The Media Odyssey

Marion Ranchet: [00:00:00] Let's do very brief. I agree. I've thought about it. I remember it's very long.

Evan Shapiro: Fly Eagles, Fly. On the road to victory. Fight, Eagles fight. Score a touchdown. 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. Hit em low. Hit em high. Watch our eagles fly. Fly, Eagles fly on the road to victory. E.A.G.L.E.S. Eagles!

That's the cold open, right there.

Marion Ranchet: Welcome, everyone. This is the Media Odyssey. This is Evan Shapiro.

Evan Shapiro: And that is Marion Ranchet.

Marion Ranchet: So today's episode is all about sports. We taped it a few weeks ago, and we needed a new intro because something big happened yesterday. What happened?

Evan Shapiro: The Eagles won Super Bowl 59. E A G L E S, Eagles!

Marion Ranchet: So this episode, all about sports, we're going to be talking about Tubi and the Super Bowl, [00:01:00] Venue, DAZN, ESPN, you name it.

We hope you enjoy it.

Evan Shapiro: Go Birds!

This week, we have a lot going on. We actually want to open with a shout out to all our friends in Los Angeles who are all going through a really rough time right now with the fires out there, lots of property destroyed, people's homes gone in minutes. If you want to help out the folks in Los Angeles, the first responders, and the folks who have been affected by the fires, we strongly propose and ask you to give to World Central Kitchen, which is Jose Andres's great organization that is feeding first responders out there and providing meals for people affected by the fires.

We'll put the link in the show notes. Please do reach out and help. It's a really tough time out there, and frankly, hot meals are one of the biggest needs.

So, with the rest of our show, we are going to talk about sports. Sports. Go birds! I'm an Eagles fan, Marion Ranchet you are a Steph Curry fan?

Is that correct?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, I'm more basketball than American football, sorry [00:02:00] guys.

Evan Shapiro: Do you play?

Marion Ranchet: I used to play.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, because you're tall.

Marion Ranchet: Same sport as Curry.

Evan Shapiro: For a girl, you're tall.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Actually, at that time, I was much younger. And I was small at that time. And so, I had the same spot as Curry, but I wasn't as good.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be sitting here.

Evan Shapiro: Oh, point guard or shooting guard?

Marion Ranchet: Point guards.

Evan Shapiro: Okay, cool. Alright, we'll have to play. Paul, our producer, fancies himself quite the basketball player.

Marion Ranchet: Really?

Evan Shapiro: I mean it's not hard when you're, Yeah he's seven feet tall. If you're seven feet tall, what else are you going to do other than play basketball?

Marion Ranchet: Okay, I'm going to have my husband join the fun. The entire family actually plays basketball here.

Evan Shapiro: All right. This summer, when you come over for Stream TV in June, we'll all play basketball in depth.

Marion Ranchet: Nice.

Evan Shapiro: Although I played basketball in Denver, the air is very thin. You run out of breath very quickly.

Marion Ranchet: Very quickly. In June, I'm sure.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, but I'm also old. So, we will talk about sports today, and we're going to talk specifically about the effect sports and sports rights, the cost [00:03:00] of sports rights is having on the television ecosystem. We're going to concentrate very heavily on how sports is soaking up a lot of money particularly in streaming right now.

I did some math, quick math, with the assistance of ChatGPT, I will admit, this time. If you look at the rights for just the NFL, NBA, Major League Soccer, World Wrestling, F1, Big Ten, Big Twelve, other college football, NCAA men's basketball, NCAA men's, women's basketball, the total sports rights on current contracts is 221 billion dollars.

That doesn't include hockey. That doesn't include baseball. I also did some the pro darts league just signed a new contract for 110 percent increase from their last contract. The last F one deal here in the U S was a 1500% increase. The last NFL Sunday ticket deal with YouTube here in the U.S. 100 percent increase.

The last [00:04:00] NBA contract, which cut out Disco Brothers, and went to Amazon, and also NBC, up 160%. You had some numbers there on total rights spending as well.

Marion Ranchet: Well, for 2024, so the numbers from the sports business media reports, and in 2024, it, the value was around 62 billion plus 12 percent year on year.

And if you're looking at what streamers have spent in 2024, according to Ampere Analysis, the number they gave was 10 billion last year, expected to be at around 11 at the end of this year, 2025. So the pie is growing.

You have more folks, you know, buying those rights. It's a great business to be in, right? Honestly, I'm almost jealous.

Evan Shapiro: Selling sports rights is a good business to be in.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: Buying them, it just seems like the prices continue to go up. And the question is, are the returns on that investment paying off? Netflix had two games and the [00:05:00] Beyonce Bowl on Christmas Day.

And they, what's good about Netflix and with regards to those games is those did go worldwide. People were able to tap into that. But on the other hand, if you look at the traditional NFL game in December on broadcast and you compare it to what happened on Netflix, it was off.

There was at least a 10 percent drop off in audience Amazon's Thursday night football, with the NFL, that is also down from the traditional broadcast airings on broadcast television.

Marion Ranchet: But they grew this year, I believe, huh? It was bigger this year than

Evan Shapiro: Over last year? Yeah.

Marion Ranchet: So, again, huh?

Evan Shapiro: In part that's because Amazon, I think, was complaining about the quality of the games. They weren't necessarily getting the best games every week. And so I think they went to the NFL and bitched and moaned about that and got a better set of games for themselves on Thursday nights. I will tell you, I canceled my Amazon subscription earlier this year for many different reasons.

But most notably, I have this this suspicion that [00:06:00] we're all paying for Amazon to get the free shipping. And we're getting Prime as a bonus to that, but on the flip side, I don't know that I actually buy enough stuff there to pay 135, 140 dollars a year for that free shipping. And A, I haven't missed watching prime, which is not good news for them.

And 2, the one game I did want to watch, which was the Eagles playing, I think it was the commanders on Thursday night football, I just went to a bar. And and they won. So that's all I care about. But, so I guess my question. One more thing.

So then there is this other ripple effect that comes along with all these dollars being pushed into sports rights, and that is money. It's not like you're adding those dollars to your spending budget, right there. They have to come from somewhere. Netflix went the same week that they announced that they were doing this 5 billion dollar deal with WWE, they also slashed their film budget. [00:07:00]

And my sense, Ampere Analysis again -- shout out to our friends at Ampere Analysis -- They have this data that shows that the green lighting of just reality programming amongst the streamers is down almost 40 percent from pre stripe. And I think these two things are not a coincidence, I think these two things are directly tied to each other.

There was this report that came out recently from a showrunner who reported that they heard from Netflix, that Netflix went to them and said, we know people aren't necessarily watching the shows when they're running, they're doing other things.

So make sure that your dialogue is filled with lots of descriptors of what's happening on screen for the people who aren't paying attention to the show as it's running. And I think that. Go ahead.

Marion Ranchet: No. Go ahead. Sorry.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. I think I think that's, someone asked me. I was guest lecturing at a class earlier this week and they said, do you think that's a statement on how content is being made and the quality of [00:08:00] content that's being made?

And what I said, not, it's more of a comment on the quality of content on Netflix, to be honest with you. Which I think there are a lot of consumers who are basically running out of patience with the middle ground that Netflix seems to be covering these days where they used to be doing stuff that's more challenging.

And that's not exclusive. I loved Ripley. I loved Baby Reindeer. But my response was like, if you watch, Slow Horses, you're not doing your laundry and on your phone when Slow Horses is on TV. When you're watching Severance. You're leaning forward, right? I think the key here is that the quality of entertainment isn't diminishing.

It's just the amount of quality entertainment, I think, is slimming down. And I think the blame for that, in large part, is the money that's being invested in sports.

Marion Ranchet: So that's not what they were saying. So I was arguing that at the end of the day, the, because they're looking to be profitable, they're looking to, [00:09:00] I wouldn't say cap, but they're more careful about the annual content spent. And so some things got to give, right? And so at the end of the day, spending more on one side, you're taking somewhere else. And especially with sports then we can, look at the Netflix numbers in a bit more detail, whether that's WWE, Jake Paul, NFL, you're bringing a lot of people at the same time.

And the reach is and the impact is massive. Aside from a few shows each year I think we're going to see very compelling numbers showing the massive difference between what entertainment brings and what sports bring. And so this phrase from from Reed Astings that he didn't want to get into sports.

We all know they, we all knew they would, right? I think he didn't want to become traditional TV.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, they weren't going to do advertising either, remember that?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: So, I do think yeah. So there are a couple of different things at play here. And what I want to focus on now is what's happening to the audience and the targeting that a lot of these streamers have been doing.

So they all [00:10:00] went from a very heavy premium prestige. You know, Amazon won an Oscar very early on, and it's going on, won an Emmy. I think it was the first streamer to win a Best Comedy Emmy. Netflix has won a bunch of awards. Now they're much moving towards this four quadrant mass audience play.

And it's almost entirely, because now they all want to be in the ad game. And you can't be in the ad game

Marion Ranchet: Without scale.

Evan Shapiro: if you're a tiny little niche. And so what I feel like, and tell me what you think there, I feel like the streamers have all gone from being, HBO like to being now they're CBS like.

They're becoming broadcasters instead of prestige programmers. What do you think about that?

Marion Ranchet: No, completely. I think one of the latest example is Netflix in Europe. In this case, France investing in a soap, in a daily soap. If that's not traditional broadcast TV, I don't know what is.

Evan Shapiro: Holy cow.

Marion Ranchet: So yeah, absolutely.

I think at the beginning, smaller, edgier, making moves [00:11:00] to put the brand out there, et cetera. Now, the goal is scale, scale, scale, global mainstream advertising, and then yeah, you need potentially safer content to appeal to the widest audience possible.

So it all tracks. And the move to sports, that's why it was so, of course you're gonna get into sports reads, of course. Because this is, out of this and the news, the two things that people, there's actually still staying on, traditional TV, broadcast TV. To get that shoots of live events, live news, et cetera.

So actually we're going to see Netflix and the likes going more and more I would say deeper in the news, right? But so shortly back to

Evan Shapiro: Do you think? Cause news is pretty controversial and it, you want content that satisfies the widest possible audience right now in the United States at least.

It's very polarized and you have the broadcasters there in Europe, which do, I think, a much better job of covering the news than anybody here in the [00:12:00] U. S. does. But Amazon did, they, they had a, they had an election night news.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, they had an anchor right?

Evan Shapiro: Brian Williams, yeah, and it sounds like they're still exploring that.

Yeah, maybe they're chase after the next Walter Cronkite to go mass. You're right, it's the utility programming, and also live. Don't sleep on the aspect of the live product something we talked about in our prediction episode, the live product is substantially better.

For ads than the on demand product because you can't skip the ads.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. But so going back to moves being made, right? So what's coming up this year? So Venues, Dead. DirecTV went very quickly. Although I think they've been working on bringing this bundle. Is it, is this is it 70 dollars? Is that a skinny bundle of some sorts, is it, or do you have everything on the horizon within this seven, this the 70 bucks bundle?

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, my understanding of it is that, that it is sports focused, but it's not a skinny bundle. So you're getting a lot of other channels for it [00:13:00] but it's what we'd call the sports tier in traditional MVPD here.

I haven't dug that deeply into it, it was just announced yesterday. But it does seem like it's their response to Hulu and Fubo combining because Fubo has more than sports. It's sports focused. It has more sports than the traditional pay TV bundle, but it also has, general entertainment channels as well.

And I think, DirecTV's move was in direct response, pardon the pun, to the "Fulo", whatever you want to call it, combination. And, I, it'd be interesting to see what happens. One of the big complaints by the MVPDs, including DirecTV and Dish and Fubo about Venue was that it was an unfair skinny bundle that they'd been trying to get for their own platforms for a long time, but were prohibited by the sports rights holders.

I think, this is going to portend a bunch of available skinny sports bundles on every MVPD in the U. S. And I think that'll come [00:14:00] eventually to Europe as well. As much as it can, because a lot of the public broadcasters control a lot of the rights for certain things.

Marion Ranchet: The rights are super fragmented, but the broadcasters it's free, right?

So you can actually have access to live sports. And then you can decide to have a sports only bundle on top today, right?.

Having said that, because this market, this media market is so fragmented, whether you're looking at the U. S. or Europe, there's never enough, right? So that 70 dollar thing, it's missing, I'm sure, pieces that are, on Amazon, on Peacock, et cetera.

So it serves an audience that is maybe the audience of folks who want to pay less and get only sports, and then they get rid of the rest. That could be one way, right? But they won't have everything under the horizon. So they will still need to complement with, whoever else has sports that they want to watch.

So I'm skeptical.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. Amazon had [00:15:00] an exclusive playoff game the other day between the Steelers and the Ravens. And, I was just, I was actually waiting for the announcement of which game would be exclusively on Amazon because I don't have Amazon Prime and hoping that the Eagles, which, go birds, I'm an Eagles fan, I was hoping the Eagles game wasn't going to be the Amazon game, because I would have had to find a place to watch it.

If I was a Steelers fan, I guess in-market, Steelers and Ravens fans did get to watch it, so it was not excluded, but I don't live in Philly. And so if you're a Ravens fan, you don't live in Baltimore. If you're a Steelers fan, you don't live in Pittsburgh. You had to either have Prime or you were going to have to go to a bar and watch with a bunch of other schlubs.

I guess it's, you're, I think that's really right. It's a very frustrating for a sports fan, like just determining where the games are every Sunday has become, basically a Jenga game. And then you have this kind of added, well, so Premier League, have you been following? I think you mentioned this on, I think on a previous episode, have you been following the, I don't know that it's been announced officially yet, but it [00:16:00] seems like they're starting their own streaming service, right?

Premier League. The football.

Marion Ranchet: Oh, Premier League. So they actually stopped a partnership with the IMG, so longstanding partner. It is rumored that one of the things that they will be going on their own is do a D2C OTT service but I haven't seen any confirmation. Where DAZN has been struggling in its own market is because Sky has that very strong hold on sports rights, whether that's F1, Premier League et cetera.

It's been hard for them to exist, to coexist with such a strong player in the market. In Germany, they had rights to the Bundesliga, so that's the equivalent of the German Premier League, so to say. And actually the new set of rights just, will just start right now and they're splitting between Sky and DAZN.

So interesting things going on. Again, you have the [00:17:00] incumbent, which historically has had a lot of sports rights under their belt. They're seeing the competition of the broadcasters. They're seeing the competition of the streamers. And so there's a lot of sharing going on in France. France Télévisions, the public broadcaster, is sharing with Amazon the Roland Garros, which is one of the four Grand Chelem tournaments.

So there's a lot of sharing, a lot of fragmentation. Nothing different from you guys.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And I don't, I, in my mind, what differentiated programming brands in our, in my youth and then in my formative years as an executive in the industry was, you had shit that no one else had, right?

You had the Sopranos, you had the Shield, you had, Staircase and now it, there's this uniculture happening. Where, and not on sports, but last night I tuned, turned on ABC and they were airing Only Murders in the Building. Yeah. And the fact that the NFL is literally everywhere, [00:18:00] the NBA is now almost everywhere except Disco Brothers.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: Football is moving around at a record speed around the world. It does feel like, I don't know how people distinguish their brands in a marketplace where you're sharing the rights for all of these things. And again, is the viewership commensurate? Is the value there for the rights buyer in as much as it would be. Like Tubi, we talked about this before we started recording, Tubi is going to have the Super Bowl this in a few weeks, the same time it's going to be on Fox.

Now Fox is ostensibly a free broadcast over-the-air channel, but it's not. In the United States, if you have Fox, chances are you have cable, you're getting it through cable and Fox generates, even as the cable world shrinks here, Fox generates, billions and billions of dollars from retransmission consent through cable operators, and yet they're airing the Super Bowl day and date live minute by minute on Tubi, which is a free streaming service. I think it'll work great.

I think [00:19:00] they'll, I don't think you'll hurt the ratings on Fox and I think Tubi will do fine as well. But from a differentiation standpoint, from a brand building standpoint, doesn't this, at the end of the day, lead us to, "Oh who gives a shit what channel you are? I have no loyalty whatsoever."

Marion Ranchet: Going back on Fox and Tubi, I think the two have been together for a few years, right?

They could have done that last year, I believe they, they did it.

Evan Shapiro: CBS had the Super Bowl last year. I don't think.

Marion Ranchet: Ah, okay.

Evan Shapiro: I don't think CBS aired the Super Bowl on Pluto, though, because they're the same company.

Marion Ranchet: They had a, they did a FAST channel, something was going on around Super Bowl last year, but I don't know if it was the game per se.

What's fascinating is that the fact that Fox has the rights, and then that's an easy play to bring Tubi in, so to say. I don't think it's, I would be surprised if it was cannibalizing. I think it's more a way of, just giving more option and see if that sticks. The only challenge is that Tubi [00:20:00] historically has very much been an AVOD first platform, right?

So people go on there to go on demand. They have fast channels, but every time, in the news, you can say that they're saying in most of the demand and the consumption is happening on on-demand content. So will people understand and go there, number one. And number two, going back to the technology piece, because it is an important one, every year I see when the Super Bowl takes place, analysts, watching the game on ten different platforms and talking about low latency and the likes.

Can their platform sustain, that level of of viewership? I don't know. They had the World Cup two years ago, but it's soccer. You guys don't really care about soccer, right?

Evan Shapiro: We don't watch soccer here. Yeah, no. Yeah, I mean, we do. We watch women's soccer, which is okay. So let's, I'm going to put a pin in the women's sports thing, but I do want to come back to that in a second.

Let's talk about technical aspects of this. So Netflix had the boxing, well that wasn't really a [00:21:00] boxing match, the slap fight between the YouTuber and the old guy this past fall, and it broke. It could not handle the capacity. Now, the football games that they had on Christmas Day, quarter of the audience, so a little bit less stress on the system, but it held up.

I didn't see a lot of complaints on social media the same way, it worked really well in my house. But there is this thing that I think everybody should know about that's coming down the pike. It's like a fast moving locomotive headed towards every fan in the world. And that is, right now, even with as many people as stream content on their television sets, most people aren't streaming at any given time, right?

And the stress on broadband in the U. S. and in Europe with regards to the compression of video as it comes into the home, we've not asked the system to handle anything major yet. The first time really that we did do that was this boxing fight this, which is redundant, this boxing match [00:22:00] between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, and it couldn't handle it.

And that was as much Netflix's fault as it was the system's fault, by the way. So Netflix's servers couldn't handle it. But also, the fact is that the head end broadband junctures could not handle the amount of 4K video that was coming through the pipes at one time. What happens when every channel is streaming?

When everybody is streaming in prime time every night on three screens in the home because mom's watching one thing, dad's watching another, and the kid is watching a third thing. And I know for a fact, having talked to a lot of people in this industry who concentrate on this kind of stuff, we are headed for a major crash.

Our pipes just simply cannot handle that. And I'm really concerned that we're going to get actually a degraded experience. The more streaming we do, I think the worst experience is actually going to wind up getting. You have no response to that at all.

Marion Ranchet: Oh, sorry. No, well, I can only concur.

Evan Shapiro: You agree.

Marion Ranchet: I agree.

No, I think that [00:23:00] we, and by the way, shout out to our viewers and our listeners. Two things. One thank you. Thank you for listening. The response has been great. You've given us great comments. We're trying to address them. And one of the things they want us to do is disagree.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, I heard that. It's not that easy, but

Evan Shapiro: Well facts are facts, right?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. There's a lot, of we're, facts and opinions on this one. I think I have one. We'll discuss in a few weeks, but broadcasters on YouTube. Yeah or nay.

Evan Shapiro: Agree with me there. Okay. You're wrong, but

Marion Ranchet: Let's see. Let's have a discussion.

Evan Shapiro: All right. Okay.

Marion Ranchet: I don't think it's black and white, but, let's not tease any more than we should.

Evan Shapiro: The yes and. That's very much how, yeah, let's take some, let's take some sports. Back when the Champions League was exclusively on EE or BT or whatever the hell their initials are these days they had Champions League finals on television and on YouTube simultaneously. And they found that there was not cannibalization and that the audience size [00:24:00] was substantially larger as a result.

The second year that they did it, it was not as big, but that's because the teams weren't as good. It was two smaller market teams playing. So I think that's a good demonstration that these these things, it's a yes and, it's not an I, it's not a binary choice, it's not black and white.

I do want to go back to women's sports though. Women's sports in particular. So just quickly NCAA men's basketball, 10 billion contract right now. NCAA women's basketball, 1 billion contract. Last time I checked, 10 is 10 times the size of 1. However, last year, the NCAA women's basketball tournament was substantially more viewed than the men's final four.

And women's sports is about 40 percent of all sports on TV, but it gets about 4% of the revenue and yet we see this rise. The most famous tennis players in the world have been [00:25:00] women of late, right? Serena Williams, we can go on. The women's football team in the United States, the FIFA team, is substantially more successful.

Like the women, the men's U. S. soccer team has never won a World's Cup. The women's has won at least twice and they've been in the finals a number of times. Disappointing outcome last time.

Marion Ranchet: Hence why the move by Netflix is very smart. So I had predicted that they would invest in, I was saying that their programming of docuseries on sports was too male driven.

They need to fix that. But then on top, saying that they should be buying women's sports rights, and to the point you were making, it was cheap. But there was really a big bet to, to make on that, and so they did at the end of December with this two World Cup, Women's World Cup.

Evan Shapiro: No I think that, I agree with you.

I think the big opportunity, because it is underpriced, it's dramatically underpriced for the size of the fandom in particular that women's [00:26:00] basketball, women's sport, women's hockey here in the U. S. There, there are a lot women's boxing. Actually, when you watched the boxing match on Netflix, the best fight was the women's fight.

There were like two really crappy men's fight. And then there was this just, probably one of the three greatest boxing matches in modern boxing history, since Ali was around was, was the women's title fight and it was just a substantially better fight and the most entertaining part of the evening, and yet they probably got paid pennies on the dollar compared to Jake fucking Paul.

Like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I guess it is. It's innate sexism on one hand, but it is also, I think, a lack of awareness of just how good women's sports has gotten, how talented the athletes, if you look at the WNBA here, in part because of Kaitlin Clark in the last season but, attendance is at all time records, viewership is at all time records, it just feels like a massive opportunity, especially for, and I know you want to [00:27:00] talk about this, the free streamers, because you could afford to go get these rights if you're a free streamer right now and it would probably be a boon for your usership.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, actually DAZN, but I think that was football rights, women's football rights. And initially they put it behind the paywall within their packages and made a change a year or so ago and put it in France.

And so it became free. They had a whole off-platform and on YouTube and the likes strategy. They built two FAST channels, one called DAZN Rise, another one dedicated to women's football. I think it calls for a lot of innovation and what's fascinating and is in this case, to the point you were making, it's the chicken and egg.

Nothing can change if no one can actually watch women's sports on the biggest platforms. And so kudos to athletes and sports organization in the space [00:28:00] who are actually trying to think outside of the box. They're looking for pockets of businesses and revenues outside of traditional broadcasting because, or streaming and the likes, because they're not getting the attention or they were not getting the attention that they deserved.

And so they've proven the model by building audiences in many different places in the world, many different platforms, many different business model. And finally, things are coming around, right? So Netflix investing in Europe, we have a tender that just started in Jan. For again women football it's more of a competition. It's a club.

And it's the rights are available for the Americas and Europe. I'm seeing Amazon, Netflix, interesting, and being in front of DAZN who, could be the one, snatching those rights. But yeah, like anything, even for niche sports, same problem. It's not [00:29:00] on big networks, big streamers. You build your audience, you prove the business case, and then, slowly but surely, you're making the point that, you should get the scale that your sports and your athletes deserve.

Evan Shapiro: And what's fascinating is if you look at most research and data, the single biggest decider on most products bought in the home is the female head of house. They're making most of the decisions not just on things like groceries and cleaning products and things like that. And by the way, this is when they have jobs, like yourself, or when they don't have jobs.

They're still making the decisions on most products, but this is also automobiles, vacations, like home purchases, most of the major decisions wind up being pushed one way or another by the female head of household. And so pulling more women into sports fandom just makes all the sense in the world.

Because the only reason you're buying sports rights for the most part, and I want to get back to DAZN for a second, but for [00:30:00] the most part these rights are being bought because of the ad dollars, not because of subscription dollars. Although, we'll see how ESPN does as its own product out there in the wild.

Okay, so now I want to switch. Will DAZN ever be profitable? They lose about a billion dollars a year.

Marion Ranchet: There's Saudi money coming their way. I think we heard this week that there's a billion dollars coming their way and they were saying that they would be profitable, I think in '26, something like that.

Let's see, they've spent, is it another billion on the World Cup? Another club they managed? I have to say kudos to sports organization, able to think outside the box again to revamp some competitions and and make it there's people who can get their hands on those rights.

I think the NBA, one thing that I would say, you mentioned the fact that the prices grew so much, but actually, did they? Because what I'm seeing is [00:31:00] them having to put like so much more content out there, so many more games, so it's not, is it really apples to apples?

Evan Shapiro: Their costs are going up too.

Yeah, it's 160 percent increase in rights. And then today it was announced that Warner Brothers Discovery, or as I like to call them, Disco Brothers, just did a huge sports rights deal with the NBA clips. For clips, they can't get the whole games because David Zaslav, the worst CEO in modern media history, fucked up the deal with the NBA.

So now, he's paying an exorbitant amount of money to get clips for Bleacher Report. So I think DAZN, first of all, people should stop taking money from the Saudis. Golf, DAZN, like they're not, it's not a great group of humans who are investing the money. The Saudi people, I'm sure, are very nice, but the people who have all the money in Saudi Arabia are terrible, terrible people. They chop up journalists.

But secondarily, I just don't know that for a small enterprise like DAZN, who is spending [00:32:00] exorbitant amounts of money on sports rights I just don't. I don't see a path to profitability there myself.

Marion Ranchet: It's tough, huh? The perfect example of, cause like we're talking about how great there's, being in the business of selling, you're seeing your revenue going up, up, up.

We've spoken about the consumers, not great to your point, where's the brand loyalty? Money wise, you have to cough up so much more money every year because everything is so fragmented. And to give you an example is League One in France.

So terrible scenario taking place last year in, in France. And after a first major, F up a few years before with another company. So is it, is the bubble going to burst? Because what happened on this deal was, they had almost no one bidding. So Canal Plus, who historically built Ligue 1 in France since day one. Got annoyed, and actually [00:33:00] sued Ligue 1, claiming that the way the rights were split between BeIn, Amazon, et cetera was was detrimental that they paid too much for what they got, et cetera.

So they turn around, they said, they sent a letter and they said, thank you. We're not gonna bid. Which is a major thing because it's 10 million, pay TV subs.

Evan Shapiro: It is higher, right? So yeah,

Marion Ranchet: It is, yeah, this is where people were watching, Ligue 1. Yes, they watched it also on Amazon and BeIn these last few years, still a lot of games were being broadcasted on Canal Plus, and then they were left with, apparently Amazon, not really making a bid, then DAZN.

So DAZON One, launched in August of last year, came out with a price and ended up with a boycott. Folks were saying, no, we're boycotting DAZN. It's too expensive. I think they were looking at maybe 40, 40 euros a month, which for you guys is nothing, huh? But people were saying it's too expensive, et [00:34:00] cetera.

So apparently they've had a very slow start, like half a million subs. And they've been doing promos, prize promotion, for the last few months.

Evan Shapiro: So where are fans of the sport going to watch the football?

Marion Ranchet: Piracy.

Evan Shapiro: Woh, Yeah. Sports fans are very good at

Marion Ranchet: So you started seeing numbers. They are.

Yeah. We'll put it in the show notes, some numbers came out of those games being, pirated and how it grew like this as of September. And so they came this week saying that the price point which is now 20, I think, 19.99.

Evan Shapiro: So half.

Marion Ranchet: Is going to stay.

I don't know if it's 20 or 30, but it's going to stay. And so that's Ligue 1, being greedy. And they did that a few years ago. They had Mediapro. The channel stopped after less than a year.

Evan Shapiro: Their own channel.

Marion Ranchet: Their, the channel they sold the rights to. And they don't have a direct-to-consumer service.

So they spent the last 12 months being like, Oh, maybe we're gonna go black screen in August.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, and we do have to wrap up [00:35:00] here, but I think, something you were saying earlier, I want to click on which is, the sports rights holders, the leagues themselves, the teams themselves, are like that very savvy butcher.

They know how to carve up every tiny little piece of meat.

Marion Ranchet: That's a good one.

Evan Shapiro: They'll sell you the liver, they'll sell you the feet, they'll sell you the knuckles and so they're, they are carving it up into thinner and thinner slices and getting money for each one. But I think that could be a really good warning that at some point, that golden goose could stop laying eggs.

And I understand that's a huge mixed metaphor between meat and eggs. But leave me alone.

That is all the time we have because we promised ourselves we would keep these episodes short. This was great.

Marion Ranchet: I love it. Next time I need to have my basketball T. I didn't think of it.

Evan Shapiro: We do need to set a game you and your husband against me and Paul for basketball when you come over here later this year.

Thank you all. Once again, if you want to help our friends in Los Angeles, which I think we all want to do please consider giving to World Central [00:36:00] Kitchen, who is feeding first responders and people in need in Los Angeles right now. We'll put the link in the show notes. Thank you for coming to the Media Odyssey once again.

That is Marion Ranchet.

Marion Ranchet: This is Evan Shapiro.

Evan Shapiro: Your newsletter is called Streaming Made Easy. It's an excellent read every single week. Mine is

Marion Ranchet: Media War and Peace,

Evan Shapiro: Media War and Peace, which sounds so much better with a French accent.

Marion Ranchet: When I say it, right?

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. Thank you everybody.

Marion Ranchet: Thank you everyone.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. We'll talk to you again soon.