In Super Bowl streaming deal, Verizon scores again
What a delightful week this is turning out to be for Verizon. First, archrival AT&T decides it will ditch its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA (as if they weren’t grinning madly in the halls of Verizon’s Art Deco building down on West Street) and then they get a piece of this NBC deal to stream the Super Bowl. No doubt, in the greater scheme of things the AT&T news trumps the streaming deal — but every little thing helps in the crazy competitive telecoms world.
Here’s the upshot: For the first time NFL postseason games — including the Super Bowl — will be streamed live online over NFL.com and NBCSports.com and over mobile devices through an app supplied by Verizon. This is NBC’s deal; Fox tells us they have “no similar plans” while we’re CBS declined to comment on whether they would do a streaming deal..
The advantage for Verizon is clear: It’s just one more differentiator. (Verizon has really been on a roll lately. Beyond the events mentioned above, they swooped in to buy a ton of cable spectrum for $3.6 billion and made headlines with their plans to take on Netflix with a streaming service).
For NBC, the thinking is they can add an online audience to their already huge TV football audience. Joe Football Fan will watch the Super Bowl and all of its $3 million-plus commercials on the big TV screen at the same time he is watching the streaming coverage on his phone or PC, which will include a bunch of extra stuff such as additional camera angles, sideline updates and in-game analysis. In other words, it will be complementary.
At least that’s the plan. And it’s likely to work out just fine for NBC. When it comes to the Super Bowl, football fans crave all the information they can get, and having access to the game on your mobile phone while your sitting in a loud, crowded living room party would, frankly, be helpful.
There is a risk, of course. Perhaps this is just one more step toward cord-cutting, or allowing viewers to watch their favorite shows without the cost of subscribing to a cable distributor. If the NFL — the NFL! — is available in real time online, then can every third-rate sitcom be far behind?
Comcast, which controls NBC, has obviously concluded the risk is very small. They’ve been streaming games on Sunday nights and, as the Associated Press reports, their broadcasts haven’t been hurt.
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.
Super Bowl Monday: The view from armchair copywriters
Ahhh, Super Bowl Monday. The hangovers. The salsa stains on the sofa. The dreams of winning your office betting pool crushed. And the ad reviews. Yes, today is the day when everyone — many with little or no connection to advertising, football or tastemaking — puts out a list of the top Super Bowl commercials. Some are better than others. USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter is probably the best known (and this morning had Bud Light’s Dog Sitter ad ranked tops). But two others that are very good gauges of the winners/losers of the Ad Bowl are TiVo and the Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review.
They take very different approaches to rankings. TiVo ranks the most engaging moments “using aggregated, anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data” while Kellogg goes with the panel approach that asks viewers to grade ads based on “Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplification and Net equity.”
Three ads/brands were ranked highly by both TiVo and Kellogg:
But there were also some glaring differences in the two polls. For instance, the top spot in Tivo went to Snickers, followed by Best Buy and Pepsi Max. Kellogg gave all three of those middle-of-the-road rankings (Snickers and Best Buy each a received B, while Pepsi Max took a C.
The best Superbowl Ad? Easy, all the ones we did not see during Super Bowl 40 when in Australia in 2006. There were none on Aussie Tellie that I recall on the live feed on a Monday afternoon. So we saw the whole game commercial free except for a few brief station breaks. It was marvelous to See all of the nuances that occur on and off the field De Combat.(Steelers 21, Seahawks 10).
Five marketers who better bring it big on Super Bowl Sunday
Call it the Ad Bowl. Or the Buzz Bowl. Or the BS Bowl. Doesn’t matter, it all boils down to this: Sunday’s Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year for advertisers, some of which dished out $3 million for the chance to reach an audience of 100 million consumers for 30 seconds. At that price — $100,000 a second — the stakes are high. A good commercial can be a triumph, creating just the kind of water-cooler talk that propels a brand to a new level with consumers. A bad commercial? Well, those behind it better start dusting off the old resume.
Still, like anything else, the risks are greater for some more than others. So here is our list of… Five Marketers Who Better Bring It Big On Sunday.
1). General Motors. Almost the entire auto industrycould be included in this one, since Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen and Audi are among those who will help the category account for roughly a quarter of all the commercial time during the game. It’s a turnout that reflects the improving fortunes of the U.S. auto industry, which snapped a four-year sales decline in 2010. GM, however, stands out because of the sheer number of ads it bought, five in all, after a two year absence. Can it strike the right tone with consumers? Can it differentiate its lineup? Will it play it safe — flags waving, trucks pulling 100 million tons of load, some catchy tune from an All-American rocker? Or will it try to liven things up, like Audi and Volkswagen have sought to do? (see below)
2). Groupon. Admit it, you were a little taken aback by reports that Google tried to take over Groupon with a $6 billion bid. “You mean that coupon site? $6 billion?” Since then, Groupon has become a big buzz wordin the world of finance and media. And sure, it’s got 50 million users, so it’s not exactly coming out of nowhere. But the Super Bowl is a heckuva big stage. Can Groupon pull off what would be a huge brand building exercise? Can they take a page fromHulu, which aired a very well-received spot two years ago?
3). Motorola Mobility. The company split in two in January, and since then has already posted disappointing smartphone sales for the fourth quarter and warned that sales would suffer an unusually steep drop in the first quarter. The problem is that Motorola’s biggest customer, Verizon Wireless, is starting to sell an iPhone. And who really wants to compete for shelf space with Apple these days? So now it’s bought a 60-second spot in the Super Bowl to trumpet XOOM, its effort to break into the tablet market. It has even called the ad “Goodbye 1984″ (talk about setting the bar high).
Super Bowl ads: What’s $600 million between friends?
It’s almost time again for the Super Bowl, which means this is when all the talk starts about those famous, and famously expensive, commercials. Just how expensive? Kantar Media came out with a study today that shows Anheuser-Busch InBev, Pepsi, Walt Disney, General Motors, Coca-Cola have combined to spend nearly $600 million on Super Bowl ads over the last 10 years. For those of you bad with numbers, that’s more than half-a-billion dollars. Keep in mind, General Motors wasn’t even part of the game for 2009 or 2010.
This year, however, General Motors is back in a big way – leading a pack of auto makers who, as we pointed out in a story last week, will dominate this year’s game. Up to nine different auto manufacturers are expected to run spots this year. Kantar points out that five years ago only four car companies ran spots. Ten years ago only one car company bought time.
Kantar digs ups a few other interesting tidbits as well. Of course, everyone knows that prices have climbed over the last decade. But the amount of commercials running during the broadcast is also rising. Last year, the CBS broadcast contained a record 47 minutes 50 seconds of commercial time. A total of 104 individual messages aired. Who has time for a football game with all those advertisements?
It’s not just the big boys who are responsible for this ad bonanza. Kantar says that first-time advertisers account for about 20-25 percent of the ad roster. And some of these are relatively small organizations, at least when it comes to ad spending. One-third of Super Bowl advertisers put more than 10 percent of their full-year media budgets into the game.
With that as an appetizer, let the countdown to this year’s game begin.
Fox/Cablevision still talking, FCC also talking. Yet no change on Day 4.
So you know the story well by now: Fox Networks’ Fox 5 and My 9 channels have been off the air for Cablevision’s 3 million odd homes in the New York area since midnight on Saturday morning because both sides have been unable to reach a carriage deal. As a result New York football fans have missed a key Giants game versus Detroit Lions (pictured) and could miss more if this continues. As you might expect, the argument between Fox and Cablevision is over money.
Since then both sides have exchanged barbs and made various claims about who’s to blame — which is standard practice in a programming fee dispute. But FCC Chair Julius Genachowski appears to have had enough according to this statement:
“I am deeply troubled that Cablevision and Fox are spending more time attacking each other through ads and lobbyists than sitting down at the negotiating table. The time for petty gamesmanship is over.
“I have called the CEOs of both companies and reiterated the importance of reaching a deal, as many companies have done before. I reminded the companies that they share responsibility for consumer disruption, and that they shouldn’t punish consumers because of their unwillingness to reach a deal. I also insisted that they negotiate in good faith. We will continue to scrutinize their actions very closely.”
According to Fox, both sides did talk on Tuesday for a short while on the phone but “no material progress was made and we remain far apart.” Fox said they’d continue talking tomorrow.
Cablevision for its part continues to push for binding arbitration i.e. getting an independent third party involved to help both sides meet somewhere in the middle.
from DealZone:
Comcast the Barbarian?
Conan O'Brien could well be headed to Fox after making it clear to NBC that he will not go graciously into the later night. But a channel-changing question that is making the rounds has more to do with what the drama unfolding between O'Brien and former Tonight Show host Jay Leno says about NBC and its agreed joint venture with Comcast. If nothing else, the lack of replacement programming for the slot Leno is vacating, and the purported profitability NBC still enjoyed by having a cheaper, single-star variety show in a traditionally pricey prime-time slot, raise an obvious question -- why the rush?
John Hudson at the AtlanticWire does a nice job of collecting some thoughts on pressure that was probably building from Comcast, from angry affiliates who wanted Leno and his show's crummy ratings out of that vital pre-news slot, to improving PR.
"Though NBC Universal Chairman Jeff Gaspin said the Comcast deal has nothing to do with the decision, pundits say Gaspin has 'every incentive to show improvement' before his new bosses at Comcast takeover," Hudson says.
NBC said local affiliates had seen a 30 percent drop in audiences for their 11 p.m. news shows because of the weak lead-in from Leno. That would certainly have been alarming to Comcast, which knows a lot more about getting content into people's homes than it does about who is funnier, Conan or Leno.
Another reason Comcast may be the ultimate culprit here is change itself. Taking big, noisy, tough decisions before the deal with NBC gets its regulatory blessing means not having to take them when a new bunch of executives is taking charge of the remote control.
Soccer goes premium in US with new Fox footie HD channel
Football, sorry, soccer has never quite been a big money maker for the U.S. cable TV industry. But Fox Networks has long wagered that the popularity of the game with the little leaguers and the changing demographic of the country will eventually translate into the kind of big bucks that parent News Corp is used to in the U.K. with Sky Sports.
Fox said today it’s launching a new high definition soccer channel called Fox Soccer Plus, which is being offered to cable and satellite distributors as a premium channel for a selected tier or as a standalone channel for a monthly fee.
No deals have been struck yet with distributors but one hopes that the Fox programming team included Fox Soccer Plus as part of its long negotiations with Time Warner Cable into the New Year. But as a premium channel it’s unlikely to reach as many as the 35 million households of its flagship sister network Fox Soccer Channel.
The new channel will kick off on March 1, 2010 and will feature English Premier League and UEFA Champions League games, which Fox had previously sub-licensed to Setanta Sports USA, as well as a bit of calcio from Italy’s Serie A.
(Photo: Reuters)
Fox vs Time Warner Cable retrans dispute could get political
(Photo: Reuters)
Fox Networks went public today in what it said has been a fruitless nine-month-long carriage negotiations with Time Warner Cable, the No.2 U.S. cable company. It said there is the very real possibility that popular shows like American Idol and NFL Football could disappear from the air if you’re one of the Time Warner Cable’s nearly 14 million customers.
Fox wants to get paid for giving Time Warner Cable the right to carry its free-to-air Fox broadcast network for around $1 a subscriber every month. The talks also include negotiations for Fox’s bevy of entertainment cable networks including FX, Speed and Fuel but does not include its news networks. See Fox’s marketing campaign website keepfoxon.com here.
Time Warner Cable executives don’t want to pay a buck for so-called retransmission rights and claims it is has recently agreed to pay affiliate broadcasters around 25 cents per sub. See Time Warner Cable’s earlier marketing campaign warning customers of programmers plans here.
Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield said in his blog (subscription required) today that in retransmission consent negotiations the side with the most leverage always wins. Usually the weaker side is the cable or satellite company as they get the calls from irate customers if their favorite shows get blacked out. What may be different this time around is that Fox leverage might be hampered by a growing political intervention risk if the Government gets involved, said Greenfield:
While Retrans negotiations are all about leverage, the benefits of leverage to a broadcaster could evaporate if the government chooses to get involved going forward – in turn, a fine line must be walked. Remember, broadcasters are using public spectrum to broadcast and a now Democratic-majority FCC may not be as willing to let consumers pay the penalty for retrans battles the way prior administrations did (whether it be via higher video pricing and/or signal loss). We are actually quite surprised at how openly (and aggressively) the senior executives of the four major (owned and operated) station groups are talking about retrans – as we would fear that the government would begin to look at them as a cartel.
This fight is ridiculous and pathetic Fox is soooo greedy!
you cant get more greedy they just want cable to pay them more now because their carrying MLB world Series and American Idol the is nonsense i mean cable should just drop Fox and we should find someone else that carries these channels for a lesser value thats not soo greedy!
The fall TV season, beyond Jay Leno
What’s that? Jay Leno is moving to prime-time? You don’t say!
Frankly, it’s hard to remember the last time there was such hubbub about a TV show. It was, after all, the cover story in Time magazine. Not to be outdone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, AP, and probably every local news outlet between New York and Hollywood had a story about the talk show host — more often than not raising the question of whether he’s going to save network TV.
(You’ve got to give it to the public-relations machine on this one. They really worked the story. Of course, their spinning was augmented by a huge marketing effort. Stuart Elliott of the New York Times today estimated that NBC put out more than $10 million in promoting the show).
But there is more to the fall TV season than Jay Leno. The media buyers and planners over at RPA offer a useful road map to the season in a recent report.
Their take on the fall season is fairly upbeat (maybe network TV doesn’t really need Leno to save it).
“For the first time in two years, network fortunes will not be held hostage to the industry’s labor problems, but will be determined, as they used to be, by content quality and scheduling… Based on what we’ve seen, the overall quality of that content looks better than it has in the past two seasons,” the report says.
Here, according to RPA, are some things to keep in mind heading into the season:
