Less Is More: UH Reports Attendance Drop, Increased Revenue

Rainbows’ PPV Experiment Passing On Larger Revenues

Univ. of Hawaii (UH) football attendance last season dropped to 32,268, its lowest in six years, while the team’s PPV rights fees “hit a high,” according to Lewis & Tsai of the HONOLULU ADVERTISER. UH received $812,310 in rights fees last season from PPV, “nearly double the $463,038 it earned in 2002.” UH Athletic Dir Herman Frazier said that he “believed the school came out ahead financially this season.” Frazier: “No question about it. If you add that ($812,310) to the $700,000 we got from [KFVE-UPN], that’s $1.5[M] and the year before (pay-per-view started), we got $1.3[M].” UH Regent Alvin Tanaka said, “We would like to see what the trade-off is in lost attendance because, even though we have pay-per-view in football, we just don’t want to have a [star like UH WR] Chad Owens playing in front of 10,000 people.” But KFVE & KHNL-NBC VP & GM John Fink said of the attendance drop, “Did somebody stay home? Absolutely. But did $800,000 worth stay home? No way.” Fink also noted that “ESPN took many of the big-name schools like Michigan State and Boise State out of the pay-per-view lineup and viewers were still paying for some losing teams” (HONOLULU ADVERTISER, 2/22).