SBJ Media: YouTube TV’s ESPN, NBCSN deals show path toward future

Am I a little nervous after watching my Yellow Jackets barely beat Boston College on Saturday? I’m channeling Mr. Belichick on this one: We’re onto Pitt.

But before that, it’s going to be a great week here in NYC, starting with our Media Innovators event Tuesday. I’ll be opening the conference with a panel on how Wall Street sees the media landscape, which ties in well with stories in the newsletter on YouTube TV-Disney and YouTube TV-NBCSN. Plus, I have a one-on-one with the president of The CW and a panel on how media agents, talent and networks see the evolving talent landscape.

Come say hi if you’re going to be at Media Innovators or later this week at our Dealmakers conference and celebrations of New Voices of Under 30 and Forty Under 40.

Now that the battle royale of carriage deals is behind us, who won -- YouTube TV and Google or ESPN and Disney?

Like any good business negotiation, it feels like both sides got deal points they wanted and relented on others.

ESPN/Disney: win or loss?

If you just rely on social media reaction, you may think this was a loss for Disney. One move that backfired in my mind: Enlisting ESPN talent to post videos on social media asking YouTube TV subscribers to contact their provider. That was honestly was a real turnoff for a whole lot of folks -- both consumers and the media.

But if you look past the surface and acknowledge the difficulty of these talks, there are a number of positives for Disney. “We landed on a deal that was in line with the rest of the marketplace,” a source familiar with Disney’s negotiations told me. “We stuck to our initial priorities in terms of what we were willing to do, which was create a path for a sports and broadcast tier. That’s good for consumers and good for the marketplace.”

While “ingestion” wasn’t a word being tossed around much earlier on in these talks, it certainly feels like that is what ended up happening, with YouTube TV subs now getting access to ESPN Unlimited content within the YouTube TV universe -- and not from authentication, which is where some other distributors ended up. But one place Disney did not budge was with ingestion through YouTube Channels, which is a different avenue than within YouTube TV. Disney remains one of the few media holdouts for such a path. “That’s not a strategy we’re interested in doing,” the source told me.

But let’s not forget: ESPN paid $1.6 billion to get WWE PLEs onto ESPN Unlimited. So will that be a hit for the company? “We are being compensated specifically for that,” the source told me.

And despite all the public rhetoric over the last two weeks, the source tells me “the relationship is fine” between Disney and Google. These are two companies that do a lot of business together, and they will continue to do so in the future.

Google/YouTube TV: win or loss?

In talking with different source at Google/YouTube, the feeling is the deal is a “win” for the company and its YouTube TV subscribers -- and it’s tough to argue with that sentiment.

There was lots of fervor for a sports-driven skinny bundle when the proposed Venu Sports was announced by Disney, Fox and WBD. Now, YouTube TV has gained a path toward creating its own version. ESPN networks will be in there, and now we need to see who else is going to be signing up. NBC and YouTube TV already have ingestion, so it would make sense to see NBC Sports content there (an offering that wouldn’t have been available on Venu Sports).

A cheaper sports bundle from Google would certainly help assuage some fan frustrations, especially from those longtime customers who have seen their YouTube TV monthly costs skyrocket over the years. Let the great re-bundling begin!

Meanwhile, here’s a nice surprise for YouTube TV subs: Not only are you getting back ESPN games, but you get Survivor Series, WrestleMania and a whole host of other ESPN Unlimited content as part of your monthly bill.

NBCSN is back!

The cable network was formally resurrected Monday on YouTube TV and will essentially serve as an ingestion vehicle for Peacock content on linear TV. So if you want Bucks-Cavaliers Monday night, you can get it on YouTube TV if you don’t have a Peacock subscription.

What else will fans get? Content like the NBA playoffs, MLB regular-season games (I hear that deal is very close covering the next three seasons), the Premier League, select Olympic events and the Gold Zone program during the upcoming Milan-Cortina Games, the WNBA, Big Ten, Big East, U.S. Open golf, Open Championship, Kentucky Derby, studio shows and more. That’s a lot of sports for fans.

But what does this mean for NBC? Execs there spent a lot of time and money curating content that was meant to be exclusive to Peacock (like this NBA game Monday night). For league partners, it’s likely a win to get more exposure on a cable channel -- especially within YouTube TV, which is one of the distributors out there actually seeing subscriber growth.

Peacock? Not so much -- yet -- on establishing a big foothold within the streaming world. The most recent Nielsen Gauge estimates have it around 1.5% of the streaming landscape. That’s well behind others such as Paramount+/Pluto TV (2%), Tubi (2.1%) and Roku Channel (2.8%), and that’s before you even get to the big guns like Prime Video, Disney OTT channels, Netflix and YouTube.

Could this content have just gone to USA Network? Nope. Not after the split that created Versant, where USA now lies. The only cable channel NBCU kept around was Bravo, and unless there’s a “Real Housewives of the Big Ten” show I don’t know about, you’re not getting sports content there.

I chatted with an executive close to NBCU strategy on why this made sense, and even with the challenges related to launching a new channel, it really came down to the “live” aspect in terms of driving value.

But maybe for NBC, and other behemoths like ESPN or Fox, this sort of move does make sense in 2025. Like those other companies, NBC will have offerings that sit in pay TV and streaming, and while the ordering to get there may have been different the endgame seems to be the same.

Looking forward, expect NBC -- and others -- to strike more of these kinds of deals with MVPDs and vMVPDs all across the space.

David Wisnia has been at the helm of NESN -- and SportsNet Pittsburgh, for that matter -- for just over a year now, so I wanted to check in with the RSN chief on how he’s settled in and what the business looks like in Boston and Pittsburgh.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Wisnia, who serves as president and CEO. “The opportunity to come in and work for the two ownership groups that I do in Fenway Sports and Delaware North is a unique opportunity at a time where there’s tremendous contraction and people are just looking to cut costs across the board. ... To work with two groups that are constantly looking at how do we evolve, what do we acquire, how do we grow is special.”

Wisnia was certainly happy with the Red Sox’s performance as game audiences were up 44% this past season. On the other side, Pirates games were off 16%. I’m sure Wisnia wishes Cy Young winner Paul Skenes could pitch every game, as Skenes’ starts rated 20% better than non-Skenes starts. But regardless of the Pirates record, ownership can take solace that, during the baseball summer months, nothing rates higher in Pittsburgh in prime time that what the Bucs deliver.

Ramping up the tech

One of Wisnia’s mandates was making NESN more efficient, and that meant checking into every vertical. “For example, if it’s dot com or it’s backend for D2C -- are these businesses we want to be in?” he said. “Are we allocating resources to the highest areas? So it’s a constant review of every function.”

That review led to the launch of an updated version of NESN’s D2C streaming service after the MLB All-Star break alongside ViewLift. NESN had been running the backend in-house. “Surpassed our expectations,” Wisnia said. “We revisited the annual pricing. We reduced it. We pushed more fans in the annual pricing, and 50% of our buys are now annual purchases, which does a variety of things. Reduces churn and it stabilizes their DAI. So D2C is up over 100% year-on-year, which is beyond what we budgeted for.”

What’s next?

There continues to be lots of chatter at the league level of a national package of local streaming rights, but that would require many team-controlled RSNs like NESN and others to get on board. Wisnia wouldn’t get into specifics, but he noted NESN remains a profitable business. “It’s not what it used to be, as any traditional media player that’s pivoting into the digital world is seeing,” he said. “In terms of the future, I still think there’s a lot of road to go there. There’s a lot of conversations internally that we’re having. There’s a lot of conversations at MLB that we’re having, and ... there are a lot of constituents with different agendas and different sensitivities and different priorities.”

However, Wisnia welcomes the challenges of the RSN space and the work that lies ahead. “I’ve been in the business 25, 26 years, and it’s never been as hard as it is today,” he said. “The pace of change is probably unparalleled -- at least in my time in the business -- but that’s also what makes it so interesting is kind of navigating those opportunities.”

Heading into the NBA season and Year 1 of new media rights pacts, the buzzword was “discoverability” in terms of getting fans to where games were going to be airing. The biggest effort from the league was the implementation of a new “Tap to Watch” call-to-action initiative, which is essentially a button directing fans to live games.

How is the effort working thus far? Well, the NBA tells me that the effort “continues to exceed expectations.”

A month into the season, league data shows that “Tap to Watch” has referred fans to more than 4 million live game streams. National games across ABC/ESPN, Prime Video and NBC/Peacock have made up 75% of that engagement. There also have been hundreds of thousands of referrals to live games per day driven by partners such as Google, social media platforms and the NBA App. Specifically, the real-time vertical in-progress highlights within Google Stories has helped serve as a catalyst into live-game action with “Go to Game” buttons.

The top example thus far was for the Oct. 24 T’Wolves-Lakers game on Prime Video. Luka Dončić scored 49 points, and “Tap to Watch” directed more fans to that game than any other matchup so far this season.

“Tap to Watch” also has been deployed with some NBA creators. One example was the creator Jesser, who sent thousands of fans to games from his channels earlier in November. Last Friday for the Heat-Knicks game, there was even a creator watch party atv NBA HQ in Manhattan, with over 40 individuals leveraging “Tap to Watch” on their social channels

Next up for “Tap to Watch”? Implementing the initiative globally with international media partners.

Sources confirmed to me that MLS and Apple will in fact end their deal after the 2028-29 season, which is around three-and-half-years earlier than the original terms of the pact. Sportico first had the news. Honestly, it’s not a surprise. Very few sources I’ve talked to over the years believed this deal would see its conclusion. MLS-Apple viewership numbers that I reported were complicated, at best. And so, in a couple of years, MLS will be back in the market. Will big-market teams want those local rights back to sell themselves? Lots of questions on the MLS media front.

The NBA has now confirmed USA vs. the World for its All-Star Game format. I love the idea. Combine this with the fact that it’s headed back to broadcast TV with NBC, and we’re looking at a big increase coming for the event. The game hasn’t drawn over 7 million viewers since 2020, and last year it got just 4.7 million. I think it easily goes over 7 million on NBC.

My colleague Jason Wilson broke the news Sunday night about Peacock bringing back the MaddenCast alt-cast this year -- this time around the Bengals-Ravens game on Thanksgiving night. That’s prime real estate for EA Sports in Year 2. EA Sports GM and SVP/Publishing Andrea Hopelain was on the SBJ Sports Media Podcast talking about the debut effort in 2024.

Speaking of returning alt-casts: SBJ’s Joe Lemire broke the news on the NBA and ESPN reprising a Disney-centric “Dunk the Halls” animated alt-cast on Christmas Day with Cavaliers-Knicks in the noon ET slot. I’m a kid at heart and always love going to Disney World, so this one was great for me.

• The latest episode of the SBJ Sports Media Podcast, American Conference Commissioner Tim Pernetti and I talk all things football (and some ESPN). The show also digs into the end of the ESPN Bet experiment and Unrivaled adding another night.
• The Pac-12 and USA Sports signed a five-year deal that will begin next fall and run through the 2031-32 school year, with 22 college football games on USA Network each season, as well as over 50 men’s hoops games and five to 10 women’s hoops games.
• In this week’s magazine, SBJ’s Joe Lemire takes readers inside the NHL’s Situation Room for a look at the processes and tech involved in the league’s handling of replay reviews.
• Versant rolled out its new sports division that houses USA Network and Golf Channel, with the new brand officially being called “USA Sports,” reports my colleague Josh Carpenter.
• IBM introduced a new AI-powered tool that will be made available to UFC broadcasters and instantly reveal advanced researched stats that can be used on air during fights, notes SBJ’s Adam Stern.