Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. These Citizens shall have unfettered, free over-the-air access to all NFL Postseason Competition, and shall also receive, free of charge, 50 in-bone Chicken Wings with three containers of Ranch Dressing, also free."
In this week's "Next Text" exchange, Next TV writers Daniel Frankel and David Bloom remind readers of these sacred entitlements.
DANIEL FRANKEL: Hello David. Any big plans for the long MLK weekend? Lots of big Wild Card games lined up. And lots of pissed-off fans who can't watch the Chiefs-Dolphins game Saturday without subscribing to Peacock. That dissonance aside, I suspect a lot of people are going to sign up for the $4.99 subscription streaming service just to watch this game. And a lot of the same people are going to cancel immediately afterwards. What’s your take? Will it be worth the $110 million NBCUniversal is paying the NFL for the exclusive rights?
“I feel like this a major mistake.”@BillSimmons explains why the move to broadcast this weekend’s Dolphins-Chiefs game exclusively on Peacock is a disaster waiting to happen: pic.twitter.com/IHZ32TM0fNJanuary 8, 2024
DAVID BLOOM: As always, I’ll use the three-day weekend, as you clearly do, to meditate upon the ever-shifting shape of streaming, so we can serve up scintillating, searing observations for the delectation of our beloved readers. Also, I’ll be taking a few minutes to ponder the Martin Luther King Jr. quote being used by the NBA in promotions for its hoops-filled Martin’s Monday matchups: “The time is always right to do right.” So right. But in between, I’ll be watching with great interest what happens with the Peacock playoff and, far more importantly, its aftermath.
The game featuring two of the league’s best teams has implications far beyond who takes a step toward the Super Bowl. How many pissed-off non-Peacock-ers will sign up just to watch the game? How big is the game’s total audience, based on whatever metrics Comcast is willing to share, or Nielsen can grub up? How many new subscribers forget to cancel afterward for months or years, fluffing up the underfed show bird with a new audience? What do advertisers think ? How much revenue does Comcast make off those forgetful subs and eager advertisers? How does all that affect Comcast strategy as it integrates broadband, mobile, cable, and streaming operations, and probably buys a legacy studio or parts? Most likely, this is another giant step into the future, a grand experiment we’ll look back on like the first playoff game on ESPN.
By the way, the $110 million Comcast spent for a single game seems like a lot, until you remember Amazon spent nearly as much for a Black Friday game, which isn't even a playoff (though Black Friday is the Super Bowl of retail, and of Amazon). Whether the $110 million is "worth it” must be put alongside answers to the questions I just asked. Any success here speeds the streaming transition, just like the Amazon Thursday night regular-season games, which saw big jumps in Year 2 viewership. After all, when even the most popular programming on cable and broadcast is now on streaming also or exclusively, more and more viewers will go there.
Last week, you jokingly asked why, given the NFL’s overwhelming dominance of most-watched shows on cable and broadcast, the Shield doesn’t just buy a network. A late-breaking story suggests that once again, you’re prescient. The league is deep in talks with Disney to buy a stake in ESPN, which would take over the league’s existing content and distribution units. Makes sense, but of course, what does that mean for all the other distribution partners paying $100 billion for a decade’s worth of games? Side question: at what point do ESPN’s economics break down? They already have $45 billion worth of TV rights commitments, with the NBA renewal looming. Any thoughts?
Also read: Sports Media Shocker: NFL Reportedly in Advanced Talks to Buy an Equity Stake in ESPN
FRANKEL: It seems like a natural evolution that the NFL would move in that direction. Certainly, it seems to jibe with Bob Iger's feelings about holding the whole bag on media networks going forward. The "journalism" part of it bums me out -- the Rollerball owns the TV network now, too? I know we had some fun with this dystopian analogy a few months ago, but things do seem to be moving in that direction.
BLOOM: Speaking of the Rollerball, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon just laid off a bunch of people from its video operations, including gamer haven Twitch, also-ran streaming service MGM Plus, and Prime Video itself, just as it rolls out that ad-supported tier of, basically, everyone on Prime who can’t be bothered to pay yet more for something that was supposed to be a throw-in.
Also read: Why Amazon Is About To Blow Up the TV Ad Market (Wolk)
This all feels like part of a semi-secret major restructuring of Amazon’s many, many confusing, sometimes conflicting video initiatives. How long does ad-supported Freevee stick around when the ad-supported Prime Video kicks in? Ad Prime likely keeps, what, 70% of the 100 million households that get it. Does Freevee still get any new originals, especially once Jury Duty picks up whatever Emmy love it has coming this weekend? I can't imagine Twitch is going away; it simply owns too big a slice of a very nice demographic, though it still needs to figure out ways to keep advertisers safe when live streamers do what live streamers do (Hello, Pat McAfee and anti-vaxer/aging Achilles heel Aaron Rodgers).
It seems like Amazon has been restructuring its video operations on a near-annual basis since Roy Price ran the place. But perhaps the company feels like it’s time to lean hard into advertising (It already generated $31 billion in advertising revenue last year, third behind only Alphabet and Meta in the known universe), make more crowd-pleasing action shows like Reacher and Jack Ryan, and worry less about competing with HBO/Max’s House of Dragons and the like. Though Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel were critical favorites, no one has any idea what kind of actual audiences they attracted. More important, only Amazon has some idea whether they converted anyone into an Amazon Prime and Prime Video paying customer and dedicated online shopper. I’m also guessing we won’t see any repeat of the ridiculously expensive and perfectly adequate Matt Damon-Ben Affleck vehicle Air going forward, though I could be wrong.
This is what I think about the Dolphins game being televised exclusively on Peacock. #MIAvsKC pic.twitter.com/iAN9VcVXzsJanuary 14, 2024
FRANKEL: I personally think the second absolutely gawd-awful season of Reacher merits some discussion, and I'd love to throw some time at that. What happened there? But given the outright rebellion on the social internet this Saturday evening, I feel the need to circle back to Peacock. I mean, it's the easiest thing to sign up for and quit in the history of the TMT business, but there's a big entitled uproar tonight about how put-out everyone is.
You've got extremist MAGA wanker Clay Travis complaining about the commercials ... and how we’re all being forced to watch a “pay-per-view” event. I say pay the extra money, get the no-ad premium version, and cancel it next week. Binge The Office for a few days and have some fun before you pull the plug. Maybe check out Oppenheimer when it drops in a few weeks. I get it’s a bummer if you already pay for cable TV. Maybe you feel like you’re being double-billed. But it's not the wild greedy transgression everyone is making it out to be. It’s like these folks don't understand that disruption to the video business is profound, and going on all around them. To quote Chuck D, there’s a Streaming War going on, where y’all at?
BLOOM: Lots of trigger words in that one: "entitled,” “outrage,” “MAGA wanker.” But they all seem related. I’ll reiterate, however: social media is not reality. The entitled, outraged wankers of all political stripes on social media don’t represent anything like the real world, NFL fans, streaming consumers or much of anything else. It’s a tiny echo chamber. That’s especially true on X, where the apparently non-drug-using Elon Musk has burned through at least two-thirds of the company’s enterprise value while turning it into a meaningless anti-brand featuring a payment app no one needs and a video-first platform no one cares about.
But Comcast, NBCU and Peacock must be delighted about the X-rage. For them, it represents oodles of free advertising for a brand that hasn’t made an impression in the streaming wars. Over the past year, flightless bird Peacock has waddled into increased relevance and more compelling programming. The latest attention, alongside the playoff game, almost certainly won’t hurt. Just look at the wanker-driven Bud Light outrage some months back. Beer murderer Kid Rock was still drinking (and selling) the stuff months after his semi-auto shooting stunt. So, remember P.T. Barnum on the non-existence of bad publicity, and add in the value of the noise when accounting for that $110 million fee. Speaking of meaningless echo chambers, any thoughts on the long-delayed Emmys? The strike-forced postponement will honor shows that ran as much as 18 months ago. That makes them feel less meaningful and relevant to what’s out there now. Plus, it’s right in the middle of Oscar season, which causes some cognitive dissonance. Will anyone besides the winners care?
FRANKEL: Deft transition from Peacock to the Peacock Theater, David. I hadn't even been aware that the Emmys were happening Monday until you mentioned it. It's definitely danger time. The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards averaged an all-time low 5.92 million viewers on NBC back in September 2022. And what the TV Academy, which is grappling with plenty of disruption, didn’t need was more chaos. Little concerned that Oscar noise is going to drown out any momentum for Fox Monday. Emmy can’t afford to lose much more audience. Then again, if the Golden Globes can average 9.4 million viewers, as they just did for CBS last week, despite little known comedian host Jo Koy widely viewed as bombing terribly — there’s certainly hope.
BLOOM: It says quite a bit about the state of the Primetime Emmys telecast that even a plugged-in TV industry observer such as you completely forgot the awards were finally running this weekend. True, the TV Academy had few choices for dates after canceling the awards in September because of the lingering labor strikes. What they ended up with, though, was pretty bad. It’s the back end of the last day of a holiday weekend overstuffed with NFL playoff games, those shows that people will actually pay $5.99 to watch. Far worse, the Emmy telecast runs head to head against the last of those games, between the Philadelphia Eagles and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I say we take the under, by a lot, on whether the Emmys attract fewer viewers than the NFL game. And I mean by a lot.
Speaking of looming battles, I too saw that MoffettNathanson report on Charlie Ergen’s latest “inscrutable” moves to hide parts of the newly re-merged EchoStar from creditors as it examines “potential strategic alternatives.” Those alternatives likely involve yet more debt, but also the possibility of “creditor-on-creditor violence” as the few remaining unencumbered assets get encumbered. Those assets instead could pay down $20 billion of DISH bonds, but EchoStar can’t afford that. No surprise the Dish bonds’ value has collapsed. Investors, it turns out, are worried about the company’s ability to repay anything. It’s hard to see how this mess ends well for anybody but some deal advisors.
FRANKEL: David, once again I have to circle back -- Comcast just put out a release claiming the Chiefs-Dolphins exclusive on Peacock was the biggest live-streaming event in U.S. history. In fact, the nation's top ISP is declaring Saturday the biggest day for internet usage ever. Comcast didn't specify how many new signups Peacock generated Saturday ... which is strange. Maybe they don't want to also have to tell investors in a few weeks how many folks subsequently churned out immediately after Patrick Mahomes took the game ball home?
Regardless, NBCUniversal ended up with what it said was a 6% bigger audience vs. last year's multi-platform presentation of the primetime AFC Wild Card game. Seems like all those folks who predicted this would be a complete flop have some 'splaining to do.
BLOOM: Most of those people complaining are probably simple folks who haven’t figured out they already own connected TVs and could signup and watch the game on Peacock for less than the cost of a beer at Buffalo Wild Wings. The comparison with last year’s wild card all-platform viewership is an apt one, though these things are always further colored by idiosyncratic issues like the actual matchup, time of day, etc. The increased viewership isn’t much different than for the whole season in terms of total rise. Across all the league’s 270 regular-season games this year, the biggest viewership increase was among women, up a whopping 9%. It’s a somewhat younger audience too. Some of that might be Taylor Swift, but she was only present at a handful of Chiefs games, and she also was busy otherwise performing in the most lucrative concert tour in live music history, and directing/producing/starring in the highest-grossing concert film ever made. The pop culture power of TayTay is obviously omnipresent and massive, but could she really be the reason for the rising viewership across the league?
