SBJ Media: Around the horn with MLB viewership

An MLB season that saw breakout stars on the field (like Shohei Ohtani and Fernando Tatís, Jr.) combined with historically poor offensive statistics, experienced a similar mixed bag on the TV audience front, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp. ESPN’s signature “Sunday Night Baseball” is seeing modest growth, compared to two years ago, while Fox Sports is seeing its MLB ratings drop slightly.

The viewership is good enough that, when combined with the long-term extensions MLB signed with ESPN, Fox and Turner over the past couple of years, MLB executives gathered in Denver for the mid-summer classic have few media issues on the front burner.

Here are the numbers through the All-Star break. ESPN’s “SNB” is up 4% from 2019, averaging 1.56 million viewers. That audience growth has slowed in the last few weeks – “SNB” was averaging its best audience since 2017 just a month ago. “SNB” is up 32% from the truncated season in 2020, but that only includes 10 telecasts.

Fox’s slate of Saturday night regional games are down 13% from the same window two years ago, averaging 2.21 million viewers. Games on FS1 are down 11% from two years ago, averaging 323,000 viewers. Their numbers are way up compared to 2020: Fox is seeing a 32% increase, and FS1 is up 80%.

The top MLB game audience this season to date has been a Fox regionalized window on June 5, which featured Yankees-Red Sox, Dodgers-Braves and Cubs-Giants (2.68 million viewers). ESPN’s best audience to date was Padres-Dodgers on April 25 with just over 2 million viewers (the audience includes a special StatCast version of the game on ESPN2).

MLB All-Star Game viewers on Fox tomorrow night should be prepared for more on-field interviews during play -- a lot more. They should be prepared for unique camera angles from two “fly cams” that the network has set up at Coors Field. Fox also will have two of its Megalodon cameras on hand, in addition to 75 microphones buried in both the infield and outfield.

“We use this opportunity every year in the middle of the summer to figure out what technology we can test on the All-Star game that maybe we couldn’t use during the regular season or access that we don’t normally get during the regular season with players,” said Fox Sports Executive Producer, Exec VP and Head of Production & Operations Brad Zager.

The technical bells-and-whistles aren’t always considered tests -- sometimes they bleed into regular coverage. Case in point: Fox will produce the All-Star Game for the first time in 4K, High Dynamic Range. It also will produce the upcoming Field of Dreams game and all playoff games in 4K, Zager said.

In interviews with Fox’s top production execs, they all talked about needing to capitalize on the on-field excitement from the first half of the season. Fox VP/Production Bardia Shah-Rais said the pregame show will have interviews with Fernando Tatis, Jr. and Aaron Judge, plus a Tom Rinaldi essay on the next generation of all-stars. The show also will have a feature on Hank Aaron, who died in January.

“We’re going to try to highlight all the great players that are in the game,” Shah-Rais said. “We have a unique group that can do it.”

ESPN promoted Sonia Coleman to head up its human resources department as Senior VP/HR for Disney General Entertainment Content & ESPN. Coleman replaces Paul Richardson, who earlier this month was promoted to Disney Senior Exec VP/HR.

In her new role, Coleman will report to three execs: Disney Chair of ESPN & Sports Content Jimmy Pitaro, Disney Chair of General Entertainment Content Peter Rice and Richardson. “I am personally ecstatic to welcome Sonia to the ESPN leadership team,” Pitaro wrote in an internal email announcing the move. “I know firsthand that she is an extremely talented and capable executive who has earned her outstanding reputation.”

Coleman will oversee all of ESPN’s HR department, including its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Pitaro’s memo said. Along with Rosetta Ellis, who was promoted to run ESPN’s talent office in February, the move ensures that two African-American women oversee the vast majority of ESPN employees.

The price of ESPN+ will increase by $1 per month starting Aug. 13, with subscribers to the streaming platform paying $6.99 per month vs. $5.99 right now (that means annual subscriptions will go from $59.99 to $69.99). The change affects all new subscriptions and renewals of monthly and annual subs.

The increase should not come as a big surprise, especially considering the number of rights deals ESPN has cut this year that have streaming components, including the NHL, LaLiga and PGA Tour Live -- not to mention NFL and MLB extensions. J.P. Morgan media analyst Alexia Quadrani  today on CNBC said that the increase is "positive news" for Disney. "It's consistent with what we're seen so far from Disney," she said. "They keep adding more content, and the demand must obviously be very strong for them to continue these price increases."

Plus, Disney execs publicly have expressed interest in “NFL Sunday Ticket,” the out-of-market package that is expected to draw a lot of interest when the NFL starts to sell it. The current "NFL Sunday Ticket" deal with DirecTV ends in 2022.

ESPN+ launched in 2018 and had 13.8 million subscribers as of April. The increase will not affect the price of UFC pay-per-view events. The individual hike for ESPN+ also will not affect the cost of the bundle with Disney+ and Hulu, which will continue to cost $13.99 per month (or $19.99 per month if you want Hulu without ads).

• I’m told that two of Stadium’s high-profile reporters are about to hit the free agency market. Contracts for college football insider Brett McMurphy and college basketball analyst Jeff Goodman are up next month. Both are talking about remaining at Stadium, but have drawn interest from others.

• ESPN2 will air a StatCast presentation around the Home Run Derby for the third straight year. Tonight's iteration will be a TV producer’s dream, complete with a real-time Augmented Reality Tracer. Look for ESPN2 to insert exit velocity, launch angles and distance on its live shots.

• Barstool's “Pardon My Take” remained the top sports podcast in June, coming in at No. 8 among all pods in the U.S., just behind “This American Life,” per data from Podtrac. The only other sports entrant among the top 20 was “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz,” which made its debut at No. 20. Among podcast publishers, ESPN ranked No. 7 overall in terms of U.S. audience (43.7 million streams from 105 active podcasts). Barstool was No. 8 with 39.6 million streams from 62 active pods.

• Two proposed new golf circuits, the Premier Golf League and Super Golf League, are on the horizon, but my colleagues John Lombardo and Liz Mullen note that attracting a U.S. TV deal would be a tough sell, as CBS, NBC, ESPN and Discovery have billions of dollars tied up in PGA Tour agreements. Fox also got out of golf and its deal with the USGA. But a streaming deal could be made with digital platforms such as Amazon Prime, Apple TV or any one of the big tech players that are looking for an entry into the sports business.

• As we approach the Tokyo Games, I spoke with longtime NBC producer Dick Ebersol about the Olympic legacy left by Roone Arledge, who would have been 90 last week. "The Olympics were not a big deal on television until Roone got his hands on them,” Ebersol said. “He made it about who these people were and what they’d overcome. It led to what the Olympics are today.”

• ESPN is the most-followed sports brand on TikTok (17.3 million followers), passing Overtime for the top slot last week, per data from SocialBlade. Rounding out the top five: Barstool Sports, House of Highlights and Dunk.

• The Netflix docuseries "Drive to Survive" is the "most successful example of reality-based programming driving interest in a sport." So declared my boss, Abe Madkour, in his SBJ column this week. "It shows F1 as glamorous, global and elitist, racing in luxury destinations, filled with ego and self-interests that drive the personalities and the sport."