SBJ Media: DirecTV close to 'Thursday Night Football' deal

DirecTV will carry “Thursday Night Football” to commercial establishments, including bars and restaurants, this NFL season, sources have told me.

Amazon holds the exclusive streaming rights to the NFL package, but it has agreed to have DirecTV carry it to bars and restaurants. Nothing has been signed and specific deal terms have not leaked. I reached out to both companies; both declined comment.

News of the pending deal will bring a sense of relief to restaurant and bar owners who were faced with the prospect of having to upgrade their video systems to handle streaming video. Some of the country’s biggest chain restaurants, like Buffalo Wild Wings, sources tell me, are not fully equipped to handle streaming video.

Other bars that have upgraded their video systems have run into latency issues, where it’s hard to sync the video going into different TV sets.

As DirecTV walks away from the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market package, look for the satellite company to focus more on supporting its commercial business for the next several years as bars and restaurants continue to upgrade their video to handle streaming services and Big Tech picks up more exclusive sports rights.

It’s hard to come up with a definitive verdict on LIV Golf’s video numbers from last weekend. On one hand, the numbers are tiny compared to linear TV -- streaming numbers for sports always are.

The question is whether they compare favorably to other sports that are live-streamed, and that answer is a lot cloudier. If only MLB would make its AppleTV+ and Peacock numbers available, we’d have a much more useful comparison.

I’m still of the mind that a U.S. TV network will eventually carry LIV Golf events, probably as early as next year, regardless of how these streaming figures looked from Bedminster.

The numbers that we’ve seen are predictably small. “Fewer than 1,000 people were concurrently watching the Facebook Live feed for much of the first two rounds this weekend, while LIV Golf’s YouTube channel was at or above 60,000 viewers for much of Saturday’s second round,” according to a story written by WaPo’s Rick Maese.

On Sunday, viewership on the YouTube channel topped out at 115,000 viewers, according to SI. Yes, that’s a peak of 115,000. TV execs would cancel any show that had viewership numbers that low. But we don’t have enough data to determine if those low numbers represent a lack of interest or not.

We do know that linear TV still produces much higher audiences. Take the final round of the PGA Tour’s Barracuda Championship, for example. The tournament was held opposite the British Open and didn’t have any of the world’s top players. The final round on July 17 averaged 214,000 viewers on Golf Channel. Its peak undoubtedly was much higher. Compare that to LIV Golf’s YouTube Sunday peak of 115,000 from Bedminster.

LIV’s Sunday YouTube average audience is likely more akin to what GC averaged for the first round of the Women's Scottish Open last Thursday (98,000 viewers from 10:00am-2:00pm ET).

When Bill Russell was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last year -- for a second time -- he stayed at the Connecticut home of legendary broadcast exec Dick Ebersol, a friend of his for more than 50 years. “We would sit out on the porch and talk for hours and hours,” Ebersol recalled. “We’d tell stories and just laugh about the things that we had seen or done together.”

I called Ebersol shortly after hearing of Russell’s death. The two had known each other for more than five decades, meeting back when Russell was a player-coach for the Celtics and Ebersol was a production assistant for ABC. I figured Ebersol would have a unique perspective on an icon of American sports.

Like many others, Ebersol recognized Russell as a tireless champion of civil rights. “Wherever he went, he was a passionate advocate for equal rights,” Ebersol said. “That is how I always remember him.”

But Ebersol also remembered Russell’s more personal side, including his “cackle.” “When he laughed, it was the deepest laugh in the room."

I asked Ebersol for his best Russell story, and he recalled one meeting the two had on a California freeway in the late 1970s, soon after Ebersol left his job with NBC Entertainment. Ebersol was speeding in his black Porsche on I-5 North headed toward San Francisco, when he was overtaken by a Volkswagen Beetle.

“I slowed down a little, the car pulls up and I don’t see anybody in what should have been the driver’s seat,” he said. Russell then leaned forward and waved to Ebersol with a huge smile on his face. Russell had the front seats of the compact car removed. It was customized with a driver’s seat in the back. “We pulled off to the side of the road and must have talked for a half-hour, just catching up as we always did,” Ebersol recalled.

I read a lot of really good pieces on Russell over the past two days. If you read only one, make it this one by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

My first thought when I saw that Amazon hired Dude Perfect for an alternate telecast was thatthisis how media companies should view alternate telecasts.

Most alternate telecasts seem to be tailored to hard-core fans, with coaches’ shows that attract viewers that normally would watch the regular telecast. They don’t seem to be designed to grow the audience so much as move it from one feed to another.

Dude Perfect is different, though. They have 58 million subscribers on YouTube and produce viral sports videos. As my buddy Austin Karp tweeted, Dude Perfect has the type of content that will get his 10-year old to watch.

“TNF with Dude Perfect” will be available as an alternate telecast for Prime Video and Twitch alongside an undetermined number of games. Amazon promises guests, challenges, world record attempts, dunk tanks and pudding cannons.

• Comcast takes $25,000 equity stakes in every startup selected for participation in its SportsTech accelerator program, which is soon entering its third year, notes SBJ's Chris Smith. The program has also facilitated dozens of relationships between startups and major properties like NASCAR, the PGA Tour, U.S. Ski & Snowboard and WWE.

• CBS did not address whether it would return for a third season of the Superstar Racing Experience, and league investor Sandy Montag said that SRX execs will be talking to CBS over the next month about what the future holds, reports my colleague Adam Stern.

• From the first morning that it started carrying games in August 2013, NBC has carried every Premier League match via one of its platforms. That relationship continues into the 10th season of the partnership this weekend, as NBC begins its new six-year, $2.7 billion rights deal with soccer's most high-profile league.

• Acceptance is growing for biometrics-infused broadcasts, which can be particularly compelling for viewers of high-participation sports like cycling and golf, writes SportTechie's Joe Lemire.

• MGM is developing a new film about Rocky Balboa's previous foe Ivan Drago, which has "revived" Sylvester Stallone's "ire over his standing with the boxing franchise," notes the Hollywood Reporter.