Thursday, March 15, 2018

Quick Look at New C-USA Rights Agreements

A few items on the new Conference USA rights agreements

* CBS Sports Network essentially picked up the ESPN portion of the rights agreement, taking on the five regular season football games plus the conference championship game in addition to the six regular season football games they already carried.  Men's basketball will also see a marginal increase in linear television exposure (two games).  To lighten their load, potentially three of those 12 football games and up to six men's basketball games will air on Facebook with a CBS production.

CBSSN has also been working on (finally) adding authenticated streaming for the TV providers they have agreements with.  Recently they added DirecTV and Dish.

And to get a five year deal with a financial bump from CBS Sports where the last set of deals were of a shorter term is nice security.  Even with the addition of three C-USA games, CBSSN should still have plenty of room if it is working on adjustments in the areas of the American, MAC or Mountain West.

* Any webcast, whether its ESPN3, Facebook or school produced is a nice extra because of how the school can work to pick the optimal start time to maximize ticket sales and still get a TV quality production.  And there are ways to push these streams to televisions, so to point to these streams and say that you can only watch them on a computer is a misnomer.

* Production costs of streams were pointed out as a reason to not go the route that the Sun Belt did with ESPN+ and those costs, depending on the contract, could lead to the conference eating up its rights fee.  For example, the previous contract with the Missouri Valley Conference called for them to pay a portion of production costs and that cost exceeded the rights fee the conference was receiving from ESPN.

* beIN Sports wasn't mentioned, but they remain a rightsholder for 2018-19.  Their agreement was one year longer than the expiring CBSSN and ESPN agreements.  Per North Texas AD Wren Baker, the conference is still talking with both them and ESPN.  The talks with ESPN might end up being about how schools can self-produce content to air on ESPN3.

* Right now, the televised game count is slightly lower, but the conference is banking on accessibility of Facebook in addition to linear TV.  Its an interesting bet.

1 comment:

bigddan11 said...

It might not include ESPN3 at all. The schools self produced games could very easily be ESPN+.