SBJ Media: Silver Warns Of "Broken" System

At 7:00pm tonight, ESPN ran Jimmy Valvano’s inspiring 1993 ESPYs speech across all its networks as part of its V Week for Cancer Research. Twenty-six years later, and I still hang on every word of it.

ADAM SILVER SKEPTICAL OF PAY TV SYSTEM

• NBA Commissioner Adam Silver surprisingly painted a stark picture of the pay TV system, calling it “broken” and saying that his league has to do more to attract younger viewers. “Especially for the NBA, which is primarily a cable-satellite sport, that system is broken to a certain extent,” Silver said at SBJ’s Dealmakers in Sports conference. “It’s not just in terms of the loss of homes, but our young viewers, in particular, are tuning out cable, traditional cable.” The pay-TV system, of course, has been the lifeblood of the NBA, contributing an average of $2.66 billion per year into the NBA’s coffers.
  
  
• When SBJ’s Abe Madkour pointed out that the entire pay-TV universe was only down 3% this year, Silver pushed back, citing a stat that showed pay TV has lost 20% of its audience over the past four years. Silver: “You’re really pushing a rock up a hill if you’ve lost 20% of your audience over the last four years especially when ... that young audience that we attract is disproportionately represented by that 20%.”
  
  
• Silver identified “discovery” as an issue that the league needs to address, saying that he sometimes has trouble finding specific programming on cable. An innovation that Silver is bullish on are services that send viewers alerts to an exciting finish to a game. For a small fee, a user can push a button and go right to the game. “Discovery’s very difficult,” Silver said. “We’re on all kinds of different networks depending on where you are, at different times of day, different days of the week. That’s something where technology will help solve some of those problems.”
  
  
• Executives from ESPN and NBC Sports Group pushed back on the idea that the cable system is broken during a panel later in the day. The total multichannel subscriber base currently is at 92.894 million subscribers, including virtual MVPDs, according to the most recent Nielsen report. That’s down 3.2% from last year. ESPN and NBC executives said they already are rolling out a lot of services to court younger fans, from direct-to-consumer services to NBC’s decision to make 20 Trail Blazers games streamed direct to consumer in Portland. “You can’t take a singular approach to the distribution of content anymore and hope to succeed in the same way that you have in the past,” ESPN’s Burke Magnus said.

NBA POINTS TO INJURED STARS AMID RATINGS SLIDE

• Injuries to big stars, rather than load management, is the main reason the NBA’s early season television ratings have dropped double digits on ESPN and Turner, Adam Silver said. One or more star players sat out 21 of the 33 games on ESPN and TNT this season -- a whopping 64% of games. “It’s less about resting; it’s more about injuries,” he said, referring to Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and Zion Williamson. “We have major injuries in the league right now, but that’s something we all have to deal with.”
  
  
• TNT (down 22%) and ESPN (down 19%) both have posted double-digit viewership drops nationally six weeks into this season. ESPN’s Burke Magnus said that his network’s executives try to not get too high when ratings are up or too low when they are down. “We’re careful to not use linear game ratings as a sole proxy for success or failure,” he said.

ESPN’S “GAMEDAY” OUTDRAWS FOX’S “BIG NOON KICKOFF” ON SATURDAY

• ESPN’s “College GameDay” averaged 2.19 million viewers last weekend from 9:00am-12:00pm ET, edging Fox’s college football pregame show in the 10am-noon window. ESPN’s show also beat Fox’s show in the 11am-noon hour -- 2.78 million viewers to 2.395 million viewers. ESPN’s pregame show led into Clemson-South Carolina, while Fox’s show led into the Ohio State-Michigan game, which was the second most-viewed college football game this season on any network (12.42 million), behind only LSU-Alabama on CBS (16.73 million).
  
  

FOX’S “BIG NOON KICKOFF” OUTDRAWS ESPN’S “GAMEDAY” ON SATURDAY

• Fox’s college football pregame show “Big Noon Kickoff” averaged 2.79 million viewers, edging ESPN’s college football pregame show in window measured from 11:00am to kickoff, which was 12:06pm for Fox and 12:00pm for ESPN (yes, those six minutes mattered). ESPN’s “GameDay” averaged 2.78 million viewers from 11:00am-12:00pm.
  
  
• Lies, damned lies and statistics. I declare SBJ Media as the winner of this matchup because we always like good network PR battles.

SPEED READS

• NBC Sports is seeing its best EPL audience in four years, SBJ’s Austin Karp reports. Games across cable and broadcast TV (474,000 viewers) are up 9% from the same point in the 2018-19 campaign (433,000). The British league got out of the gate strong in mid-August, with Chelsea-Manchester United (just over 1 million viewers on NBCSN) marking the best opening weekend match ever on U.S. TV.
  
  
• ViacomCBS completed its merger this afternoon -- creating a deep-pocketed company that could become even more aggressive in pursuing media rights. Earlier this month, CBS surprised the business by placing the winning bid for UEFA Champions League rights.
         
• Former NBA Commissioner David Stern spoke to SBJ at our Dealmakers in Sports conference today about cord cutting and its effect on the NBA. He compared the landscape to 1980s, when the league made the bold call to move games from broadcast TV to cable.
  
  
• Golf analyst Frank Nobilo isn't looking to maintain the status quo on CBS's PGA Tour coverage in 2020. Nobilo, who will join the net on a full-time basis next year after a decade plus at Golf Channel, said, "[CBS] is looking at their own golf coverage like everyone else is, and should be. ... Everybody’s concerned about the TV deals going forward." Nobilo credited Fox for its technology innovations at the U.S. Open, and hinted that similar enhancements could be coming to CBS. "It will change, it will evolve. ... It’s going to be fun to go forward and try things." See tomorrow's issue of THE DAILY for a full Q&A with Nobilo from SBJ's Thomas Leary.
  
  
• Fox' Kevin Burkhardt called an NFL game with Greg Olsen in 2017, and he has no doubt the current Panthers tight end could find work on the media side after his playing career. Burkhardt told THE DAILY's David Rumsey, "It comes naturally to him. It’s pretty hard to be an analyst." Burkhardt was less sure of the broadcast future of Jay Cutler, who was supposed to join he and Charles Davis in 2017. "I haven’t really talked to him, I don’t know. He was into it when we were in the mode and then he got called to go to the Dolphins. My gut is right now I don’t think so."

• Execs like David Zaslav, Alex Kaplan and Bill Goodwyn mingled with reporters like Brian Stelter and Stewart Elliott and stars like Martha Stewart and Eve "Jan Brady" Plumb at a Discovery-hosted party in New York last night at what has become the unofficial first Christmas party of the season. Tomorrow night, it's CBS's turn to host...

Discovery's David Zaslav welcomes Martha Stewart to his company's annual party at ABC Kitchen last night

Enjoying this newsletter? We've got more! Check out SBJ College with Michael Smith on Tuesdays and Thursdays for insights into all the latest news around the world of college sports. Also check out SBJ Football with Ben Fischer on Friday afternoons.

Something on the Media beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).