Who wants a college sports TV network? Who doesn’t?
Sure it was obvious, but I applaud the decision by whoever organized the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum to pipe The Cars “Shake It Up” through the loudspeakers of a bland room in New York’s Marriott Marquis as the conference wrapped up.
College sports — and here I’m the one being obvious — are going through a serious transition. Conferences are realigning, TV deals are being struck, and feelings are getting hurt.
“This has been a painful, stinging two years,” said Chris Plonsky, Women’s Athletic Director at University of Texas, which this year launched its own regional sports network, The Longhorn Network. The battling “belongs on the field”, she said. “When it comes to business, let’s play nicely in the sandbox.”
Easier said than done, given the big money at stake. Check out these estimates from IMG: College sports have 173 million fans; 79 million of them are female and 29 million of them earn at least $100,000 a year. Those are the kind of numbers that make a TV executive’s head spin.
Sharing the stage with UT’s Plonsky were NBC Sports President Jon Litner, University of Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, and Chris Bevilacqua, a well-known dealmaker who helped put together the Pac-12 TV network. It was no surprise, then, that Swarbrick was asked about Notre Dame’s own plans for a TV network. (At the moment, Notre Dame, with its huge following, has a long-term deal with NBC reportedly worth around $9 million year).
“The Longhorn Network does not have a bigger fan than me,” said Swarbrick. “But it’s not a model that works for Notre Dame.” The problem, he said, was geography. The Longhorn Network can reach a concentration of fans in the school’s home state (which happens to the market size of some European countries).
“We don’t have that. What I have is interest everywhere, so we need to take another approach.”
As Nike sticks by a tarnished Penn St., others flee
The last 10 days have obviously tarnished the Penn State brand, and left advertisers, sponsors, and others closely associated with the university and its football program with some tough questions. Boiled down, it amounts to this: How far should you go to distance yourself from the crisis?
Fallout has already been heavy, so much so that Penn State has hired Ketchum to help the university navigate through the mess. Yet this may be one of those cases — and there are many — when the big PR firm is brought in too late.
“Penn St. has been incredibly tarnished, it’s a huge hit to that brand,” says Paul Pierson, a partner at branding and design firm Carbone Smolan Agency. “Some of the most damaging things to the brand have already done, like the outpouring of support from the Penn State students for Paterno after the firing,” he adds. “That made it look as though the school cared more about football than ethics.”
Now the university is apparently considering removing its stadium’s statue of Paterno, who was head coach of the Nittany Lions football team from 1966-2011. (A columnist for CBSSports.com, @greggdoyelcbs, Tweeted that Penn St. professors have told students that the statue will come down over Thanksgiving). Paterno’s name has already been removed from the Big Ten’s championship trophy. And all traces of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky — the subject of the child abuse accusations — are hurriedly being erased. (The picture at left shows artist Michael Pilato painted over the portion of his mural that showed Sandusky).
Keep in mind Paterno and the football team were once the university’s best marketing tool. Just ask Nike, which has continued to stand by the university and its former coach. It has long been Penn State’s footwear and uniform supplier.
How closely is Nike sticking with the school and its former coach? To the amazement of many, Nike hasn’t indicated any plans to change the name of its Joe Paterno Child Development Center, a daycare facility on its Beaverton, Oregon campus. In a statement, Nike said, “Our relationship with Penn State remains unchanged. We are deeply disturbed by the claims brought forth in the indictments. We will continue to monitor the situation closely. We have no current plans to change the name of our child care center.”
Forbes writer Clare O’Connor ran all this past Prevent Child Abuse America’s CEO James Hmurovich, who said the following: “What allegedly happened at Penn State should outrage our nation, and to find that a national brand will not distance itself from Penn State and Joe Paterno in this situation is equally disturbing.”
Boycott Nike! Shut Down Penn State! The reason Nike won’t shut Penn State out is beyond belief. Still supporting this sickness is despicable.
At CBS Sports, the good times are rolling
Many of us are looking forward to Saturday night’s prime-time match-up between Louisiana State and Alabama, the top two teams in college football. For a few hours, we get to set aside the craziness of conference realignment, forget about our own dismal teams (Boston College, this means you) and watch a good old-fashioned brawl between two storied programs.
But nobody may be as pumped up about Saturday’s game as Les Moonves, the CBS Corp Chief Executive who, it must be said, gets pumped up about a lot of stuff (ask him about NCIS sometime). Who can blame him — CBS Sports is bound to draw a blockbuster audience for the Southeastern Conference showdown.
“This weekend on our air we essentially have this year’s college football championship when number one LSU plays number two Alabama in prime time,” he said yesterday on an earnings conference call. “You don’t have to wait for the BCS in January this year to find out who the best team in the country is.”
He then added, “So our long-term deal with the SEC is paying off now and will continue to do so until 2023. This deal is looking better all the time as the SEC has clearly become the dominant conference in college football.”
It will be interesting to see just what sort of audience the game draws. Brad Adgate, of Horizon Media, told me today that he wouldn’t be surprised if more than 12 million viewers tuned in to CBS. He notes that last month’s game between Alabama and Florida — a good match-up, but hardly as good as Saturday’s — pulled in 8 million viewers for CBS.
“This will be big,” he said.
File under acceptance: CBS knows it must pay up for the NFL
This time of year, it seems everybody loves football. The players, the fans, and, of course, the TV executives. And what’s not to like about football if you’re running a TV network, provided you have a deal with the NFL? Check it out, a total of 107 million viewers tuned into games between Thursday and Sunday on CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC.
So it should come as no surprise that CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves, while speaking at today’s Bank of America conference, said he intended to renew the contract with the NFL when it expires in three years. “No surprise there,” he said. Indeed. The bigger question is what will CBS end up paying? Just last week, ESPN signed a new contract with the NFL at $1.9 billion a year. Repeat: $1.9 billion. That is about 73 percent more than ESPN previously paid the NFL.
As The New York Post’s Claire Atkinson points out in a story today, the ESPN deal has come under some heavy fire, particularly from the pay-TV industry, worried that it’s going to jack up rates.
“ESPN is a different animal,” Moonves said at today’s conference. “It’s really apples and oranges. There are a lot of other things involved than just the games. There’s a lot of content, and ESPN can maximize it. We have three years left on our NFL deal. We intend to keep the NFL, no surprise there. I’m sure there will be an increase — I hope it’s not the increase that they paid.”
Other comments from the always-upbeat Moonves:
- Advertising is fine at CBS. Done worry. There’s no slowdown
- CBS is not about to go crazy on big, blockbuster movies. Keeping it small, keeping it real
- Not joining Hulu was a totally fantastic decision
- Forget all that negative stuff you hear about CNET. “We’re pleased with the way it’s going”
- Political advertising is going to rock, even if the politics are ugly business
- More digital distribution deals — like the Netflix one — could be considered, “but with caution”
- Outdoor — ummm, I’m pretty sure he said something about that
- Publishing is more profitable than a year ago, even with revenue under pressure
When it comes to NFL, TV executives put on brave face
Shrewd? Prescient? Delusional? Tough to know, but top TV executives this week all seemed relatively confident — even off the record — when asked about the chances that NFL games would be played this fall.
The background, of course, is that NFL team owners and players are at odds over salary caps and other issues, raising the possibility of a lockout and the cancellation of some or all of the 2011 football season. Very bad news, if you’re a fan or a network executive.
As Yinka Adegoke and Liana Baker wrote in a piece this spring, “It is difficult to overstate the importance of the NFL to the revenue and profits of broadcasters like CBS Corp, Walt Disney’s ESPN, Comcast Corp’s NBC and News Corp’s Fox.”
Consider this: The broadcast and cable networks that share the NFL rights sell about $3 billion in advertising time for games each season. That’s $3 billion that’s up for grabs.
As TV executives made the rounds this week to introduce their 2011-12 prime-time schedules, they couldn’t escape the 800-pound linebacker in the room. It’s noteworthy that all of them — even if they were privately sweating — put on a brave face. Here’s a taste… “They’re going to play,” said John Skipper, who oversees content for ESPN. “I don’t know when they are going to play, but eventually they will play, and we will show it on Monday nights.”
If you really want brass, check out the what Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt had to say over at NBC, which counts on the NFL for blockbuster ratings every Sunday night. “We’ve obviously pretty close to what’s going on with this situation. We’re feeling pretty optimistic that football will be there. Worst case scenarios is we might have delay of games for a few weeks, in which case we’ve got a contingency plan to produce several high quality live event reality type shows that will fill out Sunday. But we’re feeling pretty good about where we’re going to be with the NFL.”
And Fox? A bit more wishy-washy, but hardly any signs of panic. “I think they’re planning for there to be an NFL season and at the same time working on contingencies if there’s not,” said Fox Networks Entertainment Chairman Peter Rice.
Researchers use Intel chips to build better football helmets
Football players infamously take a serious amount of punishment. Now, Intel is offering up a way to measure the extent of that pootential physical damage.
Intel is currently working with universities and a sports equipment maker to build an intelligent football helmet.
Researchers and helmet-maker Riddell are using clusters of computers powered by Intel chips to rapidly compute the risks and ways that a football player could be injured as he slams into a 220 lb linebacker and other typical head impacts.
And some of that data comes from real-life collisions as players suit up with helmets decked out with instruments to measure the forces involved.
Intel’s Atom processors, which are ubiquitous in PC netbooks, could eventually be embedded in helmets, letting doctors monitor the effect of massive and potentially health-endangering blows suffered by professional football players as they play.
Researchers from Texas State University, Dartmouth, University of Northern Colorado and other schools demonstrated their research at a supercomputing event in New Orleans on Monday.
Football in 3D, coming to a theater near you
The first-ever 3D broadcast of an NFL game was rushed into movie theaters in three U.S. cities last night, kicking off what many hope could be a new way of generating revenue for theater operators.
We attended the event in Los Angeles, where a throng of football fans, reporters and Hollywood executives donned black plastic 3D glasses and crammed into a stadium-style theater for kickoff between the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers.
In an interview the day before the game, Michael Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of 3D system provider RealD 3D, said of the experience: “You feel like you are really on the field in the middle of the action,” and called the event “the dawn of live events at your local theater.”
For us, sitting in the theater, the 3D technology really did make it feel like we were right on the field at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium. Most of the camera angles were field-level, which even in conventional “2D” broadcasts offer viewers a better sense of what it’s like for players than other angles.
The NFL Network cable network showed the same game in the conventional fashion as we saw it in 3D. There were different announcers for our game, because 3D production company 3ality Digital’s cameras followed the action differently as well as presenting it in three dimensions. The camera angles were closer to the action. We were surprised how realistic it was. It was not as if we were on the field with the players, but just like we were on the sideline with the coaches.
The announcers kept quiet for minutes at a time to allow the sounds of the game — players colliding, grunting and at times cursing. That enhanced the “being there” experience.
So what’s the catch? There were a few. First, though the visuals were top-notch for most of the game, there were times when the image, or parts of it, were fuzzy. These instances weren’t a huge distraction, and not long-lasting, but they did make your head hurt a little bit until the cameras cut to a clearer shot.
Hello Per Peterson. Yes yes yes the surfing and snowboarding footage was memorable. The flakes of snow after the snowboarder cut seemed like they were coming right at us. The 3D shots of objects (footballs, snow, surfers) coming right at the camera really brings out the advantages over “2D” video. Football is largely watched by people who either never played or never played beyond high school. I assume people active in a sport would be even more likely to support extra charges if there are any for 3D. There’s a huge audience of snowboarders and surfers who would love this. Also I assume that golf, because there are so many active golfers, will work. Golf for me on TV is boring but my friends who are golfers can watch it for hours and hours. But I digress. YES, way cool footage.
from Summit Notebook:
NFL exec: Most of our players are good guys
The NFL is getting a lot of gruff over the fact that some of its players have been taking the "bad boy" persona a wee bit too far. But the league says that most of its players know that violence belongs on the field; not at home, in bars or, say, crossing state lines.
Eric Grubman, the NFL's top business executive, declined to comment on the incident involving New York Giants receiver Plaxico Burress -- who shot himself this past weekend.
But Grubman told the Reuters Media Summit that most of the league's other players behave themselves.
Bad behavior hurts all of us. The fans don't like it, our sponsors don't like it, and you know what? The players don't like it. The vast majority of players are hard working. We hear about a few players a week, out of 1,600 players, many of them have been out of college a couple of years. To have so few incidents out of the total is really astonishing.
Of course, his "so few" is "so many" to others, particularly bloggers. One site counts the number of days since an NFL player has been arrested. Today, in light of Burress, it's set at Zero.
I don't want to comment on that case, because I don't know what the facts are and I'm not the commissioner, but our policy in regard to firearms and other things are abundantly clear, and every player's responsibility to adhere to those policies. Yeah these things are bad, but I would really emphasize that it's a small minority of players (who get in trouble).
He added that the league avoids any real backlash from sponsors by quickly identifying and taking action against bad behavior.
