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Awful Announcing: The Big Ten adding Rutgers and Maryland could be a major problem when cable dies
Part of thought process/premise:
>>Whatever outlet is streaming college football games in the 2020s will not want the bloated buffet of games. The present model favors the conferences. ESPN and FOX need live sports content to get cable providers to carry multiple networks. That changes if you’re dealing with Apple or Amazon.
We could see a model where the ten best Big Ten football games per season are on Amazon Prime. The Big Ten is streaming the rest of its football package and almost all of regular season college basketball on its own.
Cable subscribers no longer matter in that scenario. Fans who watch do, the very fans the Big Ten blithely disregarded. Rutgers and Maryland become dead weight.
Those two schools dilute the product. They drag on attendance when they show up to Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. They drag on television revenue. Mich/OSU/PSU are playing Maryland and Rutgers vs. sellable games against Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Iowa. They are also two extra mouths to feed when it comes to distributing the diminished revenue Mich/OSU/PSU are producing.<<
Part of thought process/premise:
>>Whatever outlet is streaming college football games in the 2020s will not want the bloated buffet of games. The present model favors the conferences. ESPN and FOX need live sports content to get cable providers to carry multiple networks. That changes if you’re dealing with Apple or Amazon.
We could see a model where the ten best Big Ten football games per season are on Amazon Prime. The Big Ten is streaming the rest of its football package and almost all of regular season college basketball on its own.
Cable subscribers no longer matter in that scenario. Fans who watch do, the very fans the Big Ten blithely disregarded. Rutgers and Maryland become dead weight.
Those two schools dilute the product. They drag on attendance when they show up to Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. They drag on television revenue. Mich/OSU/PSU are playing Maryland and Rutgers vs. sellable games against Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Iowa. They are also two extra mouths to feed when it comes to distributing the diminished revenue Mich/OSU/PSU are producing.<<