Other Sports Rupert Murdoch to create rival sports network to challenge ESPN - Page 5

Deberg_1990 · 03-05-2013, 03:12 PM

For Rupert Murdoch, creating a national cable sports network in the United States to compete with ESPN has been his white whale — a tantalizing television opportunity but one of the few fields that his media empire has not conquered.

But two decades after shaking up the sports broadcasting world for the first time by acquiring N.F.L. rights, Murdoch has plans to challenge ESPN head on and claim some of the lucrative revenue that the sports media giant has had largely to itself for more than three decades.

On Tuesday, Fox will announce its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network, in August.

The channel will carry Nascar races, Major League Baseball games, college basketball and football, soccer and U.F.C. fights. It will also broadcast studio shows, including one that is to be hosted by Regis Philbin, a celebrated Notre Dame fan.

Murdoch’s effort is a long shot to topple ESPN, or at least take a huge bite out of it.

ESPN brings in more than $6 billion annually from its industry-high subscriber fees. It owns the rights to televise Major League Baseball; the N.F.L.; the N.B.A.; Nascar; tennis; myriad collegiate conferences; the Bowl Championship Series and its new playoffs; and a raft of other sports. Both ESPN and ESPN2 have 98.5 million subscribers.

It is a true empire, with eight domestic cable channels; the ESPN3 broadband network; the Web sites ESPN.com and Grantland.com; a radio network; digital properties like ESPNw, which focuses on women’s sports; a magazine; the WatchESPN app, which enables viewing of ESPN on computers, smartphones and tablets; and ownership of the Global X Games, college basketball tournaments and seven bowl games.

Fox Sports 1 will join a market that is far more crowded than it was when Murdoch first contemplated squaring off against ESPN. Not only will Fox face the dominance of ESPN, but NBC and CBS have their own sports channels, which are struggling for viewers and identities. The Big Ten and Pacific-12 conferences have created their own networks, and the Southeastern Conference is planning one. And in the past decade, M.L.B., the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. have started their own channels.

Still, Fox and its parent, News Corporation, have a companywide faith in sports as a DVR-proof way to attract viewers — especially young men — and a belief that their new sports channel will differentiate itself from the competition, as the Fox News channel has demonstrated in its successful challenge to CNN and then MSNBC. To ensure that Fox Sports 1 has some of the style and attitude that Fox Sports has had since it began in the mid-1990s, Murdoch and Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, brought back one of their favorite executives, David Hill, for its creation and launch. Hill, the former head of the Fox Sports Media Group, left the division last year for another job within News Corporation.

“We think sports is a huge arena that has room in it to build a really attractive businesses,” Carey told analysts on an earnings call last month. He said that the company recognizes the escalating costs of sports rights but “in a world of increasing fragmentation, we think sports continues to be a more and more important and unique part of that overall landscape.”

The channel’s success might not have to come as a result of beating ESPN at its game.

David Bank, managing director of global media and Internet research at RBC Capital Markets, said that Fox Sports 1 would be a success “from Day 1” and could, in future years, bid against ESPN for N.B.A. rights and any cable package of N.F.L. games that might come to market.

“Do I expect them to be ESPN? No,” he said. “Mega-success will be hard to determine for five years.”

But, he said, “Rupert and Chase have had a pretty decent run at building long-term value.”

Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Nomura Securities, wrote in a recent report that Fox Sports 1 would be a “good start” for News Corporation but was “unlikely to make a material dent to ESPN’s business for the investable time horizon.”

One way to measure Fox Sports 1’s future success will be how many subscribers it gets and the subscriber fees it can accumulate. Fox has spent months working to convert Speed, a motorsports-centric network with 81 million subscribers, to Fox Sports 1. A companion service, Fox Sports 2, will replace another niche channel, Fuel.

Fox is seeking substantially more for Fox Sports 1 than the 31-cent monthly subscriber fee that Speed gets, according to the media research firm SNL Kagan.

Bank estimated that Fox Sports 1 will probably charge cable, satellite and telephone companies 75 cents to $1 a subscriber. “At $1 a sub, it’s a massive home run,” he said.

By comparison, ESPN charges $5.15 a month and additional fees for its other channels.

“We view Fox as a formidable competitor,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s president. “They’ve got the resources of News Corp., and the willingness that Fox has shown in the past to take big bets and to create a difference.”

He added: “We like our hand. We just have to play it well.”

Fox is certainly asset-rich. It plans to use existing long-term deals to fill Fox Sports 1 with M.L.B. games, including some from the league division series, beginning in 2014; Nascar Sprint Cup and truck races; U.F.C. matches; future World Cup soccer matches; and Big 12 and Pac-12 football and basketball games, as well as those from a basketball conference that is being formed by the seven Catholic universities that are leaving the Big East. The new network is also expected to buy some Big East games from ESPN.

Fox also has 22 regional sports networks to plumb for talent and some of its baseball programming. Two of those regional channels, each in Los Angeles, recently lost the rights to carry the Lakers and the Dodgers — each to networks created by Time Warner Cable. But last November, News Corporation made a major foray into the New York sports market by paying about $2 billion for a 49 percent stake in the YES Network, the profitable channel of the Yankees, with an option to buy up to 80 percent in three years.

Still, the possibility of starting a national sports network constitutes unfinished business at Fox.

In the late 1990s, Fox tied a package of M.L.B. games and a news operation with Keith Olbermann as the star anchor on its regional sports channels. It failed. Recalling that time, a former Fox executive said, “It was Chase’s vision that we’d use the regional sports networks to transition into a national sports network.”

Then, in 2004, Murdoch tried to create a national channel in partnership with the N.F.L. and cable operators. At the time, Murdoch said, “We want to consider the capacity of pay television subscribers to pay for two ESPNs.”

But that effort never got off the ground, and he has waited nine years to make his next move.

Sports will become even more integral by this summer, when News Corporation splits into two publicly traded companies. The company’s newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will join a publishing-based company that will retain the name News Corporation. The 20th Century Fox studio, Fox Broadcasting, Fox Sports, the cable channels FX and Fox News and the regional sports networks will form the Fox Group.

News Corporation has recently grown its sports business in the United States and abroad, making live sports programming central to the Fox Group, executives have said.

In the past year, News Corporation paid $335 million to complete its acquisition of Singapore-based ESPN Star Sports, previously a joint venture with the Walt Disney Company, and $757.6 million to broadcast Indian Premier League cricket through March 2018 on its Star TV channel.

“Across the whole sports portfolio, it’s about making choices about where you want to invest and where to prioritize,” James Murdoch, the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, said on the earnings call last month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/sp...ewanted=1&_r=2

**MahiMike** · 08-21-2013, 07:52 AM

All they have to do is keep their commercials down to less than every 2 minutes.

I laughed at the DVR-free audience. While it's true that most of you guys have to have your sports in real time, rarely do I watch commercials. Just tape it and start watching an hour later. Problem solved.

**Buehler445** · 08-21-2013, 08:09 AM

Flipped over there and it was a soccer show. I'm sure in the winter I will tune in a little better.

**Dave Lane** · 08-21-2013, 08:12 AM

This will be awesome. He can have every team win every game and broadcast it to every city individually. Fox Sports where you are always a winner!

Dayze · 08-21-2013, 08:15 AM

ESPN is hilariously stale, and typically has more to do with soap opera shit than the guts of a sport.

Berman's schtick is so dated and stale. Same with Stuart Scott.
it's a really bad network with the exception of their old national football game they'd have each week, and their 30 for 30 series.

zero reason to watch it.

chiefqueen · 08-21-2013, 11:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Psyko Tek

I miss Australian rules football

Aussie rules football can usually be found very late Fri. nights on FOX Soccer Plus (I think).

Tombstone RJ · 08-21-2013, 11:48 AM

does anyone watch ESPN anymore? It's the network that bought up the right to show all the NBA games, post Jordon. The NBA has sucked for a long, long time and I think ESPN has something to do with it. The NBA is ESPN's poster child league.

Meh, even the NFLN sucks. I swear, how these networks pick the people they put on camara is beyond me. It's like "let's pick the most annoying former football player, because we love it when the audience cringes while watching!"

The only thing I watch live anymore is college and NFL football, and some NHL Hockey. I'll watch the NBA but only the Nuggets games, same with MLB, I'll watch only the Rockies games. Other than that, if it's not football or the playoffs, it won't watch it.

GoChargers · 08-21-2013, 12:25 PM

The NBA doesn't really suck - the NBA's coverage sucks, and that's ESPN and TNT's fault - whether it's creating backlash against teams that aren't the Lakers, Celtics, Bulls, or Thunder (who are somehow shielded from any media criticism for the most part) by hyping them up too early, or settling for lazy, unquantifiable one-liner "analysis" of players that defies statistical fact or the eye test. And most fans buy into this crap!

The biggest problems with the NBA are shady officiating (which isn't exclusive to them by any means) and their total inability to promote anything but MJ and the Celtics/Lakers rivalry. People legitimately get angry now when star players don't try to be some bootleg version of Jordan, because that's how the NBA marketing machine tells them it's supposed to be. Teams around the league are finally starting to abandon the old iso-ball crap and get back to ball movement and unselfish team play, while embracing innovations such as small-ball, the "3-and-D" role player, and positionless basketball.

Yet because of the NBA's outdated marketing machine, a lot of fans think the league is "soft" and full of "chokers" and "floppers" because everyone isn't getting in fistfights or selfishly chucking. It's time for the NBA and the media to catch up to the change in philosophy among the league's best teams instead of wondering where the next MJ, Hakeem, and Shaq are.

ChiliConCarnage · 08-21-2013, 12:34 PM

So far I've watched the UFC event. Good event
Yesterday I caught the very end of a show with some australian chick and regis philbin. wtf?

Then I caught part of the football show. I like Jay Glazer but I'll have to see it a few times to get a feel for whether I like it.

**Tribal Warfare** · 08-21-2013, 01:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage

So far I've watched the UFC event. Good event
Yesterday I caught the very end of a show with some australian chick and regis philbin. wtf?

Then I caught part of the football show. I like Jay Glazer but I'll have to see it a few times to get a feel for whether I like it.

It's a nice change of pace in comparison to ESPN programing

L.A. Chieffan · 08-21-2013, 02:48 PM

Watching Gary Payton, Andy Roddick, Donovan McNabb, and whoever else they drag on there to analyze sports out of their own is pretty brutal

DJ's left nut · 08-21-2013, 03:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

Wow.

Erin Andrews is still insanely hot.

BWillie · 08-21-2013, 03:12 PM

From what I've seen from this network so far, I'm pretty disappointed.

CoMoChief · 08-21-2013, 03:58 PM

They're all going to copy ESPN....and eventually turn into what ESPN does. That's what NFLN has become to a degree.

It's just corporate sponsored lamestream media....except its sports.

People are also getting tired of FOXNews, CNN, MSNBC etc.

Thig Lyfe · 08-21-2013, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoMoChief

lamestream media

whoa did you just coin that phrase???

kcxiv · 08-21-2013, 04:06 PM

I like the 2 Canadian dudes that do the night show. They are so awkward it makes me laugh lol.

I'm a big jay Glazer fan dude is on point so I tune into their NFL show. Again Charissa Thompson enough said.

03-05-2013, 03:12 PM
Deberg_1990 In Search of a Life Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: San Antonio Tx. Casino cash: $94454	Rupert Murdoch to create rival sports network to challenge ESPN For Rupert Murdoch, creating a national cable sports network in the United States to compete with ESPN has been his white whale — a tantalizing television opportunity but one of the few fields that his media empire has not conquered. But two decades after shaking up the sports broadcasting world for the first time by acquiring N.F.L. rights, Murdoch has plans to challenge ESPN head on and claim some of the lucrative revenue that the sports media giant has had largely to itself for more than three decades. On Tuesday, Fox will announce its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network, in August. The channel will carry Nascar races, Major League Baseball games, college basketball and football, soccer and U.F.C. fights. It will also broadcast studio shows, including one that is to be hosted by Regis Philbin, a celebrated Notre Dame fan. Murdoch’s effort is a long shot to topple ESPN, or at least take a huge bite out of it. ESPN brings in more than $6 billion annually from its industry-high subscriber fees. It owns the rights to televise Major League Baseball; the N.F.L.; the N.B.A.; Nascar; tennis; myriad collegiate conferences; the Bowl Championship Series and its new playoffs; and a raft of other sports. Both ESPN and ESPN2 have 98.5 million subscribers. It is a true empire, with eight domestic cable channels; the ESPN3 broadband network; the Web sites ESPN.com and Grantland.com; a radio network; digital properties like ESPNw, which focuses on women’s sports; a magazine; the WatchESPN app, which enables viewing of ESPN on computers, smartphones and tablets; and ownership of the Global X Games, college basketball tournaments and seven bowl games. Fox Sports 1 will join a market that is far more crowded than it was when Murdoch first contemplated squaring off against ESPN. Not only will Fox face the dominance of ESPN, but NBC and CBS have their own sports channels, which are struggling for viewers and identities. The Big Ten and Pacific-12 conferences have created their own networks, and the Southeastern Conference is planning one. And in the past decade, M.L.B., the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. have started their own channels. Still, Fox and its parent, News Corporation, have a companywide faith in sports as a DVR-proof way to attract viewers — especially young men — and a belief that their new sports channel will differentiate itself from the competition, as the Fox News channel has demonstrated in its successful challenge to CNN and then MSNBC. To ensure that Fox Sports 1 has some of the style and attitude that Fox Sports has had since it began in the mid-1990s, Murdoch and Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, brought back one of their favorite executives, David Hill, for its creation and launch. Hill, the former head of the Fox Sports Media Group, left the division last year for another job within News Corporation. “We think sports is a huge arena that has room in it to build a really attractive businesses,” Carey told analysts on an earnings call last month. He said that the company recognizes the escalating costs of sports rights but “in a world of increasing fragmentation, we think sports continues to be a more and more important and unique part of that overall landscape.” The channel’s success might not have to come as a result of beating ESPN at its game. David Bank, managing director of global media and Internet research at RBC Capital Markets, said that Fox Sports 1 would be a success “from Day 1” and could, in future years, bid against ESPN for N.B.A. rights and any cable package of N.F.L. games that might come to market. “Do I expect them to be ESPN? No,” he said. “Mega-success will be hard to determine for five years.” But, he said, “Rupert and Chase have had a pretty decent run at building long-term value.” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Nomura Securities, wrote in a recent report that Fox Sports 1 would be a “good start” for News Corporation but was “unlikely to make a material dent to ESPN’s business for the investable time horizon.” One way to measure Fox Sports 1’s future success will be how many subscribers it gets and the subscriber fees it can accumulate. Fox has spent months working to convert Speed, a motorsports-centric network with 81 million subscribers, to Fox Sports 1. A companion service, Fox Sports 2, will replace another niche channel, Fuel. Fox is seeking substantially more for Fox Sports 1 than the 31-cent monthly subscriber fee that Speed gets, according to the media research firm SNL Kagan. Bank estimated that Fox Sports 1 will probably charge cable, satellite and telephone companies 75 cents to $1 a subscriber. “At $1 a sub, it’s a massive home run,” he said. By comparison, ESPN charges $5.15 a month and additional fees for its other channels. “We view Fox as a formidable competitor,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s president. “They’ve got the resources of News Corp., and the willingness that Fox has shown in the past to take big bets and to create a difference.” He added: “We like our hand. We just have to play it well.” Fox is certainly asset-rich. It plans to use existing long-term deals to fill Fox Sports 1 with M.L.B. games, including some from the league division series, beginning in 2014; Nascar Sprint Cup and truck races; U.F.C. matches; future World Cup soccer matches; and Big 12 and Pac-12 football and basketball games, as well as those from a basketball conference that is being formed by the seven Catholic universities that are leaving the Big East. The new network is also expected to buy some Big East games from ESPN. Fox also has 22 regional sports networks to plumb for talent and some of its baseball programming. Two of those regional channels, each in Los Angeles, recently lost the rights to carry the Lakers and the Dodgers — each to networks created by Time Warner Cable. But last November, News Corporation made a major foray into the New York sports market by paying about $2 billion for a 49 percent stake in the YES Network, the profitable channel of the Yankees, with an option to buy up to 80 percent in three years. Still, the possibility of starting a national sports network constitutes unfinished business at Fox. In the late 1990s, Fox tied a package of M.L.B. games and a news operation with Keith Olbermann as the star anchor on its regional sports channels. It failed. Recalling that time, a former Fox executive said, “It was Chase’s vision that we’d use the regional sports networks to transition into a national sports network.” Then, in 2004, Murdoch tried to create a national channel in partnership with the N.F.L. and cable operators. At the time, Murdoch said, “We want to consider the capacity of pay television subscribers to pay for two ESPNs.” But that effort never got off the ground, and he has waited nine years to make his next move. Sports will become even more integral by this summer, when News Corporation splits into two publicly traded companies. The company’s newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will join a publishing-based company that will retain the name News Corporation. The 20th Century Fox studio, Fox Broadcasting, Fox Sports, the cable channels FX and Fox News and the regional sports networks will form the Fox Group. News Corporation has recently grown its sports business in the United States and abroad, making live sports programming central to the Fox Group, executives have said. In the past year, News Corporation paid $335 million to complete its acquisition of Singapore-based ESPN Star Sports, previously a joint venture with the Walt Disney Company, and $757.6 million to broadcast Indian Premier League cricket through March 2018 on its Star TV channel. “Across the whole sports portfolio, it’s about making choices about where you want to invest and where to prioritize,” James Murdoch, the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, said on the earnings call last month. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/sp...ewanted=1&_r=2
Posts: 68,684

08-21-2013, 07:52 AM	#61
MahiMike He's Mahomie! Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Jax, FL Casino cash: $10023443	All they have to do is keep their commercials down to less than every 2 minutes. I laughed at the DVR-free audience. While it's true that most of you guys have to have your sports in real time, rarely do I watch commercials. Just tape it and start watching an hour later. Problem solved.
Posts: 17,387

08-21-2013, 08:09 AM	#62
Buehler445 Supporter Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Scott City KS Casino cash: $-1605266	Flipped over there and it was a soccer show. I'm sure in the winter I will tune in a little better.
Posts: 60,024

08-21-2013, 08:12 AM	#63
Dave Lane Space Cadet and Aczabel Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Kanab, UT, USA Casino cash: $9333275 VARSITY	This will be awesome. He can have every team win every game and broadcast it to every city individually. Fox Sports where you are always a winner! __________________ Thanks, Trump for the civics lesson. We are learning so much about RICO, espionage, sedition, impeachment, the 25th Amendment, order of succession, nepotism, separation of powers, 1st Amendment, obstruction of justice, the emoluments clause, conflicts of interest, collusion, sanctions, oligarchs, money laundering and so much more.
Posts: 40,584

08-21-2013, 08:15 AM	#64
Dayze Resident Glue Sniffer Join Date: Nov 2003 Casino cash: $1729358	ESPN is hilariously stale, and typically has more to do with soap opera shit than the guts of a sport. Berman's schtick is so dated and stale. Same with Stuart Scott. it's a really bad network with the exception of their old national football game they'd have each week, and their 30 for 30 series. zero reason to watch it. __________________ Life is 99% inspiration, 1% Perspiration, and 1% Attention to Detial. RIP & Godspeed: Saccoppo Lonewolf Ed Fire Me Boy
Posts: 37,460

08-21-2013, 11:48 AM	#66
Tombstone RJ Broncos' Fan Extraordinaire! Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Denver Casino cash: $10012184	does anyone watch ESPN anymore? It's the network that bought up the right to show all the NBA games, post Jordon. The NBA has sucked for a long, long time and I think ESPN has something to do with it. The NBA is ESPN's poster child league. Meh, even the NFLN sucks. I swear, how these networks pick the people they put on camara is beyond me. It's like "let's pick the most annoying former football player, because we love it when the audience cringes while watching!" The only thing I watch live anymore is college and NFL football, and some NHL Hockey. I'll watch the NBA but only the Nuggets games, same with MLB, I'll watch only the Rockies games. Other than that, if it's not football or the playoffs, it won't watch it. __________________ ORANGE COLORED GLASSES ARE ALWAYS ON!
Posts: 6,151

08-21-2013, 12:25 PM	#67
GoChargers Dean Spanos is a Traitor Join Date: Oct 2012 Casino cash: $10013554	The NBA doesn't really suck - the NBA's coverage sucks, and that's ESPN and TNT's fault - whether it's creating backlash against teams that aren't the Lakers, Celtics, Bulls, or Thunder (who are somehow shielded from any media criticism for the most part) by hyping them up too early, or settling for lazy, unquantifiable one-liner "analysis" of players that defies statistical fact or the eye test. And most fans buy into this crap! The biggest problems with the NBA are shady officiating (which isn't exclusive to them by any means) and their total inability to promote anything but MJ and the Celtics/Lakers rivalry. People legitimately get angry now when star players don't try to be some bootleg version of Jordan, because that's how the NBA marketing machine tells them it's supposed to be. Teams around the league are finally starting to abandon the old iso-ball crap and get back to ball movement and unselfish team play, while embracing innovations such as small-ball, the "3-and-D" role player, and positionless basketball. Yet because of the NBA's outdated marketing machine, a lot of fans think the league is "soft" and full of "chokers" and "floppers" because everyone isn't getting in fistfights or selfishly chucking. It's time for the NBA and the media to catch up to the change in philosophy among the league's best teams instead of wondering where the next MJ, Hakeem, and Shaq are. __________________ Disclaimer: my username refers to the SAN DIEGO Chargers only. I will never cheer for the LA Chargers as long as the Spanos family owns the team.
Posts: 3,620

08-21-2013, 12:34 PM	#68
ChiliConCarnage TACO SALAD Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: yes Casino cash: $-2111532	So far I've watched the UFC event. Good event Yesterday I caught the very end of a show with some australian chick and regis philbin. wtf? Then I caught part of the football show. I like Jay Glazer but I'll have to see it a few times to get a feel for whether I like it.
Posts: 7,084

08-21-2013, 02:48 PM	#70
L.A. Chieffan PLAY GOOD FOOTBALL Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: American Gardens Building Casino cash: $2688654	Watching Gary Payton, Andy Roddick, Donovan McNabb, and whoever else they drag on there to analyze sports out of their own is pretty brutal
Posts: 17,400

08-21-2013, 03:12 PM	#72
BWillie Are you ready to Rumble? Join Date: Apr 2006 Casino cash: $-1478759	From what I've seen from this network so far, I'm pretty disappointed.
Posts: 52,909

08-21-2013, 03:58 PM	#73
CoMoChief Mahomes Dynasty Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Parts Unknown Casino cash: $7672254	They're all going to copy ESPN....and eventually turn into what ESPN does. That's what NFLN has become to a degree. It's just corporate sponsored lamestream media....except its sports. People are also getting tired of FOXNews, CNN, MSNBC etc. __________________
Posts: 39,245

08-21-2013, 04:06 PM	#75
kcxiv In Search of a Life Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Central Valley, Cali Casino cash: $8697996	I like the 2 Canadian dudes that do the night show. They are so awkward it makes me laugh lol. I'm a big jay Glazer fan dude is on point so I tune into their NFL show. Again Charissa Thompson enough said.
Posts: 29,111

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