Want a glimpse into the future of sports on television, America? Take a good, long, hard look at Denver. Then shield your eyes before they start to bleed.
“There is no simple answer,” Bob Thompson, a media consultant and the former president of Fox Sports Networks and general manager of Denver’s old Prime Sports Network, told The Denver Post.
“You’re going to have to have multiple platforms (to watch games), where it’s a satellite dish or a cable box and a Roku or an Apple TV box or a Fire stick (from Amazon). You’re going to have multiple options to watch your team, as opposed to how it used to be, where there was this cable bundle that was all things to all people. And then it got to be too expensive for a lot of (providers). It’s not going to be one-size-fits-all ordinarily anymore.”
Translation: If you want to watch every major sports team in the Denver area by legal means, you’re going to have to jump through more hoops than a trained circus lion.
The two best teams in town, the defending Stanley Cup champion Avalanche and the Nuggets, home to two-time MVP Nikola Jokic and the No. 1 seed in the NBA’s hotly-contested Western Conference, haven’t been carried by Comcast, the metro area’s No. 1 cable and broadband provider, since August 2019. The owners of the Rockies’ television home, AT&T SportsNet, Warner Bros. Discovery, have announced that they’re looking to get out of the regional sports broadcasting business and don’t have the cash to pay Colorado’s rights fees, putting the future of non-national Rockies telecasts in limbo.
It’s currently sharing broadcast limbo by the CU Buffs, whose games aired on the Pac-12 Network often go unseen for much of greater Denver and whose conference, the Pac-12, is the only Power 5 conference without a television contract that runs past July 1, 2024. The Pac-12’s next media contract is almost certainly going to include a tier of games being made available exclusively over a streaming service such as Amazon Prime or Apple TV+ or via syndication on over-the-air broadcast channels that would require a digital antenna, sources told the Post.
“Most areas are dealing with it in multiple situations,” Jon Lewis, founder of the Sports Media Watch blog, a one-stop resource for industry news and trends, told The Post. “But with the Pac-12 Network and Warner Bros. Discovery and this situation with Altitude TV, I don’t know if there’s any place with a worse situation (than Denver).
“Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any markets with this many different problems accessing home teams … just a lot of bad luck in Denver in that regard.”
Thompson and Lewis agree: the situation regarding local sports on TV in Denver isn’t just about luck. It could also be a harbinger of the future for sports broadcasting across the United States — a test market, if you like. And the early returns haven’t been pretty.
“You’re going to have to pick and choose”
The two coins on the realm of sports broadcasting are advertising dollars and subscribers — and the cable and satellite companies that used to dominate both fronts a generation ago went limping into the 2020s. Cable providers lost 3.5 million subscribers in 2022, according to the Leichtman Research Group, after dropping 2.7 million in 2021.
The playbook Thompson helped to write here in Denver — Fox Sports Net aired Nuggets and Avs games before Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, or KSE, took the rights back in order to put both teams on the company’s own Altitude TV network — has been thrown into chaos by cord-cutting.
What used to be the family of Fox Sports Net channels was purchased by Disney/ESPN from Fox Sports and then sold quickly to Sinclair Broadcasting, which rebranded the various regional sports networks, or RSNs, as “Bally Sports” networks. But the Sinclair subsidiary that absorbed the channels, Diamond Sports, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March.
Diamond broadcasts games for 14 MLB franchises, including the Rockies’ NL West rival the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks are one of three franchises that reportedly have payments from Diamond that are overdue. Arizona filed a motion in bankruptcy court last Thursday to compel Sinclair/Diamond to pay up or terminate the contract. MLB filed similar motions this past Wednesday on behalf of two other teams owed payments by Diamond, the Cleveland Guardians and the Minnesota Twins.
“The dilemma with the RSN chaos, to my mind, is that for sports like the MLB and NBA, which still have a relative lack of market parity across the league, the best-resourced clubs will be able to provide the most options for fans,” said Victoria Johnson, a professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of the book ‘Sports TV.’ “While the lesser-resourced clubs may have increasingly tiered points of entry to fandom.”
In other words, multiple price points depending on the number of games and the platform. For example, if AT&T SportsNet ceases to exist, a handful of Rockies games might be made available via an over-the-air digital channel, depending on the fee, another handful might be on a national carrier such as ESPN or FOX and the majority could be split between a streaming-only service and a different premium cable or satellite provider.
“You pretty much have to either pony up a lot of money in hopes that you get access or you basically just have to accept the fact that you have to follow the game online,” Lewis said. “You’re pretty limited (as a fan) in what you can do. There’s no good option.
“You’re going to have to pick and choose which teams you want to watch.”
“It’s not ideal”
But experts say pro sports owners, such as Rockies CEO Dick Monfort, would be reluctant to go completely a la carte, or pay-per-view, like a UFC or a boxing fight. For one, it could tie their broadcast revenue almost entirely to wins and losses. For another, they’d risk losing casual fans completely. Especially when trying to sell a franchise that is struggling on the field.
“The best (business) practice for sports properties these days is offering the games on a wide range of screens and technologies,” said longtime media consultant Lee Berke, founder of LHB Sports, Entertainment & Media. “That includes broadcast, over-the-air TV, that includes pay TV, it includes streaming, because you want to be able to watch your games from screen to screen with no friction in between.
“What needs to be done going forward (in Denver) and what definitely has been going on a national basis and is definitely (coming) on a regional basis, is to offer up your games on broadcast, on pay TV and on streaming. There’s a number of different opportunities for subscriptions and advertising sales that you can generate as a result, so ordinarily, the teams will do deals going forward (that) provide the revenue they need to be competitive.”
Forbes.com estimated the Rockies’ rights fees paid out by AT&T SportsNet at $57 million in 2022, which ranked eighth-lowest among the 29 U.S.-based MLB franchises. The club had announced a “multi-year extension” with the channel in late September 2019, but Monfort was quoted at the time of the announcement as it being “not as lucrative as I wanted it to be.” The previous deal was due to expire in 2020 and Monfort had told the team’s website in April 2019 that the prior contract was “three or four years” in length.
Additionally, per BaseballProspectus.com, MLB teams collected an estimated $60.1 million last season as part of national broadcast deals with partners such as Disney/ESPN, Turner Sports and Apple.
Local broadcast revenue was estimated to make up roughly 22% of all of MLB’s earnings in 2022. NBA teams collected 13% from local broadcast deals; the NHL, 14%.
While the Rockies sold their rights to AT&T SportsNet, local broadcasts of the Nuggets and Avs are the tentpole properties of the Altitude television channel. Broadcasts that haven’t been carried by greater Denver’s biggest cable company, Comcast, since August 2019.
Thompson’s advice? Buy every broadcasting device you can afford, keep the receipts, and try to match your priorities with your budget. Lewis’ advice is a little more … drastic.
“When it comes down to it, it’s hard to be able to find yourself in a situation where you can watch your team at all times, anywhere,” he said. “The best way to be able to watch your team play is to move far away from them. It’s not ideal.”
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