Travis Henderson has come full circle, first working the master control at KJZZ early in his career and now serving as senior vice president of broadcastinng for the Utah Jazz.Courtesy of Utah Jazz
That’s not a time machine, that’s a Utah Jazz television broadcast.
With regional sports networks leaking air and NBA teams nervously wondering if rights payments will arrive, the Jazz are reprising a saner, 1973 alternative: over-the-air TV.
Channel 14 in Salt Lake City — otherwise known as KJZZ — is the new/old television home of the Jazz, after the team’s inventive owner, Ryan Smith, decided the RSN model was putting fans last. As of the 2022-23 season, just 39% of Utah households had access to Jazz games on AT&T SportsNet, through mostly Comcast and DirecTV, and Smith’s new “free is me” linear TV launch has rounded that number up to a far superior … 100%.
“It’s called being self-reliant and betting on yourself,” Smith told Sports Business Journal.
The rest of the NBA will watch and take notes as the Jazz — along with Mat Ishbia’s Phoenix Suns — become the first two teams to bring the term “bunny ears” back into the nation’s consciousness. All a local Utah household needs is an antenna and TV, and it can watch every Jazz game that isn’t broadcast nationally. But how the franchise is financing it, producing it, disseminating it and streaming it without taking a financial bath is a case study in how sports TV could look and function without the RSN.
No team was more prepared than the Jazz to go back to the future, and much of it is a perfect storm. The franchise, like most NBA teams, originally chose the RSN route as a way to generate revenue and eyeballs in what was once a cable-centric world. At first, the Jazz RSN games were televised by Root, which was later rebranded by Warner Bros. Discovery to AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain. But the network’s household reach, due to cord-cutting and rising retransmission consent fees, was falling off a cliff, down to that 39% figure. Smith looked for an escape route.
Fortuitously, the team was on a series of one-year renewals at — according to industry sources — about $24 million to $28 million annually. And, in August of ’22, sensing RSN doom and vitriol from blacked-out fans, the team entered an open negotiation period. “Ryan wanted as wide a distribution as possible,” said Caroline Klein, the Jazz’s chief communications officer. “He wanted zero barriers for anyone to be able to watch a Jazz game.”
On social media, fans were pleading for games to air on KJZZ, a nostalgic over-the-air station known for televising games during the John Stockton-Karl Malone glory years. Purchased in the 1990s by then-Jazz owner Larry Miller, KJZZ’s Channel 14 was once a unique NBA flagship station in that it had unmatched synergy with the team. Back then and going forward, the Jazz produced their own games, sold their own ads and was constantly grooming KJZZ’s young talent, such as an up-and-coming University of Utah grad named Travis Henderson, who worked in master control.
“KJZZ was really the heart and soul of the city,” said Craig Bolerjack, the Jazz’s TV play-by-play voice. “It was the young days of the Jazz, so it was synonymous with the team: like apple pie and a la mode.”
Jazz fans can watch local games over the air or stream them through Jazz+.Courtesy of Utah Jazz
Once the Jazz opted for an RSN in 2009, KJZZ was out of sight but never out of mind. And during this past year’s open negotiation period, Smith and Co. took the sentimental route: They went sprinting back to KJZZ. “I'll be very transparent,” said Jazz President Jim Olson. “We were anxious to get a deal done with them.”
It was a match made in convenience. Sinclair-owned KJZZ didn’t want to produce the games — and, thankfully, it didn’t have to because the Jazz were one of eight NBA teams (along with the Blazers, Suns, Nuggets, Spurs, Wizards, Knicks and Raptors) who handled broadcasts in-house, even during their RSN days. Not only that, the Jazz senior vice president of broadcasting was the former KJZZ employee Henderson, who had produced and directed Jazz games since 1997-98, had won nine Emmys and served on the NBA’s broadcast advisory board. “Full circle moment for me,” Henderson said.
Smith basically told Henderson: Get whimsical with your broadcast ideas and reach back to me later. In the meantime, the owner had to make up for the roughly $24 million to $28 million in lost RSN money. According to Olson, that’s what other NBA team executives kept dialing the Jazz to ask: How in the world can you make free TV work? The Jazz’s answer was: We’ll see.
Other than the undisclosed rights fee it was earning from Sinclair’s KJZZ — likely in the $14 million to $18 million range — the first step was selling TV spots. During a typical 2½-hour NBA game broadcast, there are generally 30 minutes of advertising to sell (6 minutes every half hour) at 30 seconds a spot. If a team can then sell each of its 60, 30-second slots at $1,500 apiece, that’s $90,000 per broadcast in ad sales. Prorated out over a single NBA season of 72 games (minus, say, 10 national broadcasts), that’s $6.48 million — likely short of the ad revenue the Jazz would need to help them equal their previous RSN payment due to undisclosed in-house production costs, etc.
Although those numbers are projections from industry sources — not from the Jazz themselves — the team’s outlook may be better than at first glance, anyway. Under the team’s previous RSN model, its total viewing audience was approximately 1.2 million. But with the new over-the-air model, their reach in Utah is 3.3 million people, which could double ad spots to perhaps $3,000 apiece during games, though slightly less for pregame and postgame shows. That is the equalizer and benefit for bailing on the RSN.
The Jazz in-house staff, which is soon to expand, will handle the local ad sales, while the team has Playfly to manage national sales, as do all NBA teams other than the Raptors.
“The rate structure is obviously dependent upon the growth of total impressions and the volume of those impressions across a season,” said Playfly President Craig Sloan. “In both cases, you’re usually broadening out the demographic, with younger audiences attractive to the advertising marketing community. So the idea of the Jazz significantly increasing the rate they charge is real.”
Another revenue option, now that the Jazz is out of the RSN deal, is the ability to leverage markets outside of their broadcast footprint, such as Idaho, Wyoming, parts of Washington and parts of Eastern Oregon. Those outer markets could lift the Jazz audience from 3.3 to 5 million people, creating even more merchandise, ticketing and other revenue as well.
Courtesy of Utah Jazz
The other advantage is the streaming, direct-to-consumer component. The KJZZ linear side is only one side of this. Under the umbrella of Smith Entertainment Group (SEG Media), the Jazz owner has launched Jazz+ — back-ended by the league’s NBA App and Kiswe’s cloud-based solutions — which will stream games and original content similar to what ClipperVision debuted last season. Subscriptions cost $125.50 annually, $15.50 monthly or $5 on a game-by-game basis, and league sources believe alongside ad sales that’s conceivably another $2 million of revenue. All of this wrapped together (linear, streaming, outer markets, Playfly) means the Jazz can perhaps make 1973 TV manageable in 2023.
“We did make projections, but it’s a little early to say we’re going to hit those projections, surpass them or fall short,” Olson said. “But I will tell you that in the early stages, things are trending in a way that — not this year — but in the next couple of years, we’re very confident we’ll get back to whole.”
The KJZZ/Jazz+ on-air product — and ad sales it drives — may ultimately tell the tale, and under the direction of Henderson, the product seems prodigious. A new partnership with Delta has already led to a revamped KJZZ broadcast set at Delta Center for pregame/halftime/postgame shows. There is a docuseries coming on the 50th anniversary of the Jazz franchise; alternative game broadcasts on “Decade Nights,” where players of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s and 2010s will be in-studio; and a social media alt broadcast or maybe a players’ moms alt broadcast. The brainstorm sessions have Henderson counting the days until the season opener.
“He’s a rock star,” said Paul Benedict, the NBA’s vice president of broadcast management, of Henderson. “He’s part of the reason they can do what they’re doing. A lot of other teams we’d be a little more skeptical about, but he’s going to make things roll for them.”
Henderson’s SEG Media ideas also include a “Shoot the Shot” interview-style shooting competition show with head coach Will Hardy, as well as miked-up players and coaches during KJZZ game broadcasts. None of that existed with Stockton and Malone’s KJZZ of the ’90s.
“There’s 18,000 cameras, per se, on our team nowadays as it is,” said Smith, encouraged that ratings for KJZZ’s first two preseason games were significantly higher than last year’s regular-season average. “So this is a chance for us to show and tell stories in a different way. … Because [free TV] is coming. The NBA has the best product on the planet when it comes to basketball, and we’re going to be in a great spot. It shouldn’t be a scary thing.”
Unless bunny ears give you nightmares.
