I admit that I want Disney to burn for what they have done to Lucasfilm and Marvel and I really don't care who does the burning of Disney. If ESPN disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all.
Yeah it’s love with Star Wars have been an abomination. It makes the prequel trilogy look good. At least that had a soup and a great plot/story that made sense even if the execution was poor at times.
The Disney Star Wars movies are like the absolutely pinnacle of polishing up a focus group turd and thinking it isn’t a turd because it is so polished.
PPV / subscription and streaming can work for event based sports like UFC. It can be a good supplement for die hard NBA fans and out of market fans. But it will fail if it's the primary route to the consumer.
Average guy has some free time and goes downstairs on a Wednesday night. Pops on the local baseball or hockey team or a random college hoops game. That guy is not buying this stuff. He likes it. He'll watch now and then. But if you give him the pay / no pay decision, he's not paying. And then you've cut off his access to your product. There are a lot of those guys. That guy stops going to games. He stops talking about it with his friends. He stops consuming online content. He's dead. And his kids are gone too. This is why the MLS deal sucks. They pulled up the drawbridge at a time when they could've continued growing a lot. If you limit your customers to the existing die hands, your business will shrink.
I disagree about the MLS deal. The league is almost three decades old now, and the quality and attendance have grown a ton but TV viewership only mildly. Another decade on ESPN/FS1 isn't going to move that dial. It's more like the NHL in the US in that the entry point for fans is generally live experiences first. The Apple deal centers the live experience by making game times fan-friendly and consistent.
MLS was born too late for growth by osmosis of random cable TV viewership I think. That era already peaked so it's not going to work any better than it did going forward.
For what it's worth, you don't have to pay for everything, it's not gated like UFC. Apple broadcasts a lot of free games. Bringing in kids is hard, but I think that it's hard for everyone in an era where kids are way more likely to be watching Minecraft streamers on Twitch than whatever is on ESPN2 on a Wednesday. Sports are more about nostalgia and community than about entertainment, really, so there's just no substitute for the long slog of getting entrenched and having parents bring kids to games and learn to love being mad that your team lost.
Thank you for remembering, Ryan -- although my intelligence was somewhat questioned :)
Great episode. I love this topic. My once bold prediction is closer to becoming true. You guys covered a lot of angles but there are considerations you are overlooking that compound the problems for Disney.
1) Their advertisers have to be livid. Not only is it 1/5th the audience, but it also is the LA and NY markets during football season. The revenue losses will be much greater than just the carriage fee often quoted and will get pressured from blue chip advertisers to get a deal done.
2.) The blackout will increase churn but not necessarily mean conversion to other mediums (vMVPDs). So everyday the blackout continues, ESPN will lose customers they won't get back for a service Spectrum has become indifferent offering. Again they have more to lose.
3) When Disney does bend on their demands/or lowers it hike, it will prove ESPN cannot be economically viable (at current rights prices) to spin out as a direct to consumer product. The truth is they need the buddle more than the buddle needs them. The sports fan is not going to absorb the costs as a stand alone service -- the economics would make the price ~$80-$120/month for regular viewers. And they wouldn't even get the subscriber base at the price, so it would much worse. And the idea of Apple buying them is such a Boomer take -- not accusing you two, but it one taken seriously by guys like Marchand and Ourand and accepted as a real possibility. Apple is a very disciplined business, likes to develop everything in-house, and is highly curated in everything they do. Buying ESPN for $20-$40B violates all of those core business principles. And to what end if they did? It makes zero financial and strategic sense.
Glasspiegel suggested accurately (in my opinion) that the days of non sports fans making owners' (and players) incomes skyrocket are over... Does this mean we may see more owners start selling their teams try to get out before the values crash? Which leads me to my main question...
Does this mean the A's might actually get to stay in Oakland?!?
I am probably an idiot, but I have long thought the economics of the leagues were in serious trouble (in terms of sustaining their crazy growth) and I honestly think even the leagues know this.
My evidence is that if you listen to people like Bill Simmons and others who are tied into owners circles and get that messaging…well the messaging has really changed over the past decade or so from “omg these guys make a killing”, to “this is a luxury vanity purchase and their are more billionaires looking for luxury vanity purchases than there are teams”. People don’t really try and pretend it stands up as a long term investment anymore.
I also think very slowly the public is finally catching on to the stadium grift and the crony capitalism around that is getting harder and harder to pull off.
Is being an announcer or talking head more difficult then being high school player drafted in the first round and starting in a league? Why is it ESPN covers all these leagues and “prospects” out of high school but you never see a promising color analyst coming out of Wake Forrest signed to host Sports Center? This pod last night and seeing Mina Kimes getting 2 milly just seems crazy. ESPN should be running open tryouts and or turning over staff (roster) like these sports teams they cover. Might make it more exciting.
I love Glasspiegel as a guest, but the way he starts copping pleas at any mention of FS1’s ratings really undermines his legitimacy as your NBA Doomer co-pilot.
One minor note on Ryan’s comment about Apple TV MLS subscribers. Messi caused a huge jump but on top of that, all season ticket holders of MLS teams get a free yearly subscription, as well.
- My Deion hot take is he gets outsized favorable coverage because he makes the Gen-X sportswriters feel relevant (similar to how Nash was beloved). Every writer I see gushing over him looks to roughly be between the ages of 45-60.
- If the Spectrum Disney clash makes it through the start of the NFL season then does that pretty much guarantee it's to the death? Anecdotally I saw a lot of people drop Spectrum this past weekend for college football
It also might be because he is changing the model of coaching , using the transfer portal as a weapon. Or, because he is saying out loud what other coaches are saying behind closed doors. He is putting himself out there and may fail but it is as entertaining as hell and he is a star. He has identified college football as purely transactional and Colorado fans love it. He sold out spring practices. If you are a reporter ( any age) what’s more interesting? Deion’s statements or a “we take them one game at a time, one play at a time “ coach.
He's really not doing anything revolutionary from technical standpoint. He's just turning the dial up a notch in certain areas and being loud and brash about it.
-- Has anybody basically replaced an entire roster through the portal, no, but Mel Tucker used the transfer portal extensively for one season a few years back and got a 10 year $95 million contract out of it. Pretty much all new coaches lean heavily on the portal to start.
-- The reason coaches say all this stuff behind closed doors is they'll get squashed by the administration and old guard media for it. Everyone knows the sport is transactional at the highest level. The Georgias and Alabamas process guys every year. Cardale Jones famously said he wasn't here to play school over a decade ago.
-- Colorado fans love it because they've been non-existent on the national level for 20+ years.
-- A lot of schools with new coaches sell out spring games. Nebraska does it every year just because it's Nebraska and they have nothing else to do. Hell, Nebraska just set an attendance world record for a volleyball game.
-- I will say pulling a guy like Travis Hunter is impressive. Never been done before at an HBCU. But between having Deion there (fully intending it to be temporary), Travis' own talent, and NIL (if you don't think someone like Barstool backed up the Brinks truck I've got a bridge to sell you), it's not exactly a low-risk move. Plus it's not galaxies removed from Ed Oliver going to Houston a few years ago.
-- Shadeur also has legit talent and Shiloh I think was starting too.
I'm not saying Deion isn't a big story. But there's plenty of stuff that he's done (Prime Prep, publicly telling players they're leaving, playing Hunter 100+ snaps, fighting with the media for not "believing") that other coaches would get skewered for. As long as he keeps having success you can only tip your cap and there's novelty to his act which always gets eyeballs, but you can't tell me there's not a favorable slant to his coverage stemming from the fact that a lot of media guys enjoyed watching him play 30+ years ago.
- Whatever the Coach Prime ratings are, don't forget to take into account that it was the only good game of the afternoon. Anyone who wanted to watch college football at that time was tuned in whether they care about Deion or not.
- I understand why some people would be leery about just taking Amazon's word for it on Nielsen ratings, but as an observer I'm more inclined to trust them than Neilsen itself. They're a massive public corporation with huge penalties for lying. Getting hit with a lawsuit for securities fraud for juicing the numbers of a streaming service they don't make money off of anyway doesn't seem worth it.
- On the question of seeing demo-specific ads during broadcasts by tech giants with big advertising tech departments, I think we're in the total infancy there. When I'm on Instagram as a 40-something male I definitely get served boner pill ads, but they also know things like what my favorite teams are so I get served specific ads for those instead of generic sports apparel ads. Football in particular runs during election season as well, so you will probably also see yourself targeted by things like state or Congressional district. If PA is a swing state and NJ is not, it makes sense to only serve presidential election ads to PA residents instead of the entire Philadelphia market, for instance.
What did Bruce Arena say to get fired? Is this a case of soft snowflake athletes or is it merited?
News these days will say that someone was using inappropriate language but not actually state the inappropriate language. Because then that would be inappropriate, I suppose?
Ethan if you haven’t seen Shane Gillis’ new special on Netflix I would reccomend watching the first 6 minutes or so. He made a joke that he may have stolen from you 😂
If Ben Thompson is right and the ultimate end state is a re-bundling, isn’t this as easy as Disney lost the streamer wars and so their stock will eventually sink low enough that Netflix buys them?
And does the NBA’s leverage in this re-bundled world really look that different from where it is now? Not sure it does.
Whenever Glasspiegel is on my whole day gets about thirty percent better
I admit that I want Disney to burn for what they have done to Lucasfilm and Marvel and I really don't care who does the burning of Disney. If ESPN disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all.
Yeah it’s love with Star Wars have been an abomination. It makes the prequel trilogy look good. At least that had a soup and a great plot/story that made sense even if the execution was poor at times.
The Disney Star Wars movies are like the absolutely pinnacle of polishing up a focus group turd and thinking it isn’t a turd because it is so polished.
Aside from the past couple of years, seems like Disney has done okay with Marvel.
Marvel and StarWars ran its course. You can’t mine the same scripts and characters over and over. And over. Not that Disney hasn’t made mistakes.
Don't disagree but Disney's Marvel "course" was over a decade of making money hand-over-fist.
PPV / subscription and streaming can work for event based sports like UFC. It can be a good supplement for die hard NBA fans and out of market fans. But it will fail if it's the primary route to the consumer.
Average guy has some free time and goes downstairs on a Wednesday night. Pops on the local baseball or hockey team or a random college hoops game. That guy is not buying this stuff. He likes it. He'll watch now and then. But if you give him the pay / no pay decision, he's not paying. And then you've cut off his access to your product. There are a lot of those guys. That guy stops going to games. He stops talking about it with his friends. He stops consuming online content. He's dead. And his kids are gone too. This is why the MLS deal sucks. They pulled up the drawbridge at a time when they could've continued growing a lot. If you limit your customers to the existing die hands, your business will shrink.
I disagree about the MLS deal. The league is almost three decades old now, and the quality and attendance have grown a ton but TV viewership only mildly. Another decade on ESPN/FS1 isn't going to move that dial. It's more like the NHL in the US in that the entry point for fans is generally live experiences first. The Apple deal centers the live experience by making game times fan-friendly and consistent.
MLS was born too late for growth by osmosis of random cable TV viewership I think. That era already peaked so it's not going to work any better than it did going forward.
You could be right. I was always a guy who watched a little now and then - maybe the market isn't there.
But what about kids? Seems hard to bring in 10 year olds when you have to pay for it.
For what it's worth, you don't have to pay for everything, it's not gated like UFC. Apple broadcasts a lot of free games. Bringing in kids is hard, but I think that it's hard for everyone in an era where kids are way more likely to be watching Minecraft streamers on Twitch than whatever is on ESPN2 on a Wednesday. Sports are more about nostalgia and community than about entertainment, really, so there's just no substitute for the long slog of getting entrenched and having parents bring kids to games and learn to love being mad that your team lost.
Thank you for remembering, Ryan -- although my intelligence was somewhat questioned :)
Great episode. I love this topic. My once bold prediction is closer to becoming true. You guys covered a lot of angles but there are considerations you are overlooking that compound the problems for Disney.
1) Their advertisers have to be livid. Not only is it 1/5th the audience, but it also is the LA and NY markets during football season. The revenue losses will be much greater than just the carriage fee often quoted and will get pressured from blue chip advertisers to get a deal done.
2.) The blackout will increase churn but not necessarily mean conversion to other mediums (vMVPDs). So everyday the blackout continues, ESPN will lose customers they won't get back for a service Spectrum has become indifferent offering. Again they have more to lose.
3) When Disney does bend on their demands/or lowers it hike, it will prove ESPN cannot be economically viable (at current rights prices) to spin out as a direct to consumer product. The truth is they need the buddle more than the buddle needs them. The sports fan is not going to absorb the costs as a stand alone service -- the economics would make the price ~$80-$120/month for regular viewers. And they wouldn't even get the subscriber base at the price, so it would much worse. And the idea of Apple buying them is such a Boomer take -- not accusing you two, but it one taken seriously by guys like Marchand and Ourand and accepted as a real possibility. Apple is a very disciplined business, likes to develop everything in-house, and is highly curated in everything they do. Buying ESPN for $20-$40B violates all of those core business principles. And to what end if they did? It makes zero financial and strategic sense.
Glasspiegel suggested accurately (in my opinion) that the days of non sports fans making owners' (and players) incomes skyrocket are over... Does this mean we may see more owners start selling their teams try to get out before the values crash? Which leads me to my main question...
Does this mean the A's might actually get to stay in Oakland?!?
I am probably an idiot, but I have long thought the economics of the leagues were in serious trouble (in terms of sustaining their crazy growth) and I honestly think even the leagues know this.
My evidence is that if you listen to people like Bill Simmons and others who are tied into owners circles and get that messaging…well the messaging has really changed over the past decade or so from “omg these guys make a killing”, to “this is a luxury vanity purchase and their are more billionaires looking for luxury vanity purchases than there are teams”. People don’t really try and pretend it stands up as a long term investment anymore.
I also think very slowly the public is finally catching on to the stadium grift and the crony capitalism around that is getting harder and harder to pull off.
Is being an announcer or talking head more difficult then being high school player drafted in the first round and starting in a league? Why is it ESPN covers all these leagues and “prospects” out of high school but you never see a promising color analyst coming out of Wake Forrest signed to host Sports Center? This pod last night and seeing Mina Kimes getting 2 milly just seems crazy. ESPN should be running open tryouts and or turning over staff (roster) like these sports teams they cover. Might make it more exciting.
I love Glasspiegel as a guest, but the way he starts copping pleas at any mention of FS1’s ratings really undermines his legitimacy as your NBA Doomer co-pilot.
One minor note on Ryan’s comment about Apple TV MLS subscribers. Messi caused a huge jump but on top of that, all season ticket holders of MLS teams get a free yearly subscription, as well.
Two quick hitters:
- My Deion hot take is he gets outsized favorable coverage because he makes the Gen-X sportswriters feel relevant (similar to how Nash was beloved). Every writer I see gushing over him looks to roughly be between the ages of 45-60.
- If the Spectrum Disney clash makes it through the start of the NFL season then does that pretty much guarantee it's to the death? Anecdotally I saw a lot of people drop Spectrum this past weekend for college football
It also might be because he is changing the model of coaching , using the transfer portal as a weapon. Or, because he is saying out loud what other coaches are saying behind closed doors. He is putting himself out there and may fail but it is as entertaining as hell and he is a star. He has identified college football as purely transactional and Colorado fans love it. He sold out spring practices. If you are a reporter ( any age) what’s more interesting? Deion’s statements or a “we take them one game at a time, one play at a time “ coach.
He's really not doing anything revolutionary from technical standpoint. He's just turning the dial up a notch in certain areas and being loud and brash about it.
-- Has anybody basically replaced an entire roster through the portal, no, but Mel Tucker used the transfer portal extensively for one season a few years back and got a 10 year $95 million contract out of it. Pretty much all new coaches lean heavily on the portal to start.
-- The reason coaches say all this stuff behind closed doors is they'll get squashed by the administration and old guard media for it. Everyone knows the sport is transactional at the highest level. The Georgias and Alabamas process guys every year. Cardale Jones famously said he wasn't here to play school over a decade ago.
-- Colorado fans love it because they've been non-existent on the national level for 20+ years.
-- A lot of schools with new coaches sell out spring games. Nebraska does it every year just because it's Nebraska and they have nothing else to do. Hell, Nebraska just set an attendance world record for a volleyball game.
-- I will say pulling a guy like Travis Hunter is impressive. Never been done before at an HBCU. But between having Deion there (fully intending it to be temporary), Travis' own talent, and NIL (if you don't think someone like Barstool backed up the Brinks truck I've got a bridge to sell you), it's not exactly a low-risk move. Plus it's not galaxies removed from Ed Oliver going to Houston a few years ago.
-- Shadeur also has legit talent and Shiloh I think was starting too.
I'm not saying Deion isn't a big story. But there's plenty of stuff that he's done (Prime Prep, publicly telling players they're leaving, playing Hunter 100+ snaps, fighting with the media for not "believing") that other coaches would get skewered for. As long as he keeps having success you can only tip your cap and there's novelty to his act which always gets eyeballs, but you can't tell me there's not a favorable slant to his coverage stemming from the fact that a lot of media guys enjoyed watching him play 30+ years ago.
It's kinda wild to think and remember when Colorado was at college football vanguard about 30 years or so ago.
I love Glasspiegel episodes. Random thoughts:
- Whatever the Coach Prime ratings are, don't forget to take into account that it was the only good game of the afternoon. Anyone who wanted to watch college football at that time was tuned in whether they care about Deion or not.
- I understand why some people would be leery about just taking Amazon's word for it on Nielsen ratings, but as an observer I'm more inclined to trust them than Neilsen itself. They're a massive public corporation with huge penalties for lying. Getting hit with a lawsuit for securities fraud for juicing the numbers of a streaming service they don't make money off of anyway doesn't seem worth it.
- On the question of seeing demo-specific ads during broadcasts by tech giants with big advertising tech departments, I think we're in the total infancy there. When I'm on Instagram as a 40-something male I definitely get served boner pill ads, but they also know things like what my favorite teams are so I get served specific ads for those instead of generic sports apparel ads. Football in particular runs during election season as well, so you will probably also see yourself targeted by things like state or Congressional district. If PA is a swing state and NJ is not, it makes sense to only serve presidential election ads to PA residents instead of the entire Philadelphia market, for instance.
Gonna be tough sledding for us sportscels having to pay full freight.
What did Bruce Arena say to get fired? Is this a case of soft snowflake athletes or is it merited?
News these days will say that someone was using inappropriate language but not actually state the inappropriate language. Because then that would be inappropriate, I suppose?
Ethan if you haven’t seen Shane Gillis’ new special on Netflix I would reccomend watching the first 6 minutes or so. He made a joke that he may have stolen from you 😂
Been enjoying it!
Good stuff here Ethan
If Ben Thompson is right and the ultimate end state is a re-bundling, isn’t this as easy as Disney lost the streamer wars and so their stock will eventually sink low enough that Netflix buys them?
And does the NBA’s leverage in this re-bundled world really look that different from where it is now? Not sure it does.
terminal (and universal) wanna be a screenwriter brain