Tell that to the NFL, who just signed ridiculous sports media deals.
http://www.adweek.com/news/television/nfl-hammers-out-nine-year-rights-renewals-nbc-cbs-fox-137128
This just tells me that you don't know nearly as much as you think you do.
People keep talking about the sports media bubble bursting, yet the deals keep going up. As people stop watching live TV and cutting their cable cords it actually makes live sports an even move valuable commodity.
Okay, a couple things. First of all that article is from 2011. Not sure what your point is there.
Secondly, you have to understand that the explosion in TV rights for sports comes from two distinct pools of money that were both rapidly expanding at the same time. The first is the fact that live sports became for awhile the only reliable way to put an ad in front of an 18-49 year old male, the most coveted advertising demographic. That advantage is declining slowly, as changes in on-demand ads and various advancements in mobile phone ads are increasingly making advertisers more comfortable with non-traditional metrics of ad penetration. It's not that watching live sports is the only thing young men do (except me
), it's that people couldn't figure out other ways to get an ad in front of them. That's changing, little by little.
The second piece is the cable rights fees scam. Grab some content that is absolutely essential to a small number of people and hijack it, demanding a ransom from every customer from a cable system, rather than just the ones willing to pay for it. It was brilliant when it worked. It is now crashing down and fast. The big catalyzing event, the "popping" of the bubble seems to have been
ESPN's decision to undergo enormous cost-cutting. A lot of the big deals being made were overpays in order to lure content away from ESPN. You don't have to overpay to do that anymore and everyone knows it.
So there are two different kinds of exposure for sports entities: to the drip-drip-dripping over 18-49 male exclusivity for advertisers, or to the collapsing house of cards of cable rights fees.
The NFL is almost entirely exposed to the former, and their enormous real viewership, as opposed to "in-demo relative to other things" viewership, insulates them somewhat. Even so, they gave out more inventory to multiple partners just to maintain a modest increase in their Thursday night rights a couple of days ago, which reflects the fact that
those broadcasts are loss leaders for the networks at this point.
The Big Ten, on the other hand, is almost totally exposed to the cable bubble. There are some broadcast pieces to the Big Ten's TV inventory, but the TV revenue mainly comes from BTN dividends and rights fees from ESPN. The BTN equity (The Big Ten owns 49%, FOX owns 51%) is in big trouble, a telling harbinger of what's coming was the SEC's decision to take no ownership stake in the SEC Network and just sign a pure cash rights deal. When the SEC Network goes bankrupt (and it will) it won't make any difference, but the conference won't be bled dry in the meantime. And ESPN isn't going to stump up the money they used to for another college conference to throw on their overpriced inventory. Fox is probably the most likely outcome, but they have overcrowding of their own, and they know they don't need to beat an enormous ESPN offer.
The exact mechanics by which this all comes crashing down are unclear at this point, but the crash is at hand. In 15-20 years sports fans will watch live games exclusively through paying for a la carte services similar to NFL Sunday Ticket or what the Premier League does with Sky Sports in the UK. It will cost an eye-watering amount of money to be a general-purpose sports fan. It's gonna suck, and it's going to hurt the popularity of the games. A golden age is ending.