SBJ Media: No ESPN-YouTube TV deal coming before ‘MNF’

I visited the Grand Canyon as a little kid back in the early ’90s, but taking it in as an adult 30+ years later was a whole different kind of experience. Views from both the south and north rim, hiking down the Kaibab Trail to the interior, a dip in the Colorado River, some off-trail hiking on the Arizona/Utah border and some beautiful slot canyons. I’m not a super outdoors type of guy, but this was all amazing and highly recommended.

A short-term extension between Disney and Google that would have “Monday Night Football” available on YouTube TV on ESPN/ABC is not going to happen, sources tell Sports Business Journal. Disney earlier Monday pitched a Tuesday ceasefire, but that was just for tomorrow’s election news -- and an offer than Google reportedly rejected.

Expect the loss of around 10 million U.S. TV homes to impact the audience number for Cardinals-Cowboys on Monday night. Should this kerfuffle carry on for an extended period, the impasse could even impact the next Cowboys “MNF” game Nov. 17.

The sides remain far apart on price, sources added, and that remains a key issue in the protracted standoff. Google continues to want its pricing to be closer to what Charter/Spectrum and Comcast, leaders in the space, pay. However, YouTube TV is not quite at the subscriber levels of those two companies yet.

Once fans woke up Saturday morning to no settlement or extension, things got real, and ESPN took action with one of its hottest properties, “College GameDay.” The company said the show would be offered on the new ESPN app with no subscription or authentication required and would be available on “The Pat McAfee Show” feed on X for free.

Once games began and YouTube TV subs were left in the dark for many solid ESPN games, it felt like social media users were declaring a pox on both of their houses. There seemed to be an equal amount of frustration with both the network and the provider for the loss of service.

There was the Disney/ESPN standard practice of trying to direct consumers to other service providers. They seemed to get at least one taker in SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, who switched from YouTube TV to the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle (I guess he had to watch the Georgia-Florida game).

But did the opportunity here drive any significant sign-ups for the new ESPN app? The company declined to get into any specifics on traffic or sign-ups to the new app created by the situation.

It does sound like when a deal gets done, YouTube TV subscribers are going to get access to that ESPN Unlimited tier on the new app, similar to how other deals have been structured around authentication.

With daylight savings behind us, the sports world is trading baseball season for college basketball, which begins Monday night with a number of high-quality matchups. Hot out of the gate is a matchup of top-15 men’s teams in Florida and Arizona, who are facing off in Las Vegas on TNT/truTV.

My campus-minded colleague Ben Portnoy has a primer on the start to the college hoops season in the magazine this week.

One company that has stealthily built out its college basketball arsenal is NBC Sports. Just a few years ago, if you asked me what NBC’s portfolio was in the space, I would have said a small package of Atlantic 10 hoops. Fast-forward to this season -- the A-10 is with Versant after the company split -- and NBC/Peacock have games from powerhouse conferences Big Ten, Big East and Big 12. The latter is a package of around 20 games acquired over the summer that had previously been on Fox Sports.

That’s now an NBC portfolio of 180 college basketball games, a 5x increase from only 36 contests three seasons ago.

The play here is clearly for streaming, as the overwhelming majority of games will be on Peacock, with just a handful planned for linear TV right now (NBC will have around four or five games, but that number could grow).

“When you have the ability to stack and to program multiple games from multiple conferences and try to strategically create some big nights of programming on weeknights on Peacock, that’s an opportunity that the depth and the breadth of these three conferences are going to provide us,” said Justin Byczek, NBC Sports’ EVP/programming and rights management. “We’re really unencumbered, often with the ability of how and when to start games. And we’ve studied the data and we’ve looked a lot about how we move viewers and fan bases over from one game to another on Peacock over the years. And college basketball has really helped us do that. We can have a Big Ten game going into a late Big East game or a late Big 12 game, and we can bring those audiences in and really create a lot of memorable nights of programming.”

NBC Sports gets started Wednesday, and it also has some strategically placed hoops nights this season to take advantage of the Peacock audience around the Milan-Cortina Games. That includes a doubleheader on the Tuesday after the NBA All-Star Game when there are no NBA games, as well as a highly anticipated St. John’s-UConn men’s game the Wednesday after the Olympics (both are top-five teams right now).

“We’ve had people with us for 17 days and nights on the platform and being able to promote out of that into what we still hope is two teams in the top five and one of those can’t-miss moments on the platform,” said Byczek.

The audience in Canada on Rogers Sportsnet added another 10.9 million viewers for Game 7 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series. That marks the best English-language, non-Olympic broadcast on record in Canada (only the 2010 Vancouver Games scored higher). It is also Rogers’ best audience on record. The Sportsnet audience peaked at 14 million viewers in the bottom of the ninth inning at around 11:38 p.m. ET. The entire World Series on Sportsnet averaged 7.5 million viewers, delivering the seven best Blue Jays game audience numbers ever (Game 1: 7 million; Game 2: 6.6 million; Game 3: 5.8 million; Game 4: 6.2 million; Game 5: 7.2 million; Game 6: 9.4 million; Game 7: 10.9 million). Overall, the MLB postseason averaged 2.5 million viewers on Sportsnet.

Halfway through the season, Prime Video is averaging 14.95 million viewers for “Thursday Night Football.” It would be the company’s best figure since becoming the sole broadcaster, but it’s still behind the 16.4 million that Fox and NFL Network averaged for the package in 2021. Prime is up 15% from the same point last season, and the “TNF” median age is 48.2, which is almost eight years younger than audiences watching the NFL on linear networks (55.9).

The NHL has stayed hot early on ESPN. Games are averaging 587,000 viewers, up 40% from the same point last season. The Frozen Frenzy tripleheader last week saw a 20% bump, led by 680,000 viewers for Penguins-Flyers.

• Early data shows that Game 7 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series drew 25.5 million viewers Saturday on Fox, marking the best MLB game since Game 7 of the Astros-Dodgers World Series in 2017 (28.3 million). That figure is a fast national, panel-only number and will rise when the Nielsen Big Data number comes in. A source tells me that increase is likely be a low single-digit percentage bump.
• In the magazine this week, SBJ’s Adam Stern writes that NASCAR and Connor Schell’s Words + Pictures company worked together on a five-episode series called “Rising” that will air for free on YouTube on Nov. 17-21.
• In the latest SBJ Football newsletter, Ben Fischer looks at why we’re getting more games covering 100% of NFL national windows on Sunday afternoons.
• Bob Costas returned to NBC to provide pregame narratives for a pair of NBA broadcasts Tuesday night, the result of recent negotiations to place him in what he called “kind of an emeritus role,” reports SBJ’s Tom Friend.
• The latest SBJ Sports Media Podcast sees my colleagues Josh Carpenter and Alex Silverman discuss the MLS-Apple numbers I recently reported out. Later in the show, I chat with former HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg about “Hard Knocks,” “Real Sports” and the network’s legacy with boxing.
• NBC Sports extended its deal to carry Royal Ascot races in England through 2028, reports Carpenter.
• Cosm reached a long-term extension of its relationship with the NBA, which enables the immersive venue operator to produce and present game broadcasts in its “shared reality” LED domes, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.