Fox Sports Media Group Chair David Hill, an "innovator in sports technology," sat down with the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Alex Ben Block for an extensive interview about the NFL, baseball and myriad other topics. The following is a portion of the Q&A.
Q: Will Fox Sports do anything different with its NFL coverage this year?
Hill: One of the things that came through in the labor deal is that we can have up to six players wearing microphones. How that’s going to work, I don’t know. What I do know is that the key area where I’d like to see us get better is in audio. I believe close-up audio is effective in transmitting emotion and feeling.
Q: Baseball ratings are down; what’s the reason?
Hill: There’s been the rise of the regionalization of the sport, and the decision to play interleague games each year has taken away the luster of the All-Star Game. And if you look at the truly national teams, you quickly start to run out after the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Yankees and, to a certain extent, the Rangers, and you pray the Cubs will show some life. So the ratings are dependent on who we get into the pennant race. Are baseball ratings the same as they were 15 years ago? No. But (the World Series) is still a huge event and is going to dominate the night it’s on. So in terms of importance to the network, for prestige and relevance, it’s important and will remain that way.
Q: Does Fox lose money on baseball?
Hill: We’re not that altruistic. Sure, we’re going to come up short (some years). A contract is a contract. You can only look at the totality of it on a straightforward P&L basis. We might have had a couple of bad years, but we’ve had a couple of remarkably good years.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Fox wrapped up its '11 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series coverage on June 5, and looking back, Hill said, "What we did this year, we made a conscious effort to totally back down about the car -- we didn’t talk about the car. We talked about the driver." Hill said competition among networks in bidding for TV rights is "fabulous for sports." He added, "The more players in the market that want your stuff, the more bidders, and the more they are going to bid it up. I think if you look at what’s happened to college football rights over the last five, six years, you see a classic example of supply and demand in practice." Asked about the future of soccer on TV in the U.S., Hill said, "It will always be a niche sport until the American team develops heroes. ... The growth, the strength has got to come from MLS. And they’ve got to get the people who love watching (soccer played in other countries) to say, 'I’ve got to go home and watch the Galaxy play.' And, you know, I can’t see that happening. It’s happening in a couple of areas. It’s happening in Seattle, but it’s not happening enough" (HOLLYWOODREPORTER.com, 9/14).
