikely to look ‘either or,’ said Kosner. “If they renew with their existing partners, you’ll undoubtedly see linear and streaming, including ample use of Max, ESPN, and Disney streaming. If the negotiations open up, Amazon and Netflix could be in play — with install bases that will rival and then likely exceed broadcast distribution during the next deal.”

The wild card here is the edgy NBA itself. Unlike the more conservative NFL, the NBA is unafraid to take risks regarding its media rights.  

In 2002, the NBA shocked the sports media industry when the league moved most of its games to pay cable on ESPN and TNT from free broadcast TV on NBC. 

That move changed the face of sports television forever. Is Silver ready to make sports history again 20 years later? Don’t bet against Silver and The Association making more history two decades later.

What Should College Football Do Now? John Kosner’s Latest SBJ Column with Ed Desser

Original Article: Sports Business Journal, by John Kosner and Ed Desser, October 16th, 2023

The 2023 college football season began tumultuously: The Pac-12 disintegrated. Two of its Pacific Coast schools, Stanford and Cal, joined the … Atlantic Coast Conference. Another, Colorado — featuring head coach Deion Sanders — became the TV address with two TV-friendly 10 a.m. local time kickoffs. In a Sept. 23 New York Times op-ed, Jordan Acker, a University of Michigan regent, wrote: “The recent creation of new national super conferences … is about one thing: getting the biggest television audience — and the biggest payout.

Agreed.

We do not opine here on the proper economic model for colleges, though we hope for an economically fair one that provides athletes with a voice. Since generating more revenue is clearly crucial, our decades of pro league and major sports network experience suggests that college administrators consider these key changes that would create more media value for the key driver, football:

1. Expand the regular season. College football is the No. 2 sport in America. The NFL (No. 1) has expanded to 17 regular-season games from just 12 in 1960. College football should add at least two additional regular-season weeks and play from Labor Day weekend into the middle of December, a traditionally dead time for TV networks, but one with high “homes using TV” levels. Wear and tear on college football players is obviously a factor. But FBS schools have 85 scholarships (and now NIL) for a reason. The NFL reduced preseason games and year-round workouts as part of its longer season; colleges can too, beginning with spring ball commitments, and by …

2. Reconceiving the bowl games. The bowls no longer serve their original purpose. The six big bowls in rotation could remain as sites for the second and third weeks of CFP games. The Rose Bowl could be re-imagined as a Big Ten Championship location in late December and/or a new stand-alone Jan. 1 “Future Bowl” game featuring the best two teams not in the CFP. Eliminate the lesser bowls featuring two .500 teams.

3. The two biggest rivals should play home and home. Yes, that happens in college basketball and baseball (both shorter seasons) and is perhaps the secret of NFL divisional play. “Pay for” games, where smaller, undermanned schools take a big check to get walloped at a Power Five school, might be good for one institution’s bottom line and the other’s record, but lopsided games do little for media value or fan engagement. What fans want is traditional rivalry games, whether it’s Ohio State-Michigan, Texas-Oklahoma, USC-UCLA, Army-Navy or Alabama-Auburn. Let’s have more of them! We’d use the two added weeks to make sure all longtime rivalries remain regardless of conference changes — such as Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State and USC vs. Stanford — and perhaps bring others back, like Penn State vs. Pitt. We know that many schools have their schedules set 20 years into the future, but: (1) No games are currently scheduled for the first two weeks of December other than the conference championships (and Army-Navy); and (2) Money talks, such as the next CFP and conference TV deals.

4. Expand the weekend schedule instead of the weekdays. We suggest more games on Fridays — not just nights but afternoons too, given recent work-from-home trends. And games on Sundays as well. Yes, the NFL is a ratings juggernaut, but NFL games bring more football fans to the set and that expands audience, which can find alternatives especially if college games are strategically scheduled in windows before or after NFL games of local interest. Right now, all four broadcast networks carry college football games at the same time on Saturday afternoons. That demonstrates the sport’s unique appeal but is counterproductive to growing audiences. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are neither fan- nor school-friendly. The NFL expanded to Thursday and Monday nights. There’s no reason colleges shouldn’t program Friday through Sunday.

5. Spread the times to create a fifth national TV window. We mentioned Coach Prime playing 10 a.m. games to provide added unopposed exposure. Why not work together to have a regular early Saturday morning time slot? The Premier League has used that to great effect on NBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Besides creating five Saturday time slots, we strongly favor …

6. Shortening the games. College football has drifted into the 3½-hour territory … yes, driven by TV. All sports must trim down. Go further on the 2023 rules changes and use some of the NFL’s adjustments to reduce to three hours. Shorten halftime below 15 minutes (or the minimum to accommodate both bands!). Have fewer, longer timeouts. Manage the clock. This could even create room for an occasional sixth 9 p.m. PT “Midnight Madness” slot!

7. Create a Saturday “Red Zone.” Saturdays already resemble NFL Sunday Ticket, with three times the simultaneous games across a dozen channels, in double the number of time slots. The power conferences and their broadcast partners should team up to reward fans — creating an added home position to funnel viewers (and bettors) into hot games in progress. It could be a Fox/ESPN (and perhaps others) joint venture, and a new way to generate more revenue and interest out of the existing product base.    

Today, you must earn your fans’ time, money, attention and hearts, and constantly be improving your TV offerings. Otherwise, you’re falling behind and possibly into trouble. Even if you’re the second biggest sport in the country.

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Ed Desser is an expert witness and president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. (www.desser.tv). John Kosner is president of consultancy Kosner Media (www.kosnermedia.com). Together they developed league TV strategy and ran the NBA’s media operations in the ’80s and ’90s.

John Kosner Spoke with Jessica Toonkel of The Wall Street Journal about ESPN’s Big Betting Deal

Original Article: Wall Street Journal, by Jessica Toonkel, October 12th, 2023

Disney Goes All In on Sports Betting

After years of internal debate, the entertainment giant did a deal with a gambling company and will launch an ESPN betting app next month. Can it draw a bigger sports crowd without alienating Mickey’s fans?

In early 2019, an analyst asked Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger if sports betting could coexist with the House of Mouse’s brand. He said he didn’t see the company facilitating gambling in any way.

Just four years later, the world’s most beloved name in family entertainment is going all-in on sports betting.

In August, the company struck a 10-year deal with sports-betting company Penn Entertainment to bring gambling to Disney’s ESPN sports network. Sports fans will be able to wager on games on their phones through a new app called ESPN Bet that accepts bets through Penn’s sportsbook.

The idea of gambling under the same roof as Disney has roiled some company executives and employees who feel it will damage the brand that is synonymous with princesses and talking cartoon ducks. In the last year, at least one large investor warned Disney that it might have to sell some of its Disney stake if the company embraced betting.

But for ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro and Iger, who saw his two adult sons glued to gambling apps on their smartphones, the chance to engage a younger male audience, and the money, were eventually too good to pass up. Penn will pay Disney $1.5 billion in cash while ESPN will receive warrants worth about $500 million to purchase shares in the gambling company. Penn will operate the app and Disney will help market it.

This is how sports in America works. Fans watch and they bet—particularly young men between the ages of 18 and 34—often making multiple complicated bets during a live sporting event. They can wager on how many 3-pointers a basketball player will sink or who will catch the final fly ball in a baseball game. It is huge on college campuses.

Wagering on games ballooned after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for states to adopt it. It is legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Last year, online sports gambling generated $7.6 billion in revenue—the amount companies received after paying out winning bets. Next year, revenue is expected to grow to $11.8 billion, according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, an industry consulting firm.

ESPN, like more traditional TV networks, is struggling with the decline in cable TV subscribers and the rising cost of sports-broadcasting rights. Sports leagues and legions of startups have embraced gambling, while large media companies have homed in on betting as one of the best ways to expand.

But Disney employees, more than most other workers, feel that their company stands for a set of wholesome ideals—something more than making money.

In mid-2022, Jenny Cohen, a Disney veteran who had been promoted to head of corporate social responsibility a year earlier, raised concerns about a potential foray into sports betting to top executives at Disney’s Burbank, Calif., headquarters and leaders at ESPN, urging them to reconsider their plan to strike a deal with a sports-betting operator.

She told her colleagues, and Disney’s CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, that sports betting would tarnish the Disney brand, according to people familiar with the discussions. Consumers could start associating Disney with gambling addiction, she argued. As this discussion brewed, Disney was already managing a crisis with many employees who felt their employer didn’t take enough of a stand against a Florida bill that prohibits instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for young students, known by its opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. 

Around the same time, BlackRock, the investment giant which uses socially-conscious environmental, social and governance—or ESG—criteria to guide some of its investing decisions, contacted Disney’s investor relations staff. It warned Disney that if the company did a deal with a sportsbook, ESG rules may require some of its European funds to reduce their Disney stakes, people familiar with the matter said.

Disney is also contending with a fresh push by activist investor Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management to secure multiple board seats, The Journal reported this week. Trian thinks Disney’s stock is undervalued and that Disney needs a board that is more focused and accountable. It is unclear what other changes the hedge fund plans to seek. Peltz and Trian haven’t publicly taken a position on ESPN and gambling.

There are Disney fans, Disney+ subscribers and theme park visitors that likely have no idea that ESPN is part of Disney, but internally, Disney’s businesses are perceived as interconnected parts of one overarching corporate brand: a place where dreams come true. The ESPN+ streaming service is offered as part of Disney’s streaming bundle, and ESPN promotes shows from other Disney-owned networks during its broadcasts, and vice versa. This week, for example, ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel appeared on ESPN2’s football show the “Manningcast.”

“My job is to protect the brand at all costs,” said Pitaro, in an interview. “I am the custodian of the ESPN brand, and we needed to make sure that whoever we went with on this journey was someone that we could trust.”

Disney first began flirting with sports betting in March 2019, when it completed its $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox’s major entertainment assets, which included a 6% stake in sports betting company DraftKings.

At the time, some of Iger’s top lieutenants urged him to take a bigger ownership stake in the gambling company, but Iger resisted, arguing that betting wasn’t on-brand for Disney.

Without his blessing, sports-betting discussions stalled until Iger stepped down as CEO in February of 2020, and the board named his veteran head of parks, Chapek, to replace him.

Chapek had a much different view of gambling. He told associates that he was “not that precious about the Disney brand,” compared with his predecessor when it came to sports betting.

He began exploring a potential partnership with a sportsbook, and Disney started up talks with DraftKings, which now has more than 30% share of the sports-betting market. At the time, DraftKings had a marketing arrangement with ESPN, by which it would link ESPN.com readers to make online bets through DraftKings.

Despite Cohen’s objections, Disney signaled that it was seeking a new deal worth around $3 billion over a decade, and Chapek and Pitaro gave news interviews, saying that ESPN customers wanted a “seamless” betting option as part of the sports-viewing experience. ESPN had already embraced sports betting within its programming, including in its “Daily Wager” show, which analyzes odds for sports matchups.

Pitaro intensified his matchmaking efforts with DraftKings, but from the outset, the two companies were far apart. Disney asked for tens of millions of dollars a year more than DraftKings was willing to pay, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Eventually, DraftKings offered around $100 million a year for ESPN to use its sportsbook, but DraftKings wanted its brand included on any app or marketing as part of the deal. That was a nonstarter for Pitaro. He wanted solo ESPN branding.

His team began negotiating with Rush Street Interactive, a smaller, Chicago-based gambling company. RSI offered ESPN more than $100 million a year, but a deal never came together.

Pitaro felt pressure to secure ESPN’s future, particularly among young male fans who increasingly expect betting to be a seamlessly integrated part of the sports-watching experience. By this time, Iger had returned to Disney as its CEO after the board ousted Chapek in November of last year, and the company was hard at work on plans to remake ESPN as a streaming-focused platform. Iger had told interviewers that he had seen the writing on the wall for the traditional TV business, which was showing signs of being on its deathbed.

Overall, Disney was struggling. Its foundering share price had drawn attacks from activist investors including both Peltz and Dan Loeb’s Third Point, its streaming business was bleeding cash and its whole traditional television business, more than just ESPN, was suffering as more people dropped their cable TV subscriptions in favor of streaming. Disney is currently exploring potential strategic partners for ESPN and has had talks with major sports leagues about it.

Iger quickly set about trimming fat, announcing $5.5 billion in budget cuts and the elimination of 7,000 positions, around 3% of Disney’s total global workforce.

Soon, Iger warmed up to sports betting. His adult sons’ use of sports-betting apps opened his eyes to its popularity with a younger audience, he told associates. He said that it is “inevitable” that sports-watching and sports-betting will go hand-in-hand, and he blessed Pitaro’s efforts to find Disney a partner. Getting involved with gambling was the only way to ensure that ESPN is able to continue to attract younger audiences, he reasoned.

Along came Penn, the Wyomissing, Pa.-based casino operator turned sports-betting company that also needed a makeover after it got into regulatory and reputational trouble over its ownership of sports-media company Barstool Sports, founded by Dave Portnoy. Several women have accused Portnoy of sexual misconduct—allegations he has denied.

Penn runs casinos and racetracks in smaller regional markets like Lake Charles, La., Biloxi, Miss., and York, Pa., and its CEO Jay Snowden wanted to remake the company into a digital gambling powerhouse.

Snowden first met Pitaro in his office for about a 90-minute meeting earlier this year. Pitaro left thinking Snowden was “a straight shooter” who knew what he was doing, the ESPN executive said. 

Pitaro quickly deployed teams working on ESPN’s sports-betting, tech, strategy and marketing into parallel talks with Penn to flesh out what a potential partnership could look like. He said Penn’s technology, including the functionality and design of the app, stood out. In addition, Disney views Penn’s tiny market share as an advantage because ESPN can have more control over branding the app and not have to share the spotlight with a better established player, according to people familiar with Disney’s stance.

There was a key requirement to move forward with a Disney deal. Penn had to dump Barstool.

When Penn began acquiring Barstool in a series of transactions starting in 2020, the gambling company hoped it would help it build a young customer base. Barstool runs an extensive sports-content operation that has drawn criticism for sexism and some of its employees’ crude behavior. Gambling regulators ultimately fined Penn for violating rules about marketing to people under the age of 21 and scrutinized advertisements that appeared to promise financial success. Barstool said it was being sarcastic.

Pitaro informed Iger of the talks in an early June meeting, and the CEO liked the idea of a partnership with Penn. Pitaro had long held out hope that Disney could fashion a deal with DraftKings, a market-leading online gambling company that was seen by some inside Disney as a natural fit, but the negotiations had become bogged down.

Pitaro suggested that they end talks with DraftKings. Iger, who felt that the negotiations had gone on too long and DraftKings’ demands weren’t reasonable, agreed. Besides, Penn was offering a better price. It was time to move on.

In June, Pitaro presented the Penn deal to Disney’s board at a meeting in Anaheim, Calif., and in early August, the day before Disney was set to announce third-quarter financial results, Disney announced the $2 billion deal.

Penn needed to rebrand the Barstool Sportsbook app into ESPN Bet under the new deal. To quickly make room for Disney, the company sold Barstool back to Portnoy for $1, just six months after fully acquiring the company. Penn kept the database of 1.5 million online betting customers it has accrued, which the company aims to retain under the ESPN name.

ESPN and Penn have the option to walk away from the partnership in three years if the venture hasn’t captured a minimum market share target. Snowden declined to say the exact target, but said it was around 10%.

“There’s only one ESPN,” Snowden said. “If we were going to make a pivot, there was really one option to do that, and that was with what is the only name that is truly synonymous with sports in the United States.”

ESPN sports programming won’t be pushed into the betting app when it launches in November so as not to slow down the betting experience, Snowden said. Instead, the goal is for ESPN viewers and readers to easily switch back and forth between sports and the betting app.

Pitaro said that many on-air stars are eager to get involved with ESPN Bet, and the company plans to announce an expanded talent lineup to host and promote its gamblingrelated products and shows. ESPN forged a partnership with former NFL punter and foulmouthed YouTube star Pat McAfee, who is known for hosting broadcasts in sleeveless Tshirts and making occasional off-color jokes. He will promote ESPN Bet to his audience.

ESPN is also considering alternative broadcasts of games focused on betting, similar to the popular version of Monday Night Football hosted by former NFL stars and brothers Eli and Peyton Manning that airs on ESPN2 and ESPN+, and plans to promote betting to its growing fantasy-sports audience. Pitaro said its fantasy platform is expected to reach more than 12 million users this year, a 10% increase from the previous year.

“Getting into sports betting is a perceived business necessity for ESPN,” said John Kosner, a former ESPN executive who now runs Kosner Media. “I think this decision has to do more with ESPN’s manifest destiny than Disney’s position on branding.”

John Kosner Spoke with Adam Zagoria of Forbes About the NFL & Taylor Swift

Original Article: Forbes, by Adam Zagoria, October 5th, 2023

How far will the NFL go to milk the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance?

The answer, it seems, is pretty far.

The New York Post reported that the NFL pressured its television partners to run free promotional ads for Swift’s upcoming film during recent NFL games, adding that NBC and ESPN “acquiesced” and that the 30-second ads in the “million-dollar neighborhood” during were “paid for.”

“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film will be released in theaters on Oct. 13.

“It just shows how hard [the NFL] is working to turn Swifties into NFL fans,” Bob Dorfman, a sports marketing pundit and Creative Director at Pinnacle Advertising in San Francisco, told me.

“Milking the Swift-Kelce romance may not thrill hardcore football fans, but it’s not going to keep them from watching. It’s all about building the fan base, and keeping Swift close to the game as long as possible—with a future [Super Bowl] halftime show in the cards.”

Usher is scheduled to headline the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show in Las Vegas, and Dorfman pointed out that Swift is scheduled to give a concert the night before, on Feb. 10, in Tokyo, “but maybe Swift drops in for a surprise duet?”

He added that “it’s more likely [Swift] headlines in 2025 or ‘26.”

John Kosner, a veteran of sports media, said he thinks the NFL is targeting Swift for the Super Bowl halftime show in 2026.

“This is where we are today: the NFL is uniquely powerful; Taylor Swift is uniquely powerful,” he said. “Everyone is advantaging themselves. Ultimately Taylor will do the NFL halftime show but only when she is ready. I’ve circled Super Bowl LX in San Francisco in 2026.

“Since Apple Music is now the halftime sponsor, not Pepsi, there is not a (Pepsi/Diet Coke) advertising conflict precluding this from happening. Getting the networks to run a free promo is not unheard of and not necessarily that big a deal (the NFL probably makes the point that Taylor is drawing new attention from female fans and that is good for everyone). I disagree with others who pooh pooh her impact; I think Taylor does make a ratings difference.”

Swift has attended the last two Chiefs games while supporting her beau Kelce, the first one in Kansas City where he scored a touchdown in a 41-10 blowout of the Bears, and the second in Sunday night’s 23-20 win over the Jets at Met Life Stadium.

The romance between the world’s biggest pop star and the NFL’s best tight end has been the story of the league this season — and possibly the biggest story in sports.

Her attendance at the games has also driven interest in the NFL.

Sunday’s game was the most watched Sunday show since the Super Bowl—in part thanks to the 53% increase in viewership among girls 12 to 17—and after the September 24 game she attended in Kansas City, Kelce’s jersey sales increased 400% as Swifties began to support him.

According to a Morning Consult survey from earlier this year, more than half of U.S. adults say they’re Taylor Swift fans. Some 53% of U.S. adults said they were fans of Swift, and 16% identified themselves as “avid” fans of the star.

Still, the backlash has also been evident.

As my Forbes colleague Molly Bohanon pointed out, “Giants fans booed a Taylor Swift ad that came on in the stadium before Monday night’s game, and some on social media have said the focus on Swift is ‘already getting ridiculous’ after NBC cut to her suite after the Chief’s first touchdown Sunday.”

Meantime, in his podcast Wednesday, Kelce said he thinks the NFL is “overdoing it a little bit” in it terms of its coverage of Swift, but he gave the league the benefit of the doubt, adding, “I think they’re just trying to have fun with it.”

The Chiefs next game is Sunday against the Vikings in Minnesota on CBS, and all eyes will be on a) whether Swift attends; and b) whether CBS runs any promo ads for her film.

The Philadelphia Eagles play the Chiefs Nov. 20 in Kansas City and five-time Pro Bowler Darius Slay of the Eagles has already chimed in, saying he doesn’t want Swift at the game.

“She might not miss a game this year,” he said on the “Big Game Slay” podcast. “And it looks like they’re 2-0 with her. If we play her... Taylor, do not come to the game.

“Do. Not. Come. To. The. Game,” he repeated. “Cause you seem to bring the energy of winning. So, do not come to that game.”

John Kosner Spoke with Meg Linehan of The Athletic About the NWSL’s Media Negotiations

Original Article: The Athletic, by Meg Linehan, October 3rd, 2023

NWSL seeking new media rights deal: What the league should expect

The NWSL is at a crossroads. The league’s three-year media rights deal with CBS wraps up at the end of the year, and commissioner Jessica Berman expects a new deal to be in place by the end of 2023 season.

The stakes of that next deal are significant. Get it right, and the league gets a cash influx, greater connection with fans, and a resulting boost in team valuations and expansion fees. Get it wrong, and not only could games be more inaccessible than they are now, but the NWSL will continue to lag behind other leagues in building a solid financial foundation.

There are lots of questions to address. What’s a fair valuation for the NWSL to expect, especially when we’ve seen MLS and U.S. Soccer command large fees? Should the league prioritize the financials over exposure, or the other way around? What’s the long-term play here?

With the clock winding down on the league’s self-imposed deadline, here’s what we know so far about the decisions the NWSL and its board of governors will have to make in selecting the right media partner (or partners), and what the league’s history of media deals and the overall landscape could indicate.

What we know

Potential rightsholders 

CBS, the NWSL’s current English-language partner in the U.S., had an exclusive negotiation period with the league that ended in January, according to NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman. The NWSL has not shared any other rights-holders they may be engaged with.

A deal by the end of the season

Earlier this month Berman said the goal was to “be in a position to finalize our media deal in conjunction with the playoffs and the conclusion of our season.” The hope is that viewership numbers spike again for the NWSL Championship — maybe cracking one million for the first time — which would be the league’s best shot to advertise how to watch next season’s games.

Endeavor is involved 

Berman and the NWSL front office are working with Endeavor (and subsidiary IMG), which distributes the league’s global media rights. Endeavor is a major player in the sports world —  the company has partnerships with the NFL and NHL, owns the professional bullriding league and is the majority owner of WWE and UFC under TKO Group Holdings.

Endeavor also signed a deal earlier this year to become the NWSL’s data and streaming provider, which includes running the streaming platform for the league’s international viewers on the NWSL website.

Media industry issues impacting talks

Before the Challenge Cup final, Berman answered a question about how the current state of the media industry could impact the deal

“It is a tough time for the media industry, it’s extremely fragmented, and there’s cost-cutting measures happening in almost every media property,” Berman said. “That being said, although that dynamic exists and we’re certainly aware of it, we feel really proud of how far we’ve come in the negotiations and we expect to have a great deal that isn’t really inhibited by those external factors.”

Players could benefit 

The league’s collective bargaining agreement with the NWSL Players Association says that, if the league becomes profitable for the final three years of the CBA’s term, 10% of any media rights deals will go to player compensation (detailed more thoroughly in section 8.13). That’s a big “if” right now, but it remains a solid win for the PA from a long-term perspective.

Current numbers

The league has shared some viewership metrics updates throughout the year with the public, but they don’t reveal anything about the actual quantity of regular viewership. The latest one of these came in June, stating that “regular season viewers on CBS have increased 21 percent, total unique viewers on Paramount+ has increased more than 50 percent.”

Without the full context, it’s hard to know if this will be enough to truly vault the NWSL into a more financially lucrative media rights deal moving forward.

What the NWSL should expect

There’s no true standard for a men’s or women’s sports media rights deal — each is structured differently. The split between linear and streaming broadcasts, which entity covers production costs, editorial support, ad sales…all these and more are up for negotiation.

John Kosner, president of Kosner Media, and Ed Desser, president of Desser Media, are two industry veterans — both worked on the review of the NCAA’s media and sponsorship rights as part of the overall gender equity review of women’s college basketball. They spoke with The Athletic about what, in their view, the NWSL can expect from its next deal.

“You have to be a property that can generate, on average, a million people watching a broadcast if you want to be a true rights-fee sport,” Kosner said. “The traditional big-time deal that everybody wants would be a rights fee, with the (media) entity paying for production. For a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the NWSL, there are fewer and fewer of those to go around now.”

Right now, he said, there’s likely no network that considers the NWSL a “need to have,” but closer to a “nice to have,” and that’s entirely related to its audience size.

There is the reality, too, of a media ecosystem that has historically undervalued women’s sports.

“This traditional model relies on spreadsheets, and there’s circular logic in these spreadsheets right now,” said Colie Edison, the WNBA’s chief growth officer. She presented a hypothetical: a potential TV partner says they won’t give a women’s sports league broadcast windows because the league lacks advertisers. The advertisers won’t partner with the league without broadcast windows. Buyers tell the league that without the advertisers, they don’t get the windows. The cycle can be hard to escape (the good news here for the NWSL is that Ally has been a brand partner willing to step in on the league’s behalf with networks).

“We have to break the mold and introduce a new way to value women’s sports,” Edison continued. “That means pulling on levers around non-traditional aspects, such as who our audiences are, the diversity of our women who are playing, the strong stances they take on social justice, the community activism within our diverse audience spaces. That’s just a little bit of how we need to flip this narrative.”

In addition to the potential path the WNBA offers, there’s another sports property that could offer the NWSL a growth model according to Kosner: Formula 1.

When Liberty Media purchased F1 in 2017, the sport wasn’t pulling in a ton of U.S. viewers on a regular basis, and ESPN showed races without a traditional rights fee in their deal in 2018. However, Liberty was able to leverage the success of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series to increase viewership. When ESPN re-upped last year, they signed a three-year term that is worth $75-90 million annually.

F1 and the NWSL aren’t a one-to-one comparison by any stretch, but there is certainly a lesson there — namely, that building an audience in creative ways might mean a bigger payday the next time the NWSL shops around.

“I would argue that the dollar number is less important,” Desser said. “I mean, it’s easy for me to say that getting money isn’t important to your business — of course it is.”

For Desser though, the NWSL is still in its infancy, and just putting games on TV doesn’t guarantee viewers.

“It’s a multi-pronged effort,” he said. “Just getting the shelf space alone doesn’t get it done.”

The history of NWSL media rights deals

The NWSL’s current $4.5 million deal with CBS was signed ahead of the pandemic (and extended an extra year after COVID-19 upended the season). The league has lost money on this deal because it bears the costs of production for matches.

The league simultaneously signed an agreement with Twitch for their international rights, though that deal ended as originally scheduled following the 2022 season. Both deals were negotiated with the help of sports marketing behemoth Octagon, via a partnership agreement that included media rights consulting and marketing strategy before the league started working with Endeavor.

The CBS deal calls for six games to air on the main linear channel, including the Challenge Cup final and the championship game in primetime. CBS Sports Network airs another 23, including the playoffs, but CBSSN isn’t Nielsen-rated. By 2019, it was available in about 50 million households, but that number has likely decreased since then following a greater trend of cord-cutting. The rest of the matches are on the CBS-owned Paramount+ streaming service, though some also air on CBS’s Golazo network, which is free to watch online.

With the conclusion of the Twitch deal, the league put together some smaller deals with Tigo Sports for free-to-watch Spanish language broadcasts, TSN for distribution of the league in Canada, and DAZN for “non-exclusive broadcasting rights” for some international markets including the UK, Brazil and Spain. In 2023, Endeavor has run free streams for international viewers on the league’s website.

History will likely judge the Twitch partnership to be a bust, especially when the platform stopped promoting the league on its homepage.

CBS has had its pros and cons, but overall has felt underwhelming. If not for league sponsor Ally stepping in to force the issue, the NWSL never would have swung a primetime slot for the Championship. CBS has collected plenty of soccer rights, and they have built out some programming around the league (such as Attacking Third), but the NWSL has never been its marquee property by any stretch.

Before CBS, the NWSL had only managed a short-term deal with ESPN for the back half of its 2019 season. The league needed that short-term deal after ending its partnership with A+E, which included an equity stake, a year early (disclosure: I worked for A&E and the NWSL’s joint media venture during this partnership).

Before that partnership, which ran from 2017 to 2019, the NWSL had one-year agreements since the inaugural season of the league in 2013, either with FOX Sports or ESPN.

The sports landscape

The MLS deal with Apple is huge ($2.5 billion, for 10 years), but it should not set expectations for the NWSL.

“It gave (MLS) an opportunity to leapfrog on revenues,” Desser said. “But they had to trade off exposure in the process.” Both experts said the NWSL still has to do the opposite in the interest of its long-term trajectory.

The NWSL could look to the WNBA as a benchmark, though Desser notes that “it’s been a long, hard road” for that league. Only after over 25 years has it reached a level where it’s “accepted in the pantheon of significant properties,” as Desser said.

Earlier this year, the WNBA signed a multi-year deal to air games on Ion Network for $13 million a year. Ratings have been up for the WNBA across the ESPN/ABC platforms, but Ion Network allows the league to build appointment viewership with its fans — and it will help the WNBA be in a stronger position to negotiate with ESPN when their current deal ends after the 2025 season.

“We understand that cable models are breaking down from declining subscribers,” Edison said about the Ion deal. “We took a bold move to go back to an over-the-air model with Ion. We’re in over 110 million homes on the fifth-largest network in the country. We’re seeing those numbers in viewership prove the point that you must reach your audience and your fans where they are.”

There are other women’s sports properties currently looking to upgrade or start their media rights deals, too, from the LPGA to the PWHL, the new women’s hockey league. Across the board though, the theme is that women’s sports viewers can be left frustrated by cost-cutting measures.

And above all of this? The NFL still rules all.

“Budgets are shrinking,” Desser said. “You’re trying to get a bigger drink of water out of a slowing flow. This is the reality, and this is at a time when the NFL just got a 40% raise. So talk about taking the water out of the pond.”

The NWSL will have to earn it

Viewership of women’s sports is on the rise across the board. According to Nielsen, the demand is there — the larger challenges are still access and lack of information. “To satisfy this demand, broadcasters need to prioritize women’s sports, make them more discoverable and promote them enthusiastically,” a 2023 report concludes.

“People look at the growth of women’s soccer, the excitement about the World Cup, and say, ‘Okay, it’s just gonna happen now for us.’ Our experience is that’s not the case,” Kosner said. “It doesn’t mean that it can’t be built, that it can’t be successful, but there’s a ton of hard work to do.”

That 915,000 viewer mark for last year’s Championship — up against the World Series and college football, to boot — is a strong data point for the NWSL, but it’s only a single data point. The NWSL does have to make some sort of financial jump in their rights fee, while hopefully keeping the term fairly short so they can go back out to the marketplace again in the next few years with an even stronger audience.

The NWSL is going to have to break through existing biases around women’s sports to show potential partners that there is a waiting, untapped market to watch the NWSL — and that they can be a part of growing that audience.

John Kosner Spoke with Ben Strauss of the Washington Post About Bringing Adrian Wojnarowski Back to ESPN in 2017

Original Article: The Washington Post, by Ben Strauss, October 2nd, 2023

A couple of years ago, an NBA reporter had a scoop. It wasn’t anything major, just a roster-filling free agent signing, but for someone covering an NBA team, it was important news for his outlet, the Athletic, to break. So the reporter did what reporters do: He asked an agent to confirm the scoop.

A few minutes later, Adrian Wojnarowski — or Woj, as ESPN’s star NBA reporter is known — tweeted the news. Puzzled, the reporter asked his colleague, Shams Charania, what he thought.

Charania, known by his first name, is the Athletic’s answer to Woj, tasked with breaking every NBA transaction. And Shams had a hunch what happened: The agent gave the news to Woj after the reporter asked for confirmation.

“Confirming news with certain people is the same as texting it straight to Woj,” Shams explained, according to the reporter.

Like many of the journalists who spoke to The Washington Post for this story, the Athletic reporter spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing the professional repercussions that lurk in a business so dominated by two men. When they do talk, journalists and NBA officials are unequivocal that the scoop wars of the modern NBA are controlled by Woj, a 54-year-old newspaper veteran from Connecticut, and his former protégé, Shams, 29, who launched his career from his parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs.

Their dynamic has become a fascination of the league, with fans lining up to cheer them on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and to keep score of their performances on the internet and even in NBA locker rooms. Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers? Woj. Rudy Gobert has covid? Shams. Kevin Durant to the Warriors? Woj again. Both boast millions of X followers (6 million for Woj, 2 million for Shams). Both are recognized by every NBA fan with an X account.

They so own NBA news that one former league executive told The Post that they are the only NBA reporters who matter. A former Athletic executive said it might not even be worth having an NBA vertical without Shams. Shams has starred in an AT&T commercial, and Woj has been a T-Mobile pitchman. The suggestion is that they are always connected.

It doesn’t hurt that each is known by a single-syllable mononym, nor that Woj was once a mentor to Shams, hiring him for his first big job. Now, multiple NBA reporters and officials describe their relationship as something akin to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the tension between them spilling across their respective galaxies. One editor said the Athletic doesn’t want Woj tweets dropped into company Slack channels because Shams doesn’t like to see them; ESPN reporters, in turn, are discouraged from tweeting Athletic stories or inviting Athletic guests onto their podcasts. Neither reporter acknowledges the other publicly.

“It’s the only real rivalry left in the NBA,” NBA reporter Frank Isola said. “Everyone else likes each other.”

It would be naive to think of Woj vs. Shams as a petty feud. The NBA has billed itself as the league of the future, digitally savvy and popular with younger fans. More than any sport’s, its popularity is fueled by player movement — who’s getting drafted, who’s signing where, who’s demanding a trade. Being first to that news keeps fans’ attention on your platform, which is what makes the stakes so high for Woj, Shams and their respective employers. Woj has a five-year contract worth around $7 million per year, the New York Post reported, while Shams’s pay is approaching $2 million from salaries at the Athletic and TV network Stadium, according to multiple people familiar with the terms.

With those stakes has come controversy. Last year, the New York Times purchased the Athletic, making Shams one of the most famous (and highest-paid) reporters at the company. The Times allowed him to do work for a sportsbook, FanDuel, which irked rank-and-file Times staffers. People in the NBA, meanwhile, have wondered if Woj helps his sources almost as much as he breaks news.

Still, as important as Woj and Shams have become, a kind of omerta permeates their world. Both turned down repeated interview requests, as did their representatives and many of the agents, officials and reporters who work with them. Approached in the lobby of a hotel in Las Vegas during the NBA Summer League, one agent was asked about the two reporters. “Snitches get stitches,” he replied. He was probably kidding, but he wasn’t laughing, and he definitely didn’t talk.

Becoming ‘Woj’

Woj grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Bristol, Conn., near where the ESPN campus sprouted up in 1979, when Woj was 10. He was a die-hard Celtics and Red Sox fan and played baseball in high school, but he was always a basketball junkie, known in pickup games for his scrappy play and passable jump shot.

His first big scoop came during his sophomore year at St. Bonaventure. He learned the new coach of the basketball team, but with the school’s newspaper only publishing weekly, he was worried about losing the scoop. Along with classmate Mike Vaccaro, now a sports columnist at the New York Post, he placed the story with a local TV station.

After college, Woj covered Connecticut basketball before he was hired as a columnist in Fresno, Calif., and then at the Bergen Record in New Jersey, where he was twice named columnist of the year by the Associated Press Sports Editors.

In 2008, Woj landed at Yahoo, where he became the most-read NBA columnist in the country. Twitter revolutionized reporting around that time. Suddenly every NBA reporter could break any news instantly, and Woj leaned in. To friends, it was a testament to his doggedness. “He talked to the third assistant coach on the bench when no one thought to do that,” Vaccaro said. He once told a journalism class that the secret to breaking news was talking to a source as much as possible without asking for news.

As he rose, though, critics derided Woj’s willingness to write scathingly about sources who seemed not to cooperate (such as LeBron James). The New Republic reported in 2014 that the NBA once fined former Pistons executive Joe Dumars $500,000 for leaking league documents to Woj. Dumars was the subject of several flattering stories.

In 2011, Woj reached a new level of fame when he tweeted teams’ draft picks ahead of their announcement on ESPN, deflating the draft’s drama and embarrassing the NBA and its media partner. It showed the power of Twitter and was, in many ways, a glimpse of the future of sports media.

The protégé

Shams, who is Pakistani American, grew up in the north Chicago suburbs, his rise a digital-era sprint that bore no resemblance to Woj’s newspaper days. He was cut from his high school basketball team but, still obsessed with the game, reached out to a local website looking to do some basketball writing. “I remember asking if he had permission from his parents,” his editor once recalled.

Shams parlayed that into a gig at a national website, RealGM, but the Bulls wouldn’t credential a teenager, so he drove to Milwaukee for games. He once tailed the Bucks’ Brandon Jennings to the players’ parking lot to ask him about his impending free agency.

In his earliest days, Shams broke news about G League contracts or 10-day deals with smaller-name players — stories so small that other reporters weren’t interested. “Who freaking cares about breaking a two-way contract?” asked David Falk, a longtime NBA agent. “But it’s a great way to curry favor with an agent.”

He tweeted his stories at Woj and complimented his columns, too. His big break came in 2014 when he was in college at Loyola Chicago and broke the news that the Bulls had traded star Luol Deng. Woj noticed. “Big-time story break by the best young reporter in business,” he tweeted.

The next year, Woj pitched media companies about launching his own basketball vertical, with Shams as part of the team. “Shams was openly acknowledged as his apostle, and Woj didn’t discourage that,” said someone who was pitched by Woj. “He encouraged you to think of him that way.”

When Yahoo launched the vertical, Shams was a key hire — while he was a junior in college.

According to people familiar with their relationship, Woj introduced Shams to executives and agents. But the partnership wasn’t always smooth. One point of contention was a Complex magazine profile of Shams that featured a splashy photo spread, a star turn that Woj thought was distracting from the work, according to people who were told about the incident.

In 2017, ESPN hired Woj. According to John Kosner, the ESPN executive who led the move, the offer was to bring his entire team, including Shams. Several members of Woj’s team joined him at ESPN, but Shams, who was under contract, wanted to stay. He and Woj were officially competitors.

The home of ‘Woj bombs’

In the summer of 2015, Falk, who made his name (and fortune) repping Michael Jordan, had a client hit free agency. Several teams were in the running, but the player, Greg Monroe, ultimately chose Milwaukee. When Falk called then-Bucks owner Marc Lasry to tell him the good news, he asked him to keep it quiet until he relayed it to the other teams.

Before the phone call was over, Woj had tweeted the news. “I was livid,” Falk said.

Falk wasn’t the only one to notice Woj’s influence. Ken Berger, a former NBA reporter for Newsday and CBS Sports, said that around that time he reached out to Phoenix General Manager Ryan McDonough to confirm some news. Within minutes, Woj had tweeted it. Only after Woj’s tweet did McDonough text back to confirm, which convinced Berger that McDonough had tipped off Woj with his scoop.

“I couldn’t break news that I had,” Berger said. “I thought I could compete on hard work and relationships, but I was wrong.”

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McDonough did not respond to a message seeking comment. Berger left the business and now works as a health and wellness coach.

Some viewed this dominance as the culmination of years of source building and work ethic. Woj, who takes red-eyes at every opportunity to avoid missing news, had been cultivating assistant coaches and front-office staffers as sources for decades. Now they were getting promoted to bigger jobs. Those relationship skills didn’t only apply to sources, his friends say: Just like he built up Shams, he helped Malika Andrews climb the ranks from a college reporter to an ESPN star.

Others saw success fueled by Woj framing stories in ways that are plainly helpful to sources. He is a pioneer of shouting out agents and agencies when a player signs. When Kevin Durant re-signed with the Nets, Woj encouraged his followers to “read more” at Durant’s own website.

When he broke the news that former Celtics coach Ime Udoka was facing a suspension for violating “unspecified” team guidelines, his initial report noted that Udoka had just led the team to the NBA Finals. Not long afterward, Shams reported that Udoka was accused of an improper relationship with a co-worker, though he called it consensual before reporting that Udoka also made unwanted comments. (Woj later broke the news that Udoka sent crude text messages to the woman.)

Woj’s relationship with front-office veteran Neil Olshey was one of those Woj carefully cultivated, after they met two decades ago at a high school basketball tournament. Olshey eventually became the GM in Portland, where he told beat reporters that he gave his news to Woj because the beat reporters “couldn’t help him,” according to two people familiar with the remarks. Over the years, Woj has given Olshey the benefit of the doubt in his coverage, which has been noted by former Blazers star Damian Lillard, too. (Olshey declined to comment.)

However the scoops come, people around the league said a report by Woj carries more weight than one by anyone else, including Shams.

Shams left Yahoo for the Athletic and Stadium in 2018 and joined FanDuel last year. He, too, has built his life around the job, avoiding dates to focus on scoops. Around the league, he is legendary for his fire-hose approach to texting: dozens of texts at a time to get a single piece of news or just to keep in touch with sources. One Shams source said he reaches out whenever the source’s favorite team is winning games. “I once got a birthday text from Shams out of the blue,” said a person who worked in an NBA front office. “I have no idea how he knew my birthday.”

Woj is often described as a mafia don around the league, while Shams is more of a golden retriever. Partly because Woj can be so polarizing, there is an opening for Shams. “If you don’t like Woj, you talk to Shams,” a former ESPN editor said.

Shams is more likely to induce eye rolls from other reporters around the league for some of his reports. He recently tweeted that the Suns and their “driven, dynamic ownership” were “solely focused on a championship” after firing their coach. And while Woj is viewed as closer to coaches and general managers (he talks to players, too), Shams has cultivated relationships with players such as Kyrie Irving and James Harden and is making inroads with a younger crop of owners, including Alex Rodriguez.

In cultivating that access, Shams, too, has been accused of favoring his relationships to get news: Athletic staffers complained to editors about a Shams story on Irving’s decision not to receive a coronavirus vaccination, in which he wrote that Irving, according to anonymous people in the piece, wanted to be a “voice for the voiceless.”

People in the NBA say both reporters badger them to give them news, even five seconds ahead of their rival. But while there is plenty of tittering when Woj or Shams tweets news eight seconds ahead of the other, league stakeholders are really strategizing.

Agents and front offices talk about which reporter to feed news to or how they might keep news from getting out. Front offices have shrunk the number of people privy to information to keep Woj or Shams from reporting it, executives said. One former GM said he once had his IT team check an employee’s emails to see if he had been leaking and found he had been emailing Woj the team’s internal business.

Mostly, though, league officials have accepted the dynamic and tried to leverage it. Multiple people involved in NBA business marveled at how quickly news spreads when Woj or Shams breaks it, saying there is no better way to get a narrative out than to seed it with Woj or Shams. Ethan Strauss, a former NBA reporter for ESPN who now writes a newsletter on Substack, reported that Woj has sent around a document highlighting his reach on social media compared to rivals such as Shams.

Woj and Shams are also useful to front-office members trying to circumvent the league’s tampering rules, according to two former executives. One said he had signaled his team’s interest in a player by telling Shams, knowing he would deliver the message to a team or an agent. The reporters also know what every team and agent is up to, as well as which teams might soon have job openings, making them valuable sources themselves. Owners, one agent said, ask Woj for hiring recommendations on coaches and general managers. “You can’t have them mad at you because then you don’t have access to their information,” a former executive said.

“These aren’t one-sided relationships,” said Dan Marks, who spent nearly a decade in the Milwaukee front office. “The reporters get scoops; they get traffic. On the flip side, you get insight into job opportunities or favorable coverage. There are GMs who get fired where you look at it and Woj will say it’s mutual. But he’s saying mutually parted ways because it seems better for that person.”

Or, as Falk put it: “Woj built a network of moles. It’s a group of people who have decided they have more loyalty to Woj than to the teams they work for.”

Worldwide leader in scoops

ESPN has built its coverage of the country’s biggest sports around three breaking news reporters: Woj, Adam Schefter (NFL) and Jeff Passan (MLB). It’s evidenced by the salaries they receive — Schefter makes $9 million per year, according to the New York Post — that they have become the most important people in the newsroom. Even if they break news on X, executives can program a day’s worth of news and still drive digital traffic with their scoops. Clearly, fans are interested, too.

“I think you have to believe that your brand matters — that Woj’s association with ESPN gives it more importance and gravitas and that he brings people back to the platform when he breaks news,” a former ESPN executive said. “That he’s creating more engaged sports fans, and the more you’re engaged in sports, the more you’re going to consume ESPN.”

Building coverage around Woj’s scoops has led to tension. Multiple former and current people involved with ESPN’s NBA coverage said reporters feel they should avoid stories that could be unfavorable to a Woj source, and colleagues said they have the impression that they shouldn’t tweet negative things about teams because it doesn’t help Woj break news. The idea, multiple people echoed, is you should be extremely careful with the pipeline of news.

Tim MacMahon, a longtime ESPN NBA reporter, said he had never been waved off a subject and that Woj often helped him confirm stories. “He’s an intense dude,” MacMahon said. “To do that job you have to be wired a certain way. I don’t know when he sleeps.”

Shams and the Athletic are playing a different version of the same game. It launched in 2016 with a simple model: hire sportswriters with big Twitter followings to drive awareness and, in turn, subscriptions. Shams was like a digital billboard and among its most important hires.

Under the Times, the Athletic has sought to replicate ESPN’s insider model. David Perpich, the Athletic’s publisher, told The Post last year that he had expected coverage of big events such as the Super Bowl to be popular but that it was outpaced by free agency and trade interest. A former Times sports editor, Jason Stallman, said he was “dazzled” by Shams’s work. And since the Athletic’s new editor in chief, Steven Ginsberg, took over this year, he has stressed to staff the importance of breaking more news, multiple Athletic staffers said.

The Athletic re-signed Shams last year and is paying him between $600,000 and $700,000, according to two people familiar with the terms. The Athletic also recently hired Dianna Russini away from ESPN to be its NFL insider, and she is paid more than Shams, according to multiple people familiar with the terms. (Shams’s representatives contacted ESPN during contract negotiations to gauge interest, though no substantive talks took place, according to a person with knowledge of the outreach.)

Last year, gambling company FanDuel hired Shams to be a paid contributor on its TV network, marking a new frontier for insider reporters. Ahead of the NBA draft this year, Charania tweeted that a player was gaining steam to be drafted second, causing betting lines to swing wildly. The player wasn’t selected second, and FanDuel bettors wagering on Charania’s info lost.

That apparent conflict of interest was troubling enough in the Times newsroom that a staffer raised the issue in an all-staff Slack channel after The Washington Post covered it. “I was pretty surprised to see a NYT spokesman defending a sports reporter for The Athletic who also takes money from a sports gambling website while reporting on sports,” read the Slack note, which was shared with The Post. “That tangled relationship could cause all sorts of ethical problems…but what was also odd to me was that the NYT was then in a position where it was defending behavior that it would almost surely condemn if the perpetrator was an NYT Sports reporter.”

In response, Perpich wrote the Athletic shares core values and standards with the Times, stands behind Shams’s work and is continuing to evaluate guidelines for outside work.

The larger point, NBA reporters and officials said, is that Woj and Shams, and their perceived value to fans, media executives and the league, have changed NBA journalism. Woj was once a must-read columnist, but much of his coverage now is news. There is a belief that everything Woj and Shams do now is in service of the next scoop, and they have become so good at it that beat writers, who used to battle for news, have mostly given up chasing it.

Woj and Shams are less journalists in the traditional sense than they are part of the league’s whirring machinery, both publicly and privately. Woj is represented by Creative Artists Agency, which also represents a whole roster of players, coaches and general managers. Shams is repped by the Montag Group, part of the Wasserman agency, which represents players, coaches and GMs, too.

“The role of the media is to police the powerful,” said former ESPN NBA editor Henry Abbott, who launched a new media company, TrueHoop. “They have to kiss the a — of the powerful: ‘Please text me first when you’re making a trade.’ You’re begging for scraps. They confine their insight into the league to these transactions, which are the cotton candy of news. We miss the doping and the money laundering and everything else that’s happening in the NBA.”

Abbott believes the league holds fewer news conferences and talks to fewer reporters because it can give everything it wants to Woj or Shams.

Isola, the veteran NBA reporter, said that the problem was more on the rest of the NBA press corps, which could be digging more into controversial stories such as Ja Morant’s concerning behavior and Udoka’s firing. “It’s a personal thing and not an easy story,” he said. “But it’s there.”

Last week, Shams tweeted breaking news that Damian Lillard was traded to Toronto. But he was wrong. Lillard was actually traded to the Bucks, which Woj gleefully reported. Inside ESPN, colleagues and executives viewed it as a perfect example of Woj’s value, making ESPN the authority on the biggest story of the day.

Shams deleted his tweet. It was a blip, to be sure, but within a few hours he had tweeted a link to a new story that he co-wrote: “How the Damian Lillard-Bucks blockbuster came together.” And then, no doubt, he went looking for his next scoop.

John Kosner Spoke with Mike McCarthy of Front Office Sports About The NBA’s New Policies for National TV Games

Original Article: Front Office Sports, by Mike McCarthy, September 14th, 2023

The NBA will tip off multi-billion dollar media rights negotiations to determine who controls its rights into the 2030s and beyond.

Right on cue, the league has adopted harsher penalties for teams that rest otherwise healthy players during nationally televised games and in-season tournaments.

Under the more stringent rules, the NBA’s 30 teams can be fined over $1 million for resting “star” players who’ve been an All-Star or All-NBA in the past three seasons. 

If a team boasts two “star players,” like the Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, they’re not allowed to rest both during a game unless they’re injured. 

Is the NBA’s timing a coincidence? Hell no.

Like any league, the NBA wants to put its best foot forward during media rights negotiations. 

The league will seek $50 billion to $75 billion for its next long-term cycle of media rights deals. There’s a lot at stake with deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video slobbering for a streaming package from the NBA.

Fortunately, this is one of those times when the interests of the league, its TV networks, and its fans coincide.

The No. 1 beef of Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports’ TNT (never expressed too loudly) are NBA teams resting healthy superstars during their national telecasts. Once a rarity, it’s happening more often in recent seasons. 

You can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth at their respective headquarters in Bristol and Atlanta when a healthy LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Kawhi Leonard skips their broadcasts due to, say it with me, “load management.” 

You can’t blame the league’s TV partners. They’re paying $2.6 billion annually for NBA media rights through the 2024-2025 season. The NBA is a star-driven league. Attracting big audiences without putting your biggest stars on the floor is hard.

Similarly, I’ve been told that the No. 1 complaint of fans is shelling out a small fortune for game tickets only to be denied watching the players they want to watch.

The average cost for a family of four to attend an NBA game during the 2021-22 season was $444.12, according to Team Marketing Report. But you can double that for teams like the New York Knicks in the most expensive markets.

Consider teams like the dynastic Golden State Warriors, who fans want to watch around the country. 

During one stretch last season, the club’s three stars — Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green — all played in a home loss to the Indiana Pacers on Dec. 5. But two nights later, the trio were rested for a road loss to the Utah Jazz, according to ESPN. 

Yes, the Warriors’ Big 3 are getting older and need more rest. But just imagine how many ticket-buying Dads at the game that night had to explain to Little Johnny why they couldn’t watch Steph Curry shoot the 3 from downtown.

The rules will impact 25 of 30 NBA teams and 50 players.

John Kosner, the former ESPN executive turned media consultant, applauds the league for taking the bull by the horns.  

“Raising interest in nationally-televised regular season matchups is frequently about which star players are going to play. The NFL and, to a far lesser extent, college football generate playoff-level ratings during their regular season. They’re the only ones,” said Kosner, who worked closely with late NBA Commissioner David Stern. 

“The more the NBA can bridge the gap between audience levels for regular season games versus playoff games (nationally televised), the more value it creates. So, of course, that’s important to the NBA, its broadcast partners, and advertisers and matters for the League’s next media deals.”

As usual, TNT’s Charles Barkley has his finger on the pulse of the NBA. 

The trend of players sitting out due to alleged load management is “disrespectful” to fans and the game, he warned.

“It’s a huge issue,” Barkley told ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. “I love (NBA Commissioner Adam Silver). But I think he went overboard trying to take care of the players.”

To his credit, Silver admitted things have gotten out of hand. The NBA must return to the “principle” that it’s an 82-game league.

“I think we’ll state this principle, see how teams react, and see if more needs to be done,” said Silver. “But I think, most importantly, there’s a sense from all the different constituent groups in the league that this is ultimately about the fans and that we’ve taken this too far.”

Players have sidestepped rule changes before. So the jury’s still out on whether the fines will have the desired impact, said Kosner. 

But it’s smart business for the NBA to course-correct – and put its best product on the floor during the regular season. The fewer healthy stars fans and viewers see on the bench in street clothes, the better off the NBA will be.