The Varsity
1) TV executives are worried that Netflix will cave to market pressures and create ad packages for their two Christmas day National Football League (NFL) games that undercut the market that traditional networks have established. The games are certain to draw large audiences, but most advertisers want to reach viewers during the weeks before Christmas—not on the holiday, itself.
2) Jon Stewart on the problems with trying to do content on Apple TV +. After all, linear and pay TV players like NBC Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery's TNT have built their brands around their coverage of live sports—years of Olympics coverage, John Tesh's “Roundball Rock,” The Guys in Studio J in Atlanta, etc. For Apple and Amazon, however, both entertainment and live sports are means to a more elaborate end.
3) I'm seeing plenty of distribution warning signs for Ted Leonsis' Monumental Sports Network LLC regional sports network, primarily due to the fact that it is an independent RSN. When NBC owned the channel, it created leverage by tying its carriage to NBC’s other channels so that if Fubo wanted to drop the R.S.N., it would have had to go without NBC’s other channels just a month before the Paris Olympics. MSN doesn't have that leverage.
4) David Zaslav has told intermediaries that he has not shut the door on the idea of pursuing legal recourse if the NBA denies WBD the ability to exercise matching rights on Amazon’s package. I’ve dismissed rumors of potential legal action over the past couple of weeks because it seemed so far-fetched. In my decades covering this industry, I have never once seen a media company threaten legal action against a league it wants to be in business with. But this threat is increasingly being sounded.
5) During the NFL's months-long rights negotiations with YoutubeTV, several league sources suggested that Apple was also in the midst of serious talks. But when Apple executive Stephen Smith was asked about the specter of a deal during deposition, he acknowledged “I don’t believe we were ever that close.”
Plus, fifteen months out from the launch of ESPN’s new streaming property, dubbed internally as Project Flagship, questions are mounting alongside expectations.
The market still has more questions than answers about Flagship—including real biggies, like its name, cost, and content offering. ESPN has not made any announcements about the fate of ESPN+, the streaming service it launched six years ago as a complement to its linear channels. Will ESPN+ continue on its own, or will it be folded into Flagship? Or will it instead become a top-of-funnel play?
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