Menu
Download the app

SBJ subscribers – Enhance your experience with the revamped iOS app

Media

Executives passionate in defense of the TV business

The overall mood last week seemed downcast as nearly 400 sports media executives gathered for an industry conference in a gray and rainy New York City. After all, the traditional TV business had gone through a rough couple of months. ESPN had laid off about 300 employees the week before, many media stocks have yet to recover from a midsummer sell-off, and competitors (or, to use corporate speak, “disrupters”) are popping up all over the place.

But some of the biggest names in the industry used the occasion to give full-throated defenses of the television business, starting with ESPN President John Skipper, who opened the 2015 NeuLion Sports Media & Technology conference by attacking what he called the “narrative” that ESPN’s best days are in the past.

“The question is not whether things have changed,” Skipper said. “The question is whether we have the content, the will and the intellect to navigate those changes to greater usage among our fans and greater success to our business, and I have a great deal of confidence that we do have that.”

It certainly wasn’t a surprise to hear TV executives defending the TV business, but executives appeared more passionate and more forceful than might have been expected in telling their side of the story.

CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves continued in that vein on the event’s second day, saying that investors are overreacting to the broadcast industry’s threats.

“Wall Street has been looking for this digital story, that digital is taking over the universe and the old guys are dead,” Moonves said. “For us as broadcasters, they’re not taking away our money. Digital is taking away money from print and niche cable networks that are targeting a very small demographic. You can’t replicate the 20 million viewers that are watching ‘NCIS’ or ‘Big Bang Theory.’ Do you know how many hits you have to get on YouTube to hit 20 million?”

The TV business was hit with gloom and doom in the spring, when this year’s upfront advertising market proved to be weaker than usual, another area where Moonves complained investors overreacted.

“It is cyclical,” he said, adding that the weaker second quarter led to a strong third quarter in advertising. “This is what normally happens. You have good quarters and you have bad quarters in advertising. People were holding back. They were seeing what the marketplace is, and now we’re getting paid more in scatter than we would have at the upfront. So it ended up being good that we didn’t sell as much.”

Pessimism also came as a result of a shrinking business, one that has seen the pay-TV industry shed more than 4 million homes in the past four years, according to Nielsen household estimates. But Skipper and Moonves both cited their companies’ digital offerings, like WatchESPN and CBS All Access, as examples that the traditional TV companies are not standing pat.

“We continue to have a very robust return from the pay-television universe,” Skipper said. “I do not accept a proposition that we will reach less people. We will have to be nimble, we will have to have new combinations and new offerings to reach more people.”

One Wall Street analyst warned against doing too many things that can hurt the pay-TV bundle. Distributors are pushing low-cost bundles that do not have high-priced channels, and some networks are looking to go “over-the-top” and create broadband services that they can sell directly to the consumer.

“Beware of turning your multiple-revenue-stream model into a single-revenue-stream model, because I will take three multiple points off of your cash-flow streams, so it kills all your employees’ values and your own as the CEO,” said Laura Martin, an entertainment and Internet analyst with Needham & Co. “To create value the fastest, you want to add revenue, not destroy it, and you’d rather have multiple streams. …

“The legacy of digital is chaos,” Martin added. “As we unbundle the TV ecosystem, we’re moving into chaos, which is a synonym for innovation, but it’s going to create havoc with the consumer, too.”

Fox Sports National Networks President Jamie Horowitz was another executive who dismissed the idea that the traditional television business was in trouble.

“One thing that’s weird is that TV oddly needs people to come to its defense now,” he said. “It’s not sexy to talk about how important television still is. It’s much more fun to talk about Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat. We’re missing the point.”

As an example, Horowitz talked about meeting people who have popular podcasts and social media profiles — all of whom want to be on television.

“That’s still the aspiration,” he said. “I never get the reverse. I never get some people who do TV that say, ‘I’d like to give this up and start a podcast.’ It doesn’t happen.”

Twitter’s North American head of sports partnerships, Danny Keens, agreed.

“What drives our platform and makes it flourish is their content,” he said.

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

Shareable URL copied to clipboard!

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2015/11/02/Media/TV-defense.aspx

Sorry, something went wrong with the copy but here is the link for you.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2015/11/02/Media/TV-defense.aspx

CLOSE