ESPN, Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery form Sports Trapper Keeper
Sounds an awful lot like sports cable…?
In a move surprising most people who are in the sports business and sports fans, ESPN, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery announced yesterday that they will be launching a joint sports streaming venture. Coming out some time later this year, consumers will be able to find content from each entity in one single place rather than multiple streaming services. The move on its face sounds like a win for consumers, but I think there are a few things factoring into whether or not this will prove to be a seismic shift for sports viewing on the whole.
What I don’t think will be in question is the quality of the product they roll out. Combining the powers of these 3 media giants, you’d expect the app/website they come out with to be seamless and easy to navigate. Assuming this is something they have been working on for months and with an endless stream of consumer feedback, the product itself for this new sports streaming service has the opportunity to be a game changer in terms of where we go to look for our sports.
Which leads me to another positive, there will be A TON of sports on this platform. Off the top of my head, under their umbrella they will have the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, Formula 1, Tennis, PGA Tour, FIFA Men’s and Women’s World Cup, and as they so casually put it, “college sports”. I will get to college sports on their own in a minute but outside of the Barclays Premier League and Serie A for soccer, you will be able to get 80-90% of the leagues American’s view the most all in one spot. With companies coming out with their own streaming services trying to put all of their products in one spot, this seems to be a shift towards…wait…cable?
Yes, That’s the first eyebrow raise or at least chuckle from most of us. This just sounds like sports cable. Which let’s be honest, many sports fans would love to cut out the crappy news channels and the other stuff they don’t watch in their cable package just to get a place for sports. Hulu and YouTube TV have risen in popularity because of the ability to kind of do this, but they are not as sports centric as the venture by these 3 companies seems to be. The move should be universally celebrated but I, along with many others, have our skepticisms about a few things moving forward.
First and foremost, for many, what will the cost be, and how will you be able to potentially supplement it with current streaming costs? I already platoon my streaming services on a monthly(ish) basis just to save a little money. This new product throws a bit of a wrench into that. Will this new service be $25 a month? $30? $40? How much is too much before people just say not worth moving on from cable, YouTube TV, or Hulu? The success of this new joint product won’t be so much about the plethora of content, but how affordable it will be for sports fans who are not only feeling fried from current streaming habits from sports but streaming in general.
Speaking of a plethora of content, notably not in this deal are CBS and NBC Universal. Apart from the Olympics and their trials, this means that really the only major league that this new streaming venture is missing out on completely is the Premier League and to a lesser extent Serie A. Soccer fans are used to going to weird places to get their sports if they have been fans for a while, so they will be able to adapt easily. This does mean that some straggling college football and NFL will be on these other mediums along with March Madness, but those are not small. I suppose for the biggest games you can all go to a friend's house or to a bar, but it does mean that the one stop shop doesn’t have the same monopoly on college football or the NFL as, let's say, cable would.
That brings me to another point which is college sports. Two years from now who knows what college football, let alone other college sports are going to look like. Right now, and for the next several years, ESPN has a hold on pretty much all content for most of college, especially the “Olympic” sports as they call them. We thought we would get a potential War of the Roses between Fox and ESPN throwing their weight behind the Big Ten and SEC respectively, all while those two conferences have a “joint advisory group” to “try and fix college sports”.
It seems like no matter what happens at that summit, their interests are more aligned than opposed, along with the networks that back them. Hopefully, this new joint streaming service can quell the antsy Big Ten/SEC powers. Or, hopefully they use it as an opportunity for real change. I don’t think the Big Ten/SEC want to be known as NFL Lite by breaking away from the NCAA, and obviously such a split would hurt a lot of college football. A topic for another article perhaps, but I genuinely believe this move by the networks to combine forces puts the onus on the NCAA to do something when it comes to the many perceived issues facing college sports.
At this point, we don’t have a lot of information, but from what we do know, this potential merger of sports content could be a game changer. If it’s successful, would there be interest from CBS and NBC Universal to want and try and buy their way in? Will their linear channels like ESPN and Fox Sports be included? Would that mean single streaming services like ESPN+ and Max streaming sports cut their own losses and go all in with the all in one streaming option? Would that perhaps lock in streaming prices where they are now rather than increase as they try to feed us with content we didn’t want on their platform anyway? I am cautiously optimistic about where this will all head moving forward. But at the end of the day for me, and many others, it will boil down to one simple thing. How much is this going to cost me, and how much is too much.