Yahoo Sports GM Geoff Reiss envisions a future sports media landscape in which as cord-cutting continues, there is a "much closer association between what we as fans want, and what we're going to have to be willing to pay for on a direct basis." Reiss was part of the Media Innovators virtual series in a session titled, "Next Gen Fan Experiences: The Keys To Innovative Fan Engagement." He said, "We're not going to have these nice, easy, casual, all-you-can eat buffets, and NBC is demonstrating it this year. If you really love the Premier League ... you better get Peacock, and you better subscribe. As we see companies like Sinclair under genuine strain, because of the way the RSNs are performing, it's hard to imagine just blanket subscriptions to premium content being the thing that rules the roost in perpetuity."
Reiss added that evolution "leads to a lot of questions as to who these gatekeepers are." MSOs involved as a "passive set of gatekeepers," and now "we're not going to have a handful of MSOs who are responsible for that 100 million relationship." Reiss: "We're going to have those relationships existing on a much closer to retail level. Whether it's with the New York Mets ... or with NBC if you're a soccer fan, or whoever gets the next version of Sunday Ticket, we're going to have our spending align much more closely with what it is we actually consume."
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Reiss also weighed in on how COVID-19 will permanently affect sports media, with the caveat, "Some of what we've experienced from a social justice perspective is going to have some equally long lasting impact on our business." Reiss said to watch for three things that will be "accelerated" due to the pandemic: (1) "adoptions of certain forms of technology," (2) "evolutions in business models" and (3) "consumer attitude towards our category."
When asked about when tech companies will get more aggressive in acquiring sports rights, Reiss said entities like the NFL "still have this tremendous convening power," so it will be "harder for tech companies to push incumbent models out of the way for those tentpoles, because the idea of attracting 20 million people at a time is enormously seductive to traditional linear broadcasters." But there are "second-tier" sports that "don't necessarily have that convening power." Reiss: "What you started to see with a smaller entity like Flo Sports could start to migrate up."
