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NFL puts money into new shows

League will use CBS to launch one program

At a time when many cable sports channels are cutting back on their original programming budgets, the NFL is taking the opposite tack and investing 30 percent more into original offerings this year.

"Football Town: Barrow, Alaska," is one of four original shows the NFL Network will debut this fall.
Photo by: NFL NETWORK
The NFL has produced four original, non-studio shows that will appear on NFL Network this fall, and it plans to use CBS’s broadcast reach to help build an audience for them. For the first time, the NFL will premiere one of its shows, “Undrafted,” on CBS before moving it to NFL Network. CBS will carry the season’s first two episodes, plus a preview of another show, “Football Town: Barrow, Alaska,” and NFL executives hope the broadcast coverage will funnel people to NFL Network. CBS reaches 116 million homes; NFL Network is in almost 70 million.

“One of our continuing challenges — even though the network has been around for a decade — is that there are still audiences that are not fully aware of NFL Network,” said Jordan Levin, NFL chief content officer, in some of his most detailed remarks since being hired in June after running Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios. “Higher-profile shows like these and the marketing efforts to support them are a way to wave the flag and try to address some of those institutional problems that all networks face to grow their audience.”

In addition to “Undrafted” and “Football Town,” the NFL’s two other originals on its fall schedule are the fifth season of “A Football Life” and a one-hour, behind-the-scenes special, “Do Your Job: Bill Belichick and the 2014 Patriots,” that premieres Sept. 9 at 8 p.m. and features interviews with Patriots Chairman and CEO Robert Kraft, President Jonathan Kraft and all of the team’s coaches.

“The overall plan is to build a programming franchise that people care about and that people want to come back and watch, whether it’s on the NFL Network or NFL Now or wherever we put it,” said Brian Rolapp, NFL executive vice president. “Originals help us do that. Studio programming plays an important part. But it’s also fleeting in nature; it doesn’t stand up very well outside of the day it’s produced.”

NFL Network originally built its program schedule around studio shows, adding live NFL games to its programming mix in 2006. Four years ago, it debuted “A Football Life,” and the league’s executives believe these types of shows have a bigger payoff than studio programming, partly because they can be repeated so often. With four original shows slated for this fall, and more in the pipeline, NFL executives are making a clear bet that original programming makes good business sense.

For example, last season’s premiere of “Undrafted” averaged 1.2 million viewers for its first-run episodes, a good number even considering its time slot coming after the channel’s highly rated “Thursday Night Football” games.

“It will never rate as well as live sports; it’s not meant to,” Rolapp said. “These are franchises that can live well beyond their original premiere date.”

NFL Network has committed 31 hours to original premiere episodes this season, not including re-airs. Last season, that figure was 24 hours, and back in 2010 it was just three hours. Production budgets for NFL Network’s originals have showed a similar increase. League officials would not specify how much was being spent, but the investment level still is believed to be on the low end for TV sports networks.

“We’re certainly looking to continue to spend on efforts to find these programs that can ideally develop into franchises for us,” Levin said. “There will be other announcements further on in the season of some other original programming. It represents a continued investment.”

The NFL’s strategy of investing in original programming runs counter to current trends in sports TV, where networks are paying much more attention on live game programming than ancillary programming.

The NFL’s original programming focus comes as the cable industry is shedding subscribers, causing networks to look for areas to cut costs. Overall, the cable industry has shed nearly 4 million homes in the past year, according to Nielsen. The loss of cable subscribers has cut into cable network revenue. Programming budget cuts have been the most visible sign of networks’ cost-cutting measures.

Cuts appear to be most prevalent at ESPN, which has not re-signed many high-priced, on-air talent, such as Bill Simmons, Keith Olbermann and Colin Cowherd. One year after launching Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports shut down its original programming group that was led by Michael Bloom, who now is at IMG Media.

“It’s different for the league networks, to some degree, than the general sports networks,” Levin said. “The challenge for most sports networks is that even though they have tremendous scale, certainly in the case of ESPN, when push comes to shove, they know that their most valuable programming is something that they don’t own and they have to license — live games.”

Other league-owned networks, like NBA TV and MLB Network, have invested in original programming. But NFL Network’s spending increase on originals is unique this fall.

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