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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🎤 Keeping Kawhi-it. ESPN NBA reporter Ramona Shelburne alleges that the Los Angeles Clippers intentionally avoided calling on reporters who were prepared to ask questions about superstar Kawhi Leonard’s supposed no-show endorsement deal with Aspiration during the team’s media day. The NBA is, of course, investigating whether the deal was made to circumvent the salary cap.

🧐 Old McDonald. Yesterday, ESPN/MASN analyst Ben McDonald addressed his viral moment from Wednesday’s Cubs-Padres game in which he emphatically declared he would not be watching ESPN’s opening night NHL coverage. “When that thing popped up on the screen, I didn’t even know ESPN had the hockey contract to be honest with you,” he told FS1’s Wake Up Barstool.

🏀 76. That’s the number of teams the NCAA is eyeing for its expanded March Madness format. According to a report from Ross Dellenger at On3, the rumored 76-team NCAA Tournament is “inching closer,” and it could be in place as soon as next season. 12 teams would play in an “opening round” across two sites on Tuesday and Wednesday, winnowing the field down to 64 when the tournament would start in earnest.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

Why is NBC launching a new cable channel?

As part of the new long-term distribution agreement that NBC struck with YouTube TV on Thursday, the network announced it would proceed with its plans to launch a new cable channel called NBC Sports Network. Yes, NBC is seemingly relaunching a channel it shuttered just four years ago, or at least relaunching it in name only.

It might seem like an odd decision in 2025. Cable is dying, and viewers are flocking to streaming at an accelerated rate. Why would it make sense for NBC to launch a new network now?

Well, it’s not as crazy as it seems. NBC, perhaps more than any of its peers, has invested heavily in live sports to fuel the growth of its streaming service, Peacock. Between exclusive Big Ten football and basketball games, the English Premier League, an NBA deal that begins later this month, the Olympics, an MLB deal reportedly set to start next year, and more, Peacock has become a key destination for sports fans.

But even with all of that inventory, the streamer still hasn’t crossed the threshold into “must-have” status for all sports fans.

The Big Ten games are typically of lower quality, thus making them justifiable to skip even for ardent fans. NBA fans will be able to catch games on NBC, ABC, ESPN, and Prime Video on nearly every day of the week, except Monday, making Peacock’s inventory an easy sacrifice, even for hardcore basketball viewers. The Olympics only require a one-month subscription. Baseball fans won’t necessarily be dying to watch whichever game is on Peacock, similar to the current MLB packages on Apple TV+ and Roku. And Premier League fans have likely already had Peacock for some time, creating little potential for subscriber growth for that property.

All of that is a long way of saying that NBC has invested billions of dollars into live sports rights as a means of driving Peacock subscriptions, and gambling on regular-season basketball and baseball to recoup that money is a perilous proposition.

Enter: NBC Sports Network.

According to previous reports, the network will be designed to carry some of Peacock’s exclusive live sports programming and distribute it to audiences that are still subscribed to the bundle. Latest estimates suggest 65 million households are still pay TV subscribers. One would have to imagine that if a person is already paying for a full cable or satellite bundle, which includes a plethora of the most important live sports, they’d be less likely to shell out an additional $11 per month (with the recent price hike) for Peacock.

NBC wants a way to capitalize on these 65 million households with its valuable live sports programming, albeit likely not valuable enough for some people to shell out additional money for it a la carte. Initially, reports suggested that NBC was planning to release its new NBC Sports Network into genre-specific bundles, such as DirecTV MySports or Xfinity Sports & News. However, Thursday’s announcement indicated the network would be included within YouTube TV, which is not genre-specific. Perhaps this opens the door for the network to be included in other standard-issue packages, greatly increasing its potential reach.

If so, NBC can start collecting per-subscriber fees from a significant portion of those 65 million pay TV households. Let’s conservatively estimate that NBC can ask for $0.25 per subscriber per month on its new channel. Assuming 65 million subscribers, that would come out to about $200 million per year, approximately the price NBC will reportedly pay for its new MLB package. That’s before NBC even sells a single commercial.

NBC needs to pay for these expensive live sports rights somehow, and tapping into what’s left of the cable bundle is a wise way to do so. Let’s also consider that most people remaining in the bundle are there because of live sports. Adding a channel dedicated to live sports programming will only help keep those still inside the bundle in place.

It’s also important to consider what is happening to the rest of NBC’s cable assets at the end of the year. All of its current cable portfolio, aside from Bravo, is being spun off into Versant. That means all the per-subscriber fees that NBC currently collects from USA Network, Golf Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, SyFy, and others are going away. Launching NBC Sports Network will help supplement some of the cash flow the company will lose when it spins off.

Is it unusual to see NBC launch a cable channel in 2025? Yes. Even more so because it’s going by the same name of a network it shuttered just four years prior. But, make no mistake, NBC is doing this because it will help leverage its wide-ranging live sports portfolio more effectively than it could with Peacock alone.

¡Vive la NBC Sports Network!

📈 DATA DUMP 📊

• The highly anticipated Green Bay Packers-Dallas Cowboys game on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which resulted in a 40-40 tie, earned the top audience of last week in the NFL. Micah Parsons’ return to Dallas averaged 26.9 million viewers across NBC and Peacock.

• Over on CBS, the network’s national window game between the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs scored 23.77 million viewers. The game went to 93% of the country (Bears-Raiders went to 7%). The CBS regional window averaged 13.5 million viewers for a slate that included Chargers-Giants and Commanders-Falcons.

• The NFL’s International Series slate got off to a hot start in Dublin. The 9:30 a.m. ET game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings earned 7.9 million viewers on NFL Network, the second most-watched NFL Network international game on record, behind Dolphins-Chiefs in Frankfurt in 2023. That figure does not include over-the-air viewership in the local markets.

• ESPN averaged 21.4 million viewers during the two-hour overlap window for its Monday Night Football doubleheader earlier this week. Bengals-Broncos on ABC averaged 13.2 million viewers for the full game.

• Game 1 of the Yankees-Red Sox Wild Card Series averaged 6.5 million viewers on ESPN. Across all four games, ESPN averaged 4.4 million viewers for Day 1 of the new Wild Card format.

• Game 5 of the Indiana Fever-Las Vegas Aces WNBA semifinal series averaged 1.8 million viewers, the most-watched WNBA semi in 27 years. The entire semifinal round averaged 1.3 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2.

• ABC continued its college football dominance last weekend, winning all three major windows. Alabama-Georgia averaged 10.4 million viewers in primetime. LSU-Ole Miss earned 6.7 million viewers in the mid-afternoon window. And Notre Dame-Arkansas averaged 4.3 million viewers at noon ET.

📱 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Ryan Clark accused Stephen A. Smith of being a fake Steelers fan, which somehow led to them jumping Double Dutch on First Take?

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

What in the world is ‘ingestion?’

Anyone that has been following the reporting around NBC and YouTube TV’s carriage dispute in recent weeks has probably come across the concept of “ingestion.” In addition to the normal carriage squabbles about how much YouTube TV is going to pay NBC per subscriber for its content, the streamer was looking for the right to “ingest” NBC-owned content directly onto its platform during the recent negotiation.

Well, YouTube TV didn’t really get that. In the agreement announced yesterday, the two sides announced that NBC’s Peacock streaming service would be included in YouTube Primetime Channels, a service similar to Amazon’s Prime Video Channels by which users can subscribe to a streamer and access it directly within the YouTube TV (or Prime Video) apps.

What does that mean, and why is it important for sports fans? Well, let’s explain what true ingestion is first.

In an ideal world, YouTube TV (and its competitors) would like to create a seamless user experience where a customer can pay one price and access all of the content they could ever want, all on its own platform. Sound familiar? That used to be called cable.

To accomplish this lofty goal, YouTube TV will need to strike agreements with content providers, like NBC, which would have to allow for that to happen. Say you wanted to watch last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live on Sunday morning. YouTube TV would like you to be able to do that on its platform, without needing to flip over to Peacock. This concept would extend to Peacock-exclusive live sporting events. Say you wanted to watch a Big Ten basketball game. Instead of launching Peacock, the game would show up within YouTube TV’s channel guide and you could watch there.

We’re not quite there with this deal. Users will still need to purchase Peacock separately, but if they do so through YouTube Primetime Channels, they’ll be able to access that content directly within the YouTube TV app. In addition, carriage of the new NBC Sports Network channel serves as de facto ingestion for NBC’s sports content, regardless of whether one subscribes to Peacock or not.

But critically, YouTube TV isn’t getting the wholesale rate to include Peacock within its standard package and provide the streaming service to all of its subscribers. Think of it as an optional add-on.

Later this month, Disney and YouTube TV will look to reach their own new distribution agreement. Of course, that negotiation will come with its own unique challenges and circumstances, but the NBC deal could serve as a model. Content providers like NBC and Disney don’t want to give up the level of control that full-blown “ingestion” requires. However, you can expect YouTube TV to push for a similar setup for Disney+ within YouTube Primetime Channels, and perhaps even “ingestion” for ESPN Unlimited-exclusive programming.

These types of negotiations mark the unofficial beginning to our long-awaited “re-bundling.” And over the coming years, as more agreements come to term, expect “ingestion” to take a leading role in these deals.