DIRECTV unlikely to keep NFL Sunday Ticket
- Thread starter Scott Greczkowski
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In a thread about sunday ticket on directv...i was merely getting back on topic by saying that directv is the only sensible option for sunday ticket in rural america
Puck News’ Dylan Byers, reported on Wednesday that after talking with industry insiders at the Allen & Company Conference in Idaho that the eventual Sunday Ticket deal — which was previously expected to gain about $2 billion a year — is now seen as approaching $3 billion.
This price escalation means that [Disney], which bid under $2 billion, has been “effectively removed” from the negotiation process, meaning that the Sunday Ticket will not end up ESPN+. Other potential old-media bidders, like Fox, Paramount/CBS, and Comcast/NBC, are also out, leaving it a two-horse race between Apple and Amazon. And while it’s not a “done deal,” as reports this spring had indicated that it might be, Apple remains the favorite according to Byers.
Report: Apple Still Frontrunner for NFL Sunday Ticket, Price Tag Pushes ESPN Out
This price escalation means that [Disney], which bid under $2 billion, has been “effectively removed” from the negotiation process, meaning that the Sunday Ticket will not end up ESPN+. Other potential old-media bidders, like Fox, Paramount/CBS, and Comcast/NBC, are also out, leaving it a two-horse race between Apple and Amazon. And while it’s not a “done deal,” as reports this spring had indicated that it might be, Apple remains the favorite according to Byers.
Report: Apple Still Frontrunner for NFL Sunday Ticket, Price Tag Pushes ESPN Out
Sheesh. If NFLST is too rich for ESPN, NBC etc's blood now, it will be like that whenever they reup after the next deal, and the deal after that.
Which means we can count on the service price to continue to go up as well .... $300 + was enough ... I'm NOT going to $400.
You know who's most interested in the stream latency issue? Gamblers. No secret there's a huge uptick in legal online betting, where the live/in-play odds can change drastically on a single play, so a 30-40 second delay would be an eternity to those guys trying to get the right number. Especially when they are betting on who scores next, will the drive be a TD, Field goal, turnover, etc. They won't be too happy if the stream is a play/2 plays behind.
I wonder if you will need that Apple TV 4K box or will it work fine through the built in Apple TV app?
- Nov 29, 2003
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As I wrote before,, not a big surprise, both Apple and Amazon are very cash rich, Apple with over $200 billion, Amazon over $100 billion, Disney ( and the rest of those companies) are not, Disney, for example, because of the Fox merger have very little cash on hand and now is not the time for a loan, specially with the high debt load they have and the higher interest rates.
No. Let's review some numbers, shall we?
Leichtman Research counts 74.1 million multichannel pay TV subscribers in the US at the end of Q1 2022. (And this includes OTT streaming services like YouTube TV and Hulu Live.) But that figure is based on only the largest operators, which Leichtman says constitute 93% of the overall market. So if we scale up 74.1 million (i.e. divide it by 0.93), we get an estimated national total of 79.7 million total subs.
Based on the most recent US census, there are about 128.5 million total households in the US. If 79.7 million of them subscribe to multichannel pay TV, that would mean right about 62% of them do.
Now, in comparison, how many US households pay for a subscription streaming service (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, etc.)? Well, research firm Kantar put the number at 109.4 million at the end of 2021, which would constitute just over 85%. Meanwhile, a survey of 2,000 households by Leichtman in mid-2021 put the figure at 78% of households for the second year in a row, implying a total of 100.2 million households. Let's average the two and say that there are a total of 104.8 million US households with at least one active subscription streaming service they pay for. (Most have more than one.)
Lastly, how many US households are capable of using a streaming service, i.e. how many have some form of home internet? Leichtman put that figure at the end of 2021 at 87% of households, i.e. about 111.8 million households. So that means about 16.7 million households do not have home internet. It's easy to imagine that the majority of those homes do not have broadband available to them at all, meaning that the only form of pay TV they can access is satellite TV. Between DirecTV and DISH, I estimate they currently have about 18 million total satellite TV subs. Let's say half of them, 9 million, are non-broadband homes. In addition, there's a sliver of households (mainly elderly and/or low-income) who have pay TV from a traditional cable provider but who do not opt to take broadband (or, therefore, streaming). Let's say there are 4 million such households, for a total of 13 million "pay TV-only" households.
But we also know that there are quite a few so-called "cord-cutters" who have home internet plus streaming services but do not subscribe to multichannel pay TV.
I'd estimate the breakdown as follows, in millions of US households:
66.7 with pay TV + internet + streaming
4.2 with pay TV + internet
13 with pay TV only
38.1 with internet + streaming
2.8 with internet only (i.e. all streaming is free or "borrowed" via another household's login)
3.7 with none of these three service types (i.e. rely on OTA TV, DVDs, books, etc. for entertainment)
Adding up the above estimates, we arrive at the stated total of 128.5 million US households. You can also add up various combinations of these categories to arrive at the stated totals above, e.g. add categories 1, 2, 4, and 5 to come up with about 111.8 million internet households; add categories 1 and 4 to come up with 104.8 million streaming households.
Of the total 104.8 million households who subscribe to streaming, 66.5 million -- just under 63.5% of them -- also get pay TV. I wouldn't call that a VAST majority, although it is definitely a majority. But even among that 63.5%, we don't know for sure how many of them consider streaming just a "supplement" to multichannel pay TV and how many see it the other way around. In other words, what percentage of those households' total TV viewing time is spent in one format versus the other?
My guess, based on reading lots of comments on forums like this one in recent years, is that at *least* a quarter of those households (i.e. 16.6 million of them) spend as much or more total viewing time on streaming versus multichannel pay TV. So if we subtract those off the first number listed above, we get only about 49.9 million households who subscribe to both pay TV and streaming and might see the latter as only a supplement to the former. And that constitutes only 47.6% of the overall 104.8 million streaming households in the nation. Which isn't a majority, vast or otherwise.
You can drop a streaming service after a month ..then pick it up again when they have something to watch...in other words..they don't consider churn
Not really, different economies of scale, different customer acquisition costs, different value propositions and monetization options.
Basically you take 2 billion and divide by 2 million customers ( directv numbers)
Nope, because a customer has a value and a cost in addition to the subscription fee, and that's different for every service.
They don't require an Apple TV box for Apple TV+, anything that supports that app would work.
I would bet they'd require a yearly subscription to Apple TV+ to get NFLST, to prevent people from subscribing just for the fall. That would get more people engaged with Apple TV+ programming since if someone has a full time subscription to it, that's one less "slot" for people to subscribe to (since a lot of people will have a few "full time" streaming subscriptions and then switch between others for a month or two at a time to binge on new content)
I think they're more likely to go the other direction. No subscription required, but an Apple NFL ST subscriber would be surfaced a lot of advertisements and content, as well as interface with the ecosystem, which would drive subs and brand value. Requiring a general subscription up front forgoes a lot of that.
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