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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

💵 Let’s start the bidding. Comcast, Netflix, and Paramount are preparing bids for Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The report is the first indication of Netflix’s formal interest in the company, though the streamer has been speculated as a bidder for some time. As has previously been reported, Comcast and Netflix are interested only in the streaming and studios businesses, while Paramount has submitted multiple unsolicited bids for the whole of Warner Bros. Discovery.

🦚 Back from the dead. A resurrected NBCSN is officially launching on November 17 for YouTube TV subscribers. The channel will be programmed primarily with live sports currently housed on Peacock. During the day, NBCSN will air The Dan Patrick Show, The Dan Le Batard Show, PFT Live, and other similar programs.

🎄 Brees the season. Despite recently taking a full-time job as Fox’s No. 3 game analyst, replacing Mark Sanchez, Drew Brees will still call a Christmas Day game for Netflix. While ESPN and Fox seemed more than willing to lend their talent to Netflix for its NFL debut last Christmas, that hasn’t been the case for the streamer’s holiday doubleheader encore.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

MLS 3.0 is just what the doctor ordered

On Thursday, MLS announced two radical changes that could put the league on a much better trajectory going forward.

First, the league is getting rid of MLS Season Pass, the annual subscription service on Apple TV that was practically mandatory for any person looking to follow the league. Instead, MLS matches will now be available for all of Apple TV’s 45 million subscribers, without the need to pay an additional $100 each season.

It’s a move done both out of necessity and opportunity. Since the Apple-MLS deal began in 2023, the league has largely been out of sight and out of mind, even for American soccer fans. Unless you were a diehard MLS fan willing to fork over $100 (or received a Season Pass subscription through a promotion with T-Mobile), the league was a complete afterthought. FS1 would air 30-odd games per season, the vast majority of which were early in the MLS calendar with minimal postseason implications, and very few of which featured the league’s preeminent superstar, Lionel Messi.

If you didn’t catch one of those few linear TV windows, you almost certainly didn’t consume MLS.

That began to change this year, when the league made a concerted effort to expand its reach within the confines of its Apple deal. MLS debuted Sunday Night Soccer, a marquee weekly window that was available to all Apple TV subscribers, no Season Pass required. The league integrated its matches into Comcast and DirecTV’s channel guides. It started to allow local networks to air encore presentations of games. It struck linear deals in international markets, despite Apple TV being a global product.

Everything MLS could do to incrementally expand its reach, it did. But it still wasn’t enough. Apple TV attracts less than 1% of all television viewing, according to Nielsen’s monthly The Gauge metrics. In other words, no one is simply stumbling upon MLS content, like one might of another sporting event on linear TV.

The first signs of change came this fall, when MLS and Apple agreed to put the MLS Cup Playoffs in front of the Season Pass paywall. Those matches, and the regular season matches placed in front of the paywall, (predictably) reached larger audiences, per The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio.

To be sure, this will still be an uphill battle for MLS. Games are still tucked away on a streaming service that gets less consumption than Tubi on a monthly basis … by a factor of at least three. But it’s a step in the right direction, as was the league’s second, perhaps more radical move, announced yesterday.

Beginning in 2027, MLS will align its schedule with the top leagues in the world. Instead of kicking off its regular season in February and playing the MLS Cup Final in December, as is the current format, MLS will begin its season in July and contest the MLS Cup Playoffs in May.

The benefits of this move are multiple. For one, MLS will no longer be competing with football during the most important parts of its season. This year, the regular season ended on October 18 and the MLS Cup Final will be played on December 5. The entirety of the playoffs happened during the heart of football season. Under the new calendar, MLS will have room to breathe.

The season will begin in July, when regular season baseball is the biggest competition. Then, the postseason in May will compete with the NBA and NHL playoffs, sure. But they’ll end before either of those leagues reach the finals. And, to be blunt, the NBA and NHL playoffs don’t hold a candle to regular season NFL and college football games. MLS will have a much better opportunity to breakthrough in these circumstances than it does now.

Additionally, by aligning its calendar with the top leagues, MLS clubs should be more competitive in the international transfer market and attract more quality players. Another added benefit is that the league will have far fewer conflicts with FIFA international windows, meaning top players won’t be missing MLS games while on national team duty nearly as often.

It’s difficult to find much negative in either move MLS made. And the timing could not be more critical. With the World Cup coming to town next summer, MLS needs to do all it can to capitalize on the additional interest in soccer.

The one potential downside, which is purely speculative at this point, is the financial implications of the new Apple arrangement. Under the original deal, Apple paid MLS an average of $250 million per year over 10 years. That has apparently changed, per commissioner Don Garber, who indicated last night that both the original term of the agreement and the financials have been altered with Apple TV dropping the paywall. Garber said both changes “were very positive for us” but offered no details as to what those changes were.

It sounds eerily similar to how MLS brass discussed the original Apple deal, and its “so good we can’t tell you” viewership and subscription numbers. There’s almost no chance that Apple is paying MLS the same rights fee with the abandonment of the paywall. And one would have to imagine that the term of that 10-year deal got shorter, not longer, based on how things have gone so far.

Still, credit to MLS for making bold decisions as its trajectory went sideways. Nothing was going to change for the positive by sticking with the status quo. Now, the league has a fighting chance.

📺 INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🎬

• The new-look Pac-12 has found its final media rights partner. USA Sports, the freshly branded sports arm of Versant, has signed a five-year deal with the Pac-12 to begin in 2026. USA Network will broadcast 22 regular season football games, 50 regular season men’s basketball games, all rounds of the Pac-12 Tournament before the championship game, and 5-10 regular season women’s basketball games as part of the agreement. USA Network joins CBS and The CW as the conference’s broadcast partners.

• YouTube TV is reportedly angling to have ESPN Unlimited content integrated within its platform as part of its ongoing negotiations with Disney. Of course, it was never a debate whether or not YouTube TV subscribers would be able to authenticate into ESPN Unlimited, but ingesting that content directly into the YouTube TV platform would create a more seamless experience for subscribers, at the cost of Disney losing out on key user data.

• Local NBA viewership is off to a strong start this season. Across all local broadcasts, the league has seen an 8% year-over-year rise in viewership. A few teams have seen gaudy increases on account of some more favorable distribution setups. The Denver Nuggets, for instance, have seen a 280% year-over-year increase for its local broadcasts on Altitude, KTVD, and KUSA. However, Altitude was unavailable for Comcast customers until February of this year, so making any year-over-year comparisons before then doesn’t tell the full story. Similarly, the Chicago Bulls have seen a 174% year-over-year increase in local viewership, but Chicago Sports Network didn’t become available to Comcast customers until this June.

📣 THE PLAY-BY-PLAY 🎙️

The Play-By-Play crew holds their second annual NFL Announcers Draft. Check it out!

🔥 THE CLOSER 🔥

Why is the Disney-YouTube TV dispute still going on?

With the informal deadline of Disney’s quarterly earnings call behind us, and still no resolution to the dispute with YouTube TV in sight, I’ll hand it over to Awful Announcing contributor Dan Kaplan to take us through why this thing is taking so long.

Why has the Disney, nee ESPN, standoff with YouTube TV gone on so long, now around two weeks, with ominous comments from the Mouse’s CFO today suggesting the blackout could go longer (writing this almost surely means the sides will settle shortly!).

This is already one of the longest blackouts stemming from a contract dispute between a pay TV distributor –YouTube TV – and a content company, Disney. There are a few reasons why YouTube TV subscribers have been shut out from watching Monday Night Football and SEC football–not to mention the local ABC affiliate and even National Geographic channel. Obviously money is the primary concern, but there are others too.

First off, YouTube TV is a division of Alphabet, the corporate name for Google.  While YouTube TV with its 10 million subs may be a big deal in the pay TV business, it is not the major money center for Google, not by a longshot. This is not to say YouTube TV is playing hardball because of this, but the pressing need for a deal may be a little different than for those pay TV distributors whose primary business is just that.

“There’s a real question about, in my mind, where this fits in, and Google’s priority structure,” said Patrick Crakes, a media analyst. “Everybody keeps thinking, this is some kind of crown jewel right within our business. Because to us, it is.”

For Disney, the negotiation must be looked at in the context of a post-Venu world, Crakes continued. By that he means, look to the 2024 unraveling of the planned sports streamer app that Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery tried unsuccessfully to launch. Venu was viewed by the trio as the solution to losing sports fans to the digital universe. Now Disney has pivoted to a multi-faceted approach from a digital pay TV outlet like YouTube TV to its own direct to consumer app launched a few months ago.

“Disney is evolving itself,” Crakes said. “Now, finally, right after the failure of Venu, and part of that was investing in the biggest and best sports across multiple different platforms, and offering some of the stuff outside of it so it can be rebundled as well, but trying to get as many distribution points open as possible, with the understanding that the main one remains pay TV, and the most important new one is YouTube TV.”

YouTube TV is what’s known as a vMVPD, a virtual multi video programming distributor.  The traditional distributors – Comcast, Charter and so forth – are plain old MVPDs, carried on linear. What’s interesting here is that Disney has not told YouTube TV to take it or leave it.  The new direct to consumer ESPN app could be seen as leverage, a way for YouTube TV subs to get their ESPN fix without the parties agreeing to a deal.

But that is not happening, at least in great numbers (as an aside whenever you see the estimates for what Disney is losing in sub fees, remember some of that is offset by Hulu+ and ESPN the App gaining subs out of this). Company officials on the earnings call today said the primary source of new subs to the ESPN app are cord nevers, or people who never bought a bundled channel package, whether digitally or on linear. The supposed elimination of the middleman MVPD and vMVPD is not happening, at least not yet

“For a long time people told you… it was going to be direct to the consumer, cut out the middle man,” Crakes said. “Middle man’s never been bigger.” And next year Disney is scheduled to close its purchase of Fubo, adding another vMVPD into the entertainment conglomerate’s platform mix.