The regional sports networks are the canary in the coal mine for the cable bundle. I used to work for Fox Sports Pittsburgh and I can tell you, the pain is real.
Not only are cords being cut but cable companies do not pay the same rate as one another. It’s like a UAW contract, you pick a company, freeze it and isolate it.
We could pick up county by county viewership and extort (I purposely use that word extort.) more from certain cable companies than another. The further you got away from your major league city, the less you paid. The closer you were, the more you paid. Advertising was a joke, it was gravy, stellar ratings basically paid for production and a bloated staff’s salary. The fortune was made in the bundle.
We were on 24/7/365 and had ratings 70 times or 210 hours during the winter (Pittsburgh Penguins.) and 150 times or 450 hours during the summer (Pittsburgh Pirates). So of the 8,760 hours in a year, people watched our channel 360 of them. We could actually sell time in only 4% of our broadcast day that advertisers would buy.
However people in PA, WV, OH and MD paid us $7 a month. In turn the Pittsburgh Pirates, the worst team in baseball, had one of the best local TV packages valued at $50-60 million.
The cable cutting killed the RSN’s. Most of them, believe it or not, have small to no ratings. No value whatsoever. When they started losing 30% of their base revenues cable companies could say no to any price increase, they couldn’t bundle 10 networks with it.
I would say I feel bad for my old industry and co-workers but I don’t. The TV business is absolutely filled with executives and managers that are the dumbest people you will ever meet that all believe they are smarter than any person in the room. No lie, no exaggeration, no bias. I lived it for more than 10 years.
His doom and gloom about sports costing a fortune for fans in the future is not going to happen.
There are just as many dumb people at Google, Amazon, Apple and Netflix that think the “halo effect” of having a sports league is worth the billions they paid for it. That will get the sports fans through the next 10-15 years.
It’s a debt that is coming and will have to be paid but there are even bigger pockets being controlled by the same old dumb TV people.
Good post.
The industry is in complete chaos—that is the dirty secret of all the players.
“ would say I feel bad for my old industry and co-workers but I don’t. The TV business is absolutely filled with executives and managers that are the dumbest people you will ever meet that all believe they are smarter than any person in the room. No lie, no exaggeration, no bias. I lived it for more than 10 years”
You can add management of cable tv providers in there as well.
Thank you for your insight into regional sports networks.