AAC Football

[NKY Bearcat]

I've seen a lot of references to streaming services becoming a major player in this whole thing. As someone in the business, I can tell you that while certain services have begun positioning themselves for this type of move, the benefits to conferences and member institutions are currently minimal. There will be an initial overpay to enter the market, but for the immediate future those services don't have nearly the saturation of the major providers, plus those providers rely on sports to maintain their increasingly tenuous grip on the market...and both professional and collegiate entities rely on that cash heavily. I'm not saying the Amazons and Netflixes of the world aren't going to get involved on some level...it's just a little premature to believe they're suddenly going to outbid ESPN, FOX and the regional sports networks and steal the business away overnight. Chances are better that they partner with one of the current players or negotiate some lower Tier rights, and then see where it goes. Interesting times to say the least.

I think it is premature to think Netflix would out bid ESPN or Fox for a major conference. However ESPN/FOX have priorities is premium content, while Streaming companies would value quantity more than the traditional networks. So for the right conference and catalogue of content, I believe the Streaming companies would outbid. A conference that has a huge catalogue, time slots across the entire US, and schools located in major cities makes a lot of sense for the streaming providers. Military schools also fit well into the desired catalogue.

With the hypothetical conference, a streaming provider would add all day Football Saturday, with time slots stretching from East Coast early games to the late West Coast game starting at 10pm EST. They would also use the large amount of game to maximize weeknight time slots. During basketball season there would be the potential of 2 staggered games a week night and weekend basketball. Baseball, Soccer, and Olympic sports would actually gain more national coverage than currently provided by other conferences. It is great in theory, a conference just needs to build the model for Netflix/Amazon.

 

[UCBearcats]

Yeah because it's not like they just got done doing that with television shows or anything..

Television shows aren't live streaming events. The point that you're missing here is that Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, ect are not currently set up today to be live streaming networks. You can't just walk away from ESPN and Fox and magically have that content appear on your streaming service. The networks will still be included in however the landscape changes going forward.

Live streaming a sporting event in HD is a tremendous undertaking that none of these companies are currently set up to handle. The landscape of cable/television is changing and by 2024 it may look very different than it does today but I wouldn't expect the networks to be the ones that feel the tremendous burden of that change rather to providers.

I feel very confident in saying that there is a ZERO percent chance we ever see AAC football that isn't being broadcast by one of the networks (NBC, CBS, ESPN, FOX, ect.)

 

[Bcatfollower]

TV deals are a pretty deep issue. AAC will never get a good money deal from networks or streaming services cause there is no demand. The demand isn't there because AAC teams realistically have nothing to play for other than the game. So outside of some alumni and current students the casual fan could care less about the aac, mac, conf usa, mt west...etc

 

[jacobkdoyle]

ECU up 41-3 over UConn. Whoa.

Houston is up 31-24 now vs UCF, after being down 24-3 in the 3Q.