New Big Ten Media Rights Deal

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#2      

redwingillini11

redwingillini11
White and Sixth
North Aurora
redwingillini11
theathletic.com

Big Ten signs TV rights deals worth over $8 billion

The league unveiled seven-year agreements with Fox/FS1, CBS, NBC and the Big Ten Network, which will run through the 2029-30 academic year.
theathletic.com theathletic.com

The league unveiled seven-year agreements with Fox/FS1, CBS, NBC and the Big Ten Network, which will take the Big Ten through the 2029-30 academic year. The conference also announced a deal with Peacock, the direct-to-consumer streaming platform from NBCUniversal. Peacock will exclusively stream four conference football games per year in addition to four nonconference games involving Big Ten teams.
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It all sounds great except OOF on the Peacock part. There's no doubt we end up on one or two Peacock games per year. That really sucks...

Although I do think there's a chance they may want to balance to have higher profile teams play a Peacock game. If the whole goal is to get people to sign up for the service, who will drive more signups? Illinois fans or Penn State fans? Northwestern fans or Iowa fans? Rutgers fans or Michigan State fans? But this will no doubt be annoying for us at some point though.
 
#4      

redwingillini11

redwingillini11
White and Sixth
North Aurora
redwingillini11
Dan said:
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1560257823216386048
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Peacock, NBCUniversal's direct-to-consumer streaming service will deliver exclusive Big Ten football and basketball games each season, as eight regular-season football games will appear on the platform along with as many as 47 regular-season men’s basketball games (32 conference and 15 non-conference) and 30 regular-season women’s basketball games (20 conference and 10 non-conference).
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Yikes, didn't even think of basketball. That is going to be A LOT of Illini basketball games on Peacock. No avoiding a subscription now....
 
#5      

ChiefGritty

ChiefGritty
Chicago, IL
ChiefGritty
www.espn.com

Big Ten completes $7B deal with Fox, CBS, NBC

The Big Ten has completed a new seven-year media rights agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC that is set to bring in more than $7 billion to one of the nation's most powerful athletic conferences.
www.espn.com www.espn.com

As I said in the other thread, the Fox-CBS-NBC weekly tripleheader is a triumph for the conference as a big time football brand. It's a real upping of the ante in the new war against ESPN and the SEC, and it's the kind of thing you make sacrifices and tradeoffs to make happen.

Well, here come the tradeoffs.

"CBS will continue to air Big Ten men's basketball regular-season and tournament games, and will add the league's women's basketball tournament championship for the first time. Peacock will carry up to 47 men's basketball games (32 conference games) and 30 women's basketball games (20 conference games) per season. Fox and FS1 will broadcast at least 45 men's basketball games per season, and Big Ten Network will broadcast at least 126 men's basketball games per season."

Can't really sugarcoat it, that's a disaster for Illinois Basketball. Streaming exclusives are bad, and Peacock is a particularly bad outlet. Our visibility dramatically decreases and you and I now have to pay more for the privilege.

"The Big Ten has completed a new seven-year media rights agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC that is set to bring in more than $7 billion to one of the nation's most powerful athletic conferences.

The deal will begin July 1, 2023, and run through the end of the 2029-30 athletic year. Specific terms were not disclosed, but a financial windfall won't come immediately, according to media sources. The CBS payout in Year 1 of the agreement is lower since it still will be carrying SEC games during the 2023 season, and will air only seven Big Ten contests that fall. But the Big Ten's per-school distribution will slope upward in Year 2 of the deal, when new members USC and UCLA enter the Big Ten. Revenue will rise substantially beginning in Year 3."

It's still a ton of money and the upward trajectory over the course of the deal is standard and sensible (especially in a world in which inflation is a live issue), but 7 years $7 billion for the expanded league is below the expectations that were set.

And the right way to look at this is to combine the Big Ten and Pac 12. We see a bit less growth than anticipated, the Pac 12 sees decline, maybe sharply. Because the Big Ten stole their schools we get to drink their milkshake, but added together it's evocative of the rapidly softening TV entertainment industry.


It's worse to be an Illini fan in this new world. The sky is NOT falling, do not accuse me of saying that, but everything about this is in service of raising the profile of the tippy-top football games. We knew most of this was coming, but it's a worse day for Big Ten basketball than I expected.

The interesting thing now is exactly how much smaller the Pac 12 deal ends up being. What has to make this worth it is a collapse in revenue among our erstwhile Power Five competitors. Not sure what to expect.
 
#7      

Joel Goodson

Joel Goodson
respect my decision™
Joel Goodson
sinmyp1 said:
The Peacock part sucks! I am sure that Illini will be at least 1 if those 8 football games and several basketball games.
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Tons of basketball games. "Peacock will stream 32 regular-season men’s basketball games (20 conference games) in 2023-24 and 47 games (32 conference games) from 2024-25 onward as well as the Big Ten tournament’s opening night doubleheader."

Casual fans (an oxymoron, no?) will balk, but hello, Peacock! (ya gotta pay to play).
 
#8      

sbillini

sbillini
st petersburg, fl
sbillini
not particularly surprised by the peacock news, but still bummed. NBC has been throwing as much sports as they can onto peacock to drum up subscribers, esp after they shut down NBCSN. Until they throw in the towel on the service (which may very well happen, because the streaming platforms are quickly becoming a land grab but with questionable economics - for now at least), i suspect they'll continue to throw more and more onto the platform, and other networks follow suit to see what the market can bear.
 
#9      

redwingillini11

redwingillini11
White and Sixth
North Aurora
redwingillini11
Someone pointed out that the ESPN-SEC deal puts a few games per year per school exclusively on ESPN+. And I remember that part of the reason ESPN was left out of this deal was because we weren't willing to give them any inventory for ESPN+, which means they really were pushing for ESPN+ games. Makes me think either way some basketball games were going to streaming.

Still wish it was on a service I already have like Amazon or Apple, but this kind of set up was likely inevitable no matter who won the bids.
 
#11      

pruman91

pruman91
Paducah, Ky
pruman91
sbillini said:
not particularly surprised by the peacock news, but still bummed. NBC has been throwing as much sports as they can onto peacock to drum up subscribers, esp after they shut down NBCSN. Until they throw in the towel on the service (which may very well happen, because the streaming platforms are quickly becoming a land grab but with questionable economics - for now at least), i suspect they'll continue to throw more and more onto the platform, and other networks follow suit to see what the market can bear.
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I've never watched peacock at all , but the reports and posts here I've read make it sound like it's worse than B1G + or espnu as far as streaming rate or announcers/ production quality......................is peacock really as bad as I have heard ????????

asking for myself...................
 
#12      

ChiefGritty

ChiefGritty
Chicago, IL
ChiefGritty
redwingillini11 said:
Someone pointed out that the ESPN-SEC deal puts a few games per year per school exclusively on ESPN+. And I remember that part of the reason ESPN was left out of this deal was because we weren't willing to give them any inventory for ESPN+, which means they really were pushing for ESPN+ games. Makes me think either way some basketball games were going to streaming.
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Good catch, I hadn't seen that.

You'd rather be on ESPN+ than Peacock, but both stink and you'd imagine this Peacock thing was the sweetener that got NBC to create the new prime-time football game.

USC and Ohio State football are going to have huge visibility and big ratings and one would imagine a lot of Playoff success. And we're going to have the occasional big network game where they pummel us, and collect an equal share of the money.

That equilibrium won't hold forever.
 
#15      

MTMinded

M
Fatigued
MTMinded
pruman91 said:
I've never watched peacock at all , but the reports and posts here I've read make it sound like it's worse than B1G + or espnu as far as streaming rate or announcers/ production quality......................is peacock really as bad as I have heard ????????

asking for myself...................
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I have had peacock for years for EPL. Quality is good. This doesn’t bother me at all.
 
#16      

sacraig

sacraig
The desert
sacraig

A few things stood out immediately aside from the bottom line:

- Getting NBC in on the action so that Notre Dame isn't their only brand smells like a play to eventually absorb Notre Dame.

- On most Saturdays, a Big Ten game will be on Network TV basically all day. That's big in terms of total eyeballs.

- “We looked at the value that the Big Ten brought us and the national scope, and this deal makes a lot of sense for us,” McManus [chairman of CBS Sports] said. “The deal that we were talking to the SEC about just didn’t make a lot of sense for us.”

That quote above is why you add USC and UCLA.
 
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#17      

ILLjuice

ILLjuice
ILLjuice
MTMinded said:
I have had peacock for years for EPL. Quality is good. This doesn’t bother me at all.
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Yeah I agree, I don't really understand why everyone is upset about Peacock. I'd rather have that than pay for YoutubeTV just to get BTN. Even though we'll still probably have to do that too for a few games. It's infinitely better than paying for BTN+ though.
 
#19      

ChiefGritty

ChiefGritty
Chicago, IL
ChiefGritty
MTMinded said:
I have had peacock for years for EPL. Quality is good. This doesn’t bother me at all.
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Well, for EPL Peacock is using the Sky Sports feed from the UK.

For football, NBC broadcasts the biggest, highest rated NFL game every week so they know what they're doing from a presentation perspective and with the weekly NBC primetime game I'm sure there will be a lot of carryover in terms of the look and feel.

For basketball this is a streaming-only package of pretty low-rent inventory for which they will have the whole responsibility for broadcast production, and the NBC family has been out of the basketball business since the days of Michael Jordan. I would not have high expectations there. Wouldn't shock me if it winds up being a BTN broadcast with a Peacock logo stuck on it (might be the best case scenario).

And Peacock the app is not a great user experience. They're all more or less fine in terms of streaming reliability and video quality these days (none are perfect, it's still a technology working the kinks out), but it's pretty clunky getting there.
 
#20      

The Galloping Ghost

The Galloping Ghost
Washington, DC
The Galloping Ghost
I don't really understand the consternation about Peacock. Just about everybody has at least one streaming service. Frankly, if you have somehow made it to 2022 without some form of streaming service, you're an anomaly. The lowest tier of Peacock where you can still watch sports is $4.99. If you have Netflix, you're paying $15.49 for their basic service and not even getting live sports. Just cancel the streaming services that don't provide you what you want and you're good.

Plus, if we were fans of the SEC, we'd still have to get ESPN+ at $9.99 a month. Streaming is a part of watching sports at this point. Is it ideal to have to get a streaming service to watch all your team's games? No. But it was a heck of a lot worse when you just straight up had no way to watch games you wanted to see pre-streaming. Here, we are on the cheapest service out there and guaranteed to be able to see the games we want to watch. Give me a streaming option over hoping to goodness we get a nationally televised game every single time.
 
#21      

the juiceman cometh

T
the juiceman cometh
To put some numbers to this Peacock thing, when the conference goes to 16, assuming basketball keeps a 20 game schedule there would be 32/160 conference games on Peacock. That is exactly 1 of every 5. Add in 15 additional nonconference games and it looks like the typical B1G basketball team will have 4-5 games a season on Peacock.
 
#22      

WeWillWhen

WeWillWhen
WeWillWhen
www.si.com

Big Ten announces new multi-billion-dollar media rights deal - Sports Illustrated

Here is how fans can watch football, basketball and more after the 2022-23 season.
www.si.com www.si.com

Several Josh Whitman quotes in here.

Also, I’ve seen several articles mentioning escalator clauses in the deal that will raise the revenue by several billion if/when additional schools are added. I’d love to see more details about that. But some very basic math suggests to me that the escalator may be large enough to provide flexibility to add schools without reducing the expected payouts per legacy member. That would be huge.

Last, I’ll note that seven years is an interesting length. Last year the NFL sold its rights for 11 years. I think the SEC’s deal goes through 2023 and ESPN’s deal for CFP through 2026, so BIG won’t need to wait long to negotiate next package after seeing those deals, and likely, after some more conference realignment.
 
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#23      

spotter

S
spotter
sinmyp1 said:
The Peacock part sucks! I am sure that Illini will be at least 1 if those 8 football games and several basketball games.
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Agree on football.

I think CBS and FOX will want a top-tier Illini basketball team on the big network as much as possible. Maybe Illini-Penn State to get a subscription, but I don't think it will be "several."
 
#24      

spotter

S
spotter
pruman91 said:
I've never watched peacock at all , but the reports and posts here I've read make it sound like it's worse than B1G + or espnu as far as streaming rate or announcers/ production quality......................is peacock really as bad as I have heard ????????

asking for myself...................
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I'm a fan of Indy Cars. Some preliminary events are on Peacock. One feature race was on Peacock this season. Fans hate it. Resent having to pay for it, and streaming quality is poor. Now, football is more popular than racing. Hope Peacock gets it together and produces quality streaming.
 
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