Fang's Bites Media Notebook Edition No. 3
Amazon's expanding sports portfolio, traditional college basketball tournaments could go the way of the dinosaur and that looming NFL 18-game schedule
Hello everyone. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed your time with your family.
I owe you one more free column before I turn on the paywall this month so this will be free to all. The next column will be for paid subscribers so I hope you like what you have seen thus far and subscribe.
I greatly appreciate you reading.
Amazon is a force in sports media
If you’ve followed sports media casually, you’ll know that streaming is more prevalent in your viewing experience. All of the networks, except for Fox, have a streaming element whether it’s ESPN+, Paramount+, Peacock and there’s Netflix which is dipping its proverbial toe ever so slowly in the water with live events and then there’s Amazon which has built quite the sports property portfolio for its Prime Video service.
It’s partnered with the NFL for Thursday Night Football first streaming Fox’s feed in 2017 and using its own announcers to provide secondary streams, but now, it’s in its third season as the sole rightsholder.
It has purchased rights to the NWSL, One Fighting Championship, Premier Boxing Champions and we know that it will carry NASCAR, the NBA and WNBA starting next year. It also carries 20 New York Yankees games in the team’s footprint as it owns a stake in YES.
This strategy isn’t limited to the United States, Amazon is streaming English Premier League and UEFA Champions League matches in the United Kingdom, In Canada, Prime Video is carrying NHL games for the first time this season and has added the PWHL.
In France, Prime Video has rights to the country’s biggest elite soccer league, Ligue 1 and streams night session matches at the French Open.
Among some of its agreements around the globe, Amazon has rights to properties in Australia, Brazil, Japan and Mexico.
An attraction to sports leagues is of course the reach that Amazon can bring to the table. It has global rights to the NBA, NFL, WNBA and to the Professional Pickleball Association. And as Amazon continues to look for more properties to buy, know that it will likely not stop at regular season games.
Prime Video has rights to a NFL Wild Card Playoff game this season after Peacock had the game last season. And while you may think that Amazon might be happy with that, you’re quite mistaken. It’s already setting its sights on the Super Bowl in the next NFL media rights contract which is set to expire in 2033, however, the NFL can opt out in 2029.
Jay Marine leads Prime Video Sports and he told the Washington Post that the Super Bowl is in Amazon’s sights.
“Would I like to broadcast the Super Bowl [in the next rights cycle]?” Marine said. “Yes.”
And we know how aggressive Amazon was in the NBA rights negotiations after ESPN and WBD allowed it to enter the fray and purchase rights along with Comcast/NBC and Disney/ESPN. And these rights include a package of regular season games, the NBA Cup, the entire Play-In tournament, playoff games and six conference finals. This is nothing to sneeze at.
In his podcast, Everybody Loves Sports Media, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and co-host Jon Meterparel discussed how Amazon, not Fox nor NBC, is ESPN’s biggest threat. I agree that with Amazon’s unlimited resources, it can outbid the traditional TV networks and can provide the global audience that leagues desire.
Netflix is also an X Factor, but after its issues with the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight the service has to prove it can provide a stable feed without the lagging that plagued that event. Everyone will watch Christmas Day to determine if Netflix can be a player in sports media.
For now, Amazon is the go-to place for sports streaming and it has a portfolio that is year-round. With rights that will last the entire sports calendar, it has become a destination for sports fans. It will also look at college sports to expand its properties. It’s notable that Amazon outbid NBC for the Big Ten primetime football package, but at the time university presidents were questioning whether viewers would want to find their games on a streaming service, but with solid numbers for Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football (averaging 14.31 million viewers through Week 12), people are watching.
Amazon executives have to be excited with NASCAR and NBA coming to the service in 2025 and providing new eyeballs to its service plus bring more people to shop for items. We can’t forget Amazon’s other services.
The strategy behind Amazon’s ever-expanding sports portfolio isn’t a mystery. It wants eyeballs to not just watch sports, but also sample its website to make purchases. You saw it in play throughout its Black Friday NFL game between Las Vegas and Kansas City with the promotion of deals and various items to purchase. Expect more tie-ins with the NBA and NASCAR.
Plus, Amazon would love to create a Black Friday NFL-NBA extravaganza as Colin Salao of Front Office Sports writes:
The focus of the NBA, together with Amazon, a new partner in the league’s next media deal, is to turn Black Friday into a day for both basketball and football. The day normally associated with going to malls to rummage through sales has instead become an online shopping bonanza for many, which means many stay in the comfort of their own homes—and are probably on Amazon.
In 2023, the NFL aired its first Black Friday game—which drew fewer than 10 million viewers—but could rise this year with the Chiefs on the card. The NFL cannot air games on Friday nights past 6 p.m. ET due to an antitrust exemption, so the Black Friday start time is at 3 p.m. ET, giving ample time for the NBA to slip in one to two games on the card. The NBA is expected to have at least one Black Friday game starting in 2025.
The expectation for sports media is that streaming will have a bigger role as the cable TV bundle continues to implode and consumers no longer watch content via traditional media. Leagues want to go where the viewers are. TV still has power in reaching mass audiences, but streaming is finding audiences that traditional media cannot. Amazon will continue to be aggressive in purchasing sports media rights.
Unlike the traditional networks, it can be selective in what it buys and fit the programming where it sees fit. Unlike a traditional network, it doesn’t have to slot programming into certain holes, it can just stream a game whenever its wants and viewers can find it.
It’s no longer Comcast/NBC, Disney/NBC, Fox and Paramount/CBS bidding for major sports, you can add Amazon and maybe Netflix into the ring. They’re not going away anytime soon and expect to see plenty of tentpole events down the line as well.
Is the future of college basketball tournaments in doubt?
There’s nothing like holiday hoops during Thanksgiving week. With all of the MTE’s (multiple team events) across the country like the Maui Invitational in the recovering Lahaina, Hawai’i, Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas, Cancun Challenge in Mexico, Fort Myers Challenge and the new Players Era Festival, there were plenty of games to watch last week. There was college basketball content from morning to way past midnight on the East Coast.
It was fun to watch as you could flip around to CBS Sports Network, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, truTV, TBS and TNT on TV, ESPN+, FloSports and Max online.
While this was great to watch and allowed viewers to do their own college basketball version of an NFL RedZone, is the MTE a dying breed? That’s a good question in this new era of Name, Image, and Likeness.
Tournaments like the Maui Invitational and Battle 4 Atlantis are conducted the old way, inviting colleges to their sites to play as many as three games in as many days. Schools pay their way to play. But now, it’s the players who are paid and for schools to benefit, they need to find incentives to make the players happy and to make money to pay the players.
The Players Era Festival in the Las Vegas area did just that by bringing in eight teams and raising NIL revenue to ensure that the players were compensated for their time. In its mission statement, the Players Era Festival website said the tournament is “committed to providing $9 Million in NIL to college basketball players in 2024 for their engagement in activities separate and apart from competition, and more than $50 million in NIL over the next three years. For these NIL payments, players will perform services and activities fully compliant with current NCAA regulations.”
Non-NIL tournaments will likely have to change their models and do more than to pay schools to appear. Matt Norlander of CBS Sports notes that while schools love to go to Maui, the tournament will have to find new sources of revenue to attract the fields the tournament normally attracts:
The format is not going to change for the next three years, organizers said. The teams that have agreed to play for 2025, 2026 and 2027 have done so knowing it will still be three games in three days with the same bracket arrangement Maui has been for most of its existence. That doesn't mean it can't change, but it's not expected to until at least 2028. This has caused some notable high-major programs to pass on considering Maui for the near-term, though not all.
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With a few notable exceptions, if Maui wants to continue to produce the best fields, it's probably going to have to break from tradition. It's going to have to figure out a way to make it so teams don't have to lose money to come to play. Come 2028, this might no longer be three games in three days with eight teams in the same bracket anymore. There could be four high-majors and four mid-majors. Organizers might have to start paying schools, or players, in an effort to making the trip as close to a break-even proposition as possible.
So that likely means that smaller tournaments which play two games in as many days will go by the wayside. Tournaments like the Players Era Festival that can show the money and compensate the schools and players will increase. We’ve seen what happened to the Great Alaska Shootout which used to be a beloved holiday tournament with great fields, but is now on the verge of going away. Maui and Battle 4 Atlantis may be fighting for their survival in the next few years as schools look for new revenue streams.
College basketball games will always be there for us to watch, but the holiday tournaments that we have known will likely change and the Maui’s, Charleston Classics and Myrtle Beach Invitationals may be things of the past and NIL era will shuffle in more tournaments like the Players Era.
NIL is still the Wild Wild West in college sports and the dust isn’t going to settle for a long while.
The NFL 18-game schedule is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room
When the NFL expanded to 17 regular season games in the 2021 season, the conventional wisdom was that 18 games wasn’t far behind. It’s well known that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants it. The owners and the NFL’s media partners want it.
Goodell has tied an 16-game international schedule to an 18-game slate. But any expansion of the regular season must be done in conjunction with the NFL Players Association. While the players have been formally opposed to an 18-game schedule, the NFL could offer an additional bye week which would make the NFL season 20 weeks. The regular season would start on Labor Day Weekend and then end in the first week of January with the Super Bowl played on President’s Day Weekend thus allowing for fans to have the day after Super Bowl Sunday off.
The current Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NFL Players Association ends in 2031, but as Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk points out, the NFL and the union can forge an agreement at any time. As I mentioned in the section on Amazon, the NFL can opt out of its current media contract in 2029 and it could target that year to try to expand to 18 games in the 2029-30 season.
To expand to 18 games within five years, the NFL and NFL Players Association would have to strike a deal short of the expiration of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement. However, they can revise their agreement whenever they want; for example, they basically re-did the current CBA only months after it was signed, due to the pandemic.
So let’s say this happens, the NFL and NFLPA come to an agreement for an 18-game schedule with 20 weeks of play, two byes and in turn, two preseason games and the Super Bowl on President’s Day Weekend, what else could this bring?
Well, the obvious would be the 16-game international games package which would likely be sold as an additional package. Would this be saved for Netflix or perhaps ESPN’s new standalone streaming app (coming in 2025 to a mobile device near you)?
We know Goodell is talking about eight international games next season with games in London, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Mexico and Brazil. These games will be dispersed among the present NFL media partners, however, if when that 18-game schedule is approved and a new media contract is negotiated, just know that we’ll be having Sunday morning football for a majority of the season.
That international package will probably go to a streamer or perhaps say, The CW, if majority owner Nexstar wants to expand its partnership with the NFL beyond shoulder programming. However, I believe the international package is going to go to Netflix, Amazon, ESPN+ or Peacock.
It’s hard to predict our media consumption in five years, but traditional TV should still be around with streaming to be more common. Could Amazon join the Super Bowl rotation with CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC? It all depends on its viewership for Thursday Night Football, but let’s say its audience for the Wild Card game is on a par with the traditional over-the-air networks, the NFL could allow Amazon to stream one Super Bowl as an experiment.
If the NFL follows its previous contract terms in the 21st Century, we could see a contract lasting over a decade to ensure consistency and constant revenue to NFL owners.
Now the playoffs. The NFL has a six-game Wild Card Weekend. Why not eliminate the bye for the top seed and bring in an additional team from each conference to make for a 16-team, eight-game weekend? The NFL could schedule three games on Saturday and Sunday with a Monday doubleheader or go with single games on Friday and Monday, three games on Saturday and Sunday.
No matter how it’s scheduled, the NFL would have two more playoff games to distribute among its partners and could give two games each to CBS, Fox and NBC, one each to Amazon and ESPN/ABC to make everyone happy.
Divisional Weekend could remain with a distribution of CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC then Conference Championship Sunday staying with CBS and Fox.
Any Super Bowls could have CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox, and NBC airing the games at least twice and Amazon getting one Big Game. This is where I could see the NFL awarding a Super Bowl to an international destination like London as a reward to hosting several regular season games.
All this would lead billions of dollars into the NFL’s coffers and allow Roger Goodell to end his term on a very happy note.
Will all this happen? The 18-game schedule with 16 international games and 20-week season is very likely. I’d say the playoffs is quite possible and the international Super Bowl a remote possibility. We know the NFL likes to create packages and revenue streams where it can. Another package of games would give NFL owners more money to put in their pockets.
Last Thoughts
Once again, thanks for reading this column. After this, the paywall will begin and I hope you will subscribe. My goal for this site is to write multiple columns per week and if I get good amount of subscribers, I’ll go on the road to cover the sports media and add other elements.
I appreciate your indulgence.