Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with another look at the battle between the networks, the affiliates and the distributors — and whether this is even a war all sides are fighting.
Walt Disney once described his most iconic creation, Mickey Mouse, as “a pretty nice fellow who never does anybody any harm, who gets into scrapes through no fault of his own, but always manages to come up grinning.”
While the fumbling machinations of Bob Iger the past few weeks might have one thinking of Disney as a ‘Mickey Mouse organization,’ make no mistake that the company that always manages to come up grinning does so with its teeth bared.
Two weeks ago, the regulators and the affiliates seemingly felt they had Disney cornered. Two weeks later, not only has Disney emerged pretty much unscathed (at least pending any new lawsuits), it has made it abundantly clear that the affiliates are a ‘nice to have’ not a ‘must have’ for its programming. A late-night show topping the six million viewer mark with two station groups — totaling nearly a quarter of markets — refusing to air it? Put aside the politics, put aside the culture war, and understand that Disney called the affiliates’ bluff and they caved within mere days.
The resolution of the Kimmel affair — which began less than two weeks ago — was almost too easy, given how intractable it seemed.
The comedian Bill Maher, whose ABC show was canceled under pressure more than 20 years ago, recently said that “ABC” stands for “Always Be Caving.” But in every meaningful skirmish of late, it is Disney’s challengers who buckle. Remember when Charter suggested it would exit the distribution game if it did not get what it wanted from Disney? Remember when that was supposed to be the most consequential carriage fight of them all? Ask yourself what Charter got out of it. The ability for its users to sample, for free, Disney apps that are ultimately competition for the cable bundle? The ability to drop a handful of low-wattage cable channels (which have since returned to its lineup)?
There is a conflict in how Disney is perceived. There seems to be a belief that it is simultaneously all-powerful and also ripe for the picking. A steady stream of Davids lines up for a shot at Goliath, almost like lemmings lining up to dive off of a cliff. But what has happened over the course of Disney’s recent battles with affiliates and distributors is that the company appears ever closer to cutting out the middlemen entirely.
The key question is whether that is what Disney actually wants, and how much resistance it really faces.
At a certain point, a lot of the complications in television are hard to justify. Instead of a straight line from a network broadcast to your television screen, content must go through a third-party affiliate group or a distributor who can at any point decide that you are unable to watch the property. Eventually, the drama, the blackouts, the lengthy corporate letters posted to social media, beg the question: Why do we need these middlemen?
Even the middlemen themselves seem aware that they are not entirely necessary. When Nexstar less than a week ago pledged to continue preempting Kimmel, it said in a statement that the show “will be available nationwide on multiple Disney-owned streaming products, while our stations will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets.”
Maybe Nexstar thought it was calling Disney’s bluff. It certainly seems likely that neither Nexstar nor Sinclair fully thought out the preemption decision, given how quickly they backtracked. But whatever the reason, the nation’s largest affiliate group openly admitted that its stations are ultimately unnecessary if one wants to watch network programming. If that goes for Kimmel, it goes for “Monday Night Football” and the SEC on ABC and the NBA Finals — to say nothing of all the other sports properties airing on the other networks with which Nexstar stations are affiliated.
And why stop at station groups? If NBC stations go dark on YouTube TV Wednesday, NBC Sports programming will still be available nationwide on Peacock. In 2025, there is no carriage dispute or affiliate preemption that can prevent a viewer from watching network programming. It is no longer possible to use such programming as leverage if a viewer is a few clicks and give-or-take $30 away from seeing it through other means.
One of the reasons why the cable bundle collapsed was because subscribers realized that they could have exactly what they wanted without having to sign burdensome contracts, wait hours for ‘the cable guy’ — a figure once so ubiquitous that there is a movie of that name — and store bulky equipment that, upon cancellation, must be returned. They did not have to pay hundreds of dollars per month for dozens of channels they never watched. Of course the ‘they’ in question largely consists of people who never watch sports. For the sports fan, cable and its successors have remained a necessity.
That is unlikely to change anytime soon; the bundle is still a more cost-effective and convenient option than subscribing to several different services. But in a media business where the networks seem to be in a cold war with the affiliates and the distributors, the biggest convenience offered by a direct-to-subscriber service may be the simple guarantee that all of the programming offered by a given network will be available.
ESPN Unlimited is probably not the best possible deal, but at least you can be quite sure that you will never be blacked out of games there — save, of course, for any that are subject to league blackout rules. You can be sure that no local programming, from weather reports to telethons to children’s programming, is going to prevent you from watching your desired game.
For the average viewer, that assurance is probably not enough to move away from the bundle — at least not yet. Given enough time, and more open conflict between the networks and the middlemen, perhaps it will be enough to make these direct-to-subscriber services more attractive.
Already, the Kimmel conflict had analysts at the firm Needham suggesting last week that Disney shut down ABC. That suggestion is of course unworkable, considering all of the Disney sports rights deals that require a broadcast television component. But what Disney can do is erode the broadcast TV business, and even its cable TV business, by growing its direct-to-subscriber business. The Kimmel playbook — where blacked out programming is available via direct-to-subscriber streaming — could come in handy in about a month if Disney and YouTube TV are unable to reach a deal.
But do not discount the possibility that this victory will be Pyrrhic. The middlemen exist because the networks make good money off of them. It is the same reason why the leagues continue to sell their rights to media companies rather than distribute games themselves.
Until the day comes when revenue from direct-to-subscriber services surpasses the combined revenues of retransmission and subscriber fees, the headaches will be deemed worth it.
So what exactly is the state of play here? Disney — and its similarly sized brethren — is with at least some success undermining a business model that it cannot yet live totally without. The industry transition period that has so benefited the leagues is a bit different for the networks. The leagues can simultaneously have one foot in the past and one in the future, but for the networks, one takes away from the other.
It is not such a great deal for the middlemen either. The price of survival remains high, and the leverage is getting lower and lower.
Perhaps the real question after the past couple of weeks is which side most needs the status quo. In his newsletter last week, Alex Sherman of CNBC wrote that NBC executives are ‘skeptical’ of YouTube in negotiations over a new carriage deal. Their belief is that a YouTube TV blackout would actually benefit parent company Google, whose regular YouTube business figures to benefit from “any degradation in traditional TV.”
Similarly, the analyst Rich Greenfield (as quoted in Monday’s John Ourand Puck newsletter) wrote last week that while “YouTube and its parent company, Google, would be unaffected if YouTube TV collapsed and/or disappeared,” that scenario would be “quite painful” for NBCU or Disney.
Surely, YouTube — the single biggest source of media usage — is an exception. There are no other distributors, and certainly no affiliate groups, who have that leverage.
But if you were to read between the lines, and look at Charter’s one-time willingness to exit pay cable, or even Nexstar openly encouraging viewers to stream Kimmel, you might start to wonder if they see any hope in the status quo as well. After all, those lemmings never actually dove off of cliffs, they were pushed. You’ll never guess by who.
Plus: NFL ties, WNBA, Finebaum
“Nobody’s a winner tonight,” NBC’s Mike Tirico said, albeit cheerfully, in the early hours of Monday morning. Sunday’s Packers-Cowboys game might have been the most-watched tie in NFL history, given the quality of the matchup. Any pairing of Green Bay and Dallas is going to be a high-profile game, and the recent Micah Parsons trade only amplified the hype. Add to that the entertaining nature of the “Sunday Night Football” shootout, and one wonders just how many viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a game end at deuce.
The question of whether NFL games should or should not end in ties is beyond the scope of this site, but it seems notable that an audience approaching (or maybe exceeding) 30 million devoted four hours to a game that had no winner. For an NFL that seems to take great pride in being the nation’s preeminent television property, it was a particularly anti-climactic final act.
WNBA playoff viewership is already up slightly from last year, and while Nielsen’s methodological changes are almost certainly the reason for the 1% bump through last Tuesday’s games, it is no small feat that viewership is close enough to last year for that to matter. Caitlin Clark was out most of the regular season and will miss the entire playoffs, but her absence has hardly had the impact on viewership that one would expect.
Two things are true. Clark was and is the biggest draw in the WNBA’s history, and her popularity has quite clearly extended to her Indiana team — which is now one win shy of the most surprising Finals run since their NBA counterpart Pacers in June. And it is becoming fairly obvious that the entire WNBA is more popular now than it was in the years prior to Clark’s arrival. Whether one wants to credit that to Clark or not, it is hard to dispute at this point.
Before one starts taking Paul Finebaum’s post-ESPN plans too seriously, it is worth recalling that just six years ago he was reportedly thinking of leaving ESPN for ventures that included his own sitcom. That effort apparently went as far as the casting process — Jason Biggs would have played him, he later said — but thanks to COVID it fell apart.
He was also said to be in the mix for a Ringer-style startup, a role with DAZN or a move to SI or Fox Sports.
None of this is to diminish any genuine feelings Finebaum may have in this scenario. But it is worth noting that LIV Golf analyst and former Alabama governor Charles Barkley has floated similarly bold plans at contract time as well. When it comes to leaving cushy sports media gigs, actions speak louder than words.
