Entertainment has been decentralized. It used to be that if you had content, you needed to find a distributor and negotiate that media deal.
The big seismic event in sports happened in 1996 when Fox Sports purchased all of the regional networks to distribute NFL games to non NFL markets. Until then, ESPN had national rights, but now Fox ended up with local regional rights, even though ESPN paid billions of dollars for the NFL contract, Fox could still sell access to the local games in their markets.
This is when the other networks started to launch their own sports branded networks. Broadband was only a few years old at the time.
It took ESPN 2 eight years to grow to 50 million subscribers, Fox achieved that milestone in 18 months through acquisition.
Distributors were at the mercy of ESPN, who averaged $2 dollars per subscriber on cable, versus a channel like CNN, which charged.50 cents per subscriber for it's services to Comcast or Cox cable, but in order to get ESPN, you had to also carry ESPN 2 at $1.25 per subscriber.
You have to understand the economics and evolution of sports programming to understand where we are today.
It's not easy to create your own sports network and do well at a high quality. It's expensive and technically challenging.
Everybody is joining into this market, Amazon, Apple, and your cousin is getting into trying to obtain more content to distribute it via phones, streaming, cable, you name it. And if your product is big enough, even international outlets will pay.
Yormark understands media deals and how to maximize all of the available options they have.
It's going to be very interesting to see how this all unfolds when the PAC 12 media deal is finalized if it ever is.