On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 11:03 AM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Right now, in the States, sports are valuable to advertisers because > they're the one thing that young men will watch in real time, which makes > them valuable to broadcasters. I can see where that wouldn't be such a > selling point for the Premier League, which (fortunately) doesn't stop play > for commercial breaks. >
This is a fair point, and is probably the reason why free-to-air stations in the US can buy and [just about?] make money from sport like the NFL. Lack of ad-breaks in the Premier League mean that there are no free-to-air live games in the UK, just highlights on the BBC. Live Premier League games are exclusively on pay-TV networks like Sky (currently being sold by Murdoch to Disney as part of the Fox deal). But I think there's an interesting place coming next time a big NFL rights deal comes around. Even allowing for the live viewership and valuable male audience, with declining TV ratings and increasing rights costs, there's a point where sports can lose money. It's interesting that NBC feels the need to mention that it made money on the Winter Olympics. How many more cycles will that continue? Fox has bought Thursday night NFL for a substantially inflated price. Will it actually make money on those games? Certainly, even if you lose money, there's value in the promotional opportunities to market the rest of your network's offerings to a valuable audience, and maybe, the boost that those shows get might make the whole enterprise profitable, but it can all be fine margins. Incidentally, starting in the 2019/20 season, the Premier League will have regular 19:45 GMT/14:45 EST fixtures. While this was largely done to gain a healthy Saturday night audience (and Saturday nights are still big business in the UK), I can't help feeling that they have half an eye on the US market. But would that really work in the US? Would it run into college football? Adam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
