Over the weekend, there was a period of time when YouTube TV subscribers weren’t able to watch anything from the Disney family of networks. No ABC, no Disney Junior, and most critically for this newsletter, nothing from any of the ESPN networks.
I am taking an opportunity to depart a little from directly writing about Gator football because it’s the slow season with early NSD in the rearview mirror and a not-terribly-exciting bowl game coming up. The Gasparilla Bowl offers only downside: the chance to never hear the end about UCF beating Florida. The upside of winning is, well, unclear aside from the avoidance of the downside.
Florida has the better team and should win — the Knights have been in a slow-moving decline since Scott Frost left, and Gus Malzahn is so different than Josh Heupel that transition pains were evident this year — but with opt outs, portal entries, and motivation questions, I wouldn’t put money on that.
Anyway, ESPN and streaming are important because they are a major revenue source for the SEC, and, by extension, the Gators. Disney has been spending the last decade-and-a-half investing in franchises. The Mouse bought the Muppets in 2004, Pixar in 2006, Marvel in 2009, and Lucasfilm for Star Wars and Indiana Jones in 2012, and then it spent 2017-19 working on buying 21st Century Fox. In the same span it formalized its various princess-themed movies into a single Disney Princesses franchise with the exception of Frozen, which accidentally became a franchise unto itself after making more than a billion dollars in theaters (remember those?).
On the ESPN side of the company, they got one of the more valuable TV properties with the rights to Monday Night Football 15 years ago. Rights negotiations are a different kind of thing than acquiring intellectual property, and rolling up all rights to a sports property can be tricky. Leagues often want to split their various tiers of broadcast rights, or at least make sure they sell them separately even if they all go to one place, because it allows them to play bidders off of each other.
In the realm of college sports, there is no way to secure all the major schools’ rights in one fell swoop. A Supreme Court ruling in 1985 made sure of that. Schools have had control over their own broadcast rights ever since, though most willingly pool some or all of their rights with their conference mates’ rights to increase their bargaining power.
ESPN was boxed out of owning all of major college football broadcasting in 2007 when the Big Ten Network launched. It’s a joint venture where Fox Sports owns 51% of the business and the B1G owns 49%. I don’t think ESPN had such an ambition back then because it didn’t have enough channels to televise everything.
It’s different in the streaming era because putting multiple games on simultaneously doesn’t require having a separate cable channel for every game. Disney can now squirrel telecasts away behind the ESPN+ paywall to try to get people who are already paying more than $10 per month for ESPN and ESPN2 alone through their TV subscriptions to pay $7 per month for a handful of more games. It’s quite the racket. And if you signed up for ESPN+ this year because a Gator game was going to be on it (hi, it’s me), then you know Disney was heavily pushing ESPN+ subscribers to get the Disney Bundle with Disney+ and Hulu+ too.
Hulu is actually the part here where things get interesting and loop back to YouTube TV. The media landscape is changing so much that it’s hard to keep up with everything, but hang with me here.
Things really are changing fast. Think back to the beginning of last decade, in 2010. Conference realignment happened entirely based on traditional subscription TV households. YouTube itself was all of five years old. Disney could only get its channels out there through intermediaries like cable companies, satellite providers, and telcos.
Now YouTube TV is the second-largest live TV streaming service. It’s big enough that Disney has to have its channels on it, but Disney and ESPN are big enough that Google (YouTube’s parent company) has to have those channels. They both need each other, so that leads to butting heads between the two and stuff like the multi-day standoff of the weekend.
Thing is, Disney doesn’t just have to work with YouTube TV as it does with Comcast, DirecTV, and the rest. It also directly competes with YouTube TV, as Disney owns Hulu and Hulu offers live TV packages. Hulu with Live TV is the No. 1 largest live TV streaming service with roughly a million more subscribers than YouTube TV.
If anyone got mad enough to cancel YouTube TV over it taking away their ability to watch Saturday’s bowl slate, Hulu is the most likely alternative they’d have gone to. That kind of leverage makes it all the more surprising that Google actually went forward with pulling the Disney slate off of its service, because it might’ve minted some new Hulu with Live TV subscribers in the process.
In 2024 ESPN will take over the 3:30 SEC on CBS game. It can’t get all of FBS football because of the BTN and Pac-12 Networks, but it has now secured the most valuable franchise in college sports: the SEC. For better and worse, it really does mean more down here.
The SEC, and its member schools by extension, have taken a side in the streaming wars whether they meant to or not. So, from time to time, it’s worth it to check in and see how the SEC’s soon-to-be sole media partner is doing. The economics of entertainment and broadcasting are going to help determine how much money the Gators will get for their athletics product, and through the conference, UF has put all of its eggs in one basket.
For now it’s a big, cozy basket lined with lots of cash, but it’s not hard to look back a decade and see how much is different compared to then. In 2010, no one would’ve believed you that in ten years that the most acclaimed sports television show would come from the company that had just introduced the iPad (Ted Lasso, on Apple TV+).
It’s impossible to predict how things with look ten years from now, but UF and the SEC have bet big on the idea that ESPN will still be the worldwide leader in sports. We’ll see how it works out for everyone involved.