The ESPN - AAC Contract

[wbball novice]

Did I miss the thread on this? The contract pays out 7 million to each AAC program, but most of the games will be on ESPN+. So maybe no more UConn games on SNY. The only national coverage on TV of UConn women's bball will be against top five or top 10 teams. Though at least we'll get to see UConn-Tenn on TV. Could affect recruiting?

 

[Huskee11]

The big question is how will this agreement affect the SNY contract when that contract expires next year. Mike Anthony of the Hartford Courant had an article on this a couple of days ago.

To my knowledge, there has been no public announcement concerning this important issue.

If the UConn administration stood by and allowed ESPN to essentially terminate the UConn/SNY relationship through the AAC contract, there will be hell to pay.

 

[UcMiami]

ESPN has owned the rights to Uconn WCBB since the AAC was formed, but they do not care to cover the costs of production. They reached an agreement with SNY that allowed SNY to produce and broadcast all the games that were not picked up by ESPN or another national broadcaster in return for getting the streaming rights to the SNY production (with a carved out live blackout in the SNY priority market footprint - no streaming in NY, NJ, CT and western MA I believe.)

As far as I know there has been no change to either SNY's contract with Uconn, or the ESPN/SNY standard agreement. ESPN doesn't want to pay for on air talent and production for the majority of the Uconn WCBB schedule.

Have you read something different?

 

[UcMiami]

The big question is how will this agreement affect the SNY contract when that contract expires next year. Mike Anthony of the Hartford Courant had an article on this a couple of days ago.

To my knowledge, there has been no public announcement concerning this important issue.

If the UConn administration stood by and allowed ESPN to essentially terminate the UConn/SNY relationship through the AAC contract, there will be hell to pay.

Uconn has no ownership of their rights - they ceded them to the AAC when the league was formed. The old BE rights contracts excluded everything except football and men's basketball. And SNY scrambled when the AAC was formed to reach an agreement with ESPN. I am pretty sure ESPN would like to maintain SNY as they do not have the resources/desire to be producing 20+ Uconn games each year, but would love to stream someone else's production. How SNY wants to proceed at the end of their contract is more of a question as the current contract was with Uconn as a member of the BE and was an exclusive rights deal with Uconn.

 

[UConnCat]

ESPN has owned the rights to Uconn WCBB since the AAC was formed, but they do not care to cover the costs of production. They reached an agreement with SNY that allowed SNY to produce and broadcast all the games that were not picked up by ESPN or another national broadcaster in return for getting the streaming rights to the SNY production (with a carved out live blackout in the SNY priority market footprint - no streaming in NY, NJ, CT and western MA I believe.)

As far as I know there has been no change to either SNY's contract with Uconn, or the ESPN/SNY standard agreement. ESPN doesn't want to pay for on air talent and production for the majority of the Uconn WCBB schedule.

Have you read something different?

There's another thread on this where I linked a JI article. There's another year left on the SNY-UConn contract. It's not clear what will happen after the contract expires. SNY is quoted as saying they don't know.

 

[Huskee11]

Uconn has no ownership of their rights - they ceded them to the AAC when the league was formed. The old BE rights contracts excluded everything except football and men's basketball. And SNY scrambled when the AAC was formed to reach an agreement with ESPN. I am pretty sure ESPN would like to maintain SNY as they do not have the resources/desire to be producing 20+ Uconn games each year, but would love to stream someone else's production. How SNY wants to proceed at the end of their contract is more of a question as the current contract was with Uconn as a member of the BE and was an exclusive rights deal with Uconn.

That makes sense, hope you are right about ESPN wanting to maintain SNY. I would think SNY would want to continue with UConn, at least the women get good ratings.

 

[JavaMan]

Maybe we should go to the people in the know to get the story... Eric and Kara.

 

[UConnNick]

It will definitely affect recruiting. I'm guessing SNY may become a thing of the past. Why would ESPN give up the rights on any games they can just dump onto ESPN+, making subscribers have to pay an extra $5 per month to see? That means all the pre and post game shows and probably the Geno Auriemma Show will be gone forever.

Talk about exposure? There are about 86 million cable subscribers that get the ESPN channels currently. ESPN+ has 2 million. Those numbers are going to change dramatically over the next several years with cord cutting, but opposing P5 coaches are going to hammer us with recruits, saying that next to nobody will be seeing your games. It's also a concern if you have out-of-state parents of recruits with limited means. Telling them they have to pay an extra $5 per month to see their daughters play won't be a good thing.

I believe our bowl revenue and NCAA tournament shares from the men's side are in addition to the 7 million, so maybe another 1.5 million on average from those revenue streams. If we could get our Tier 3 rights back we wouldn't have to share those with the rest of the AAC. It's not fair that we get about 1.5 million from SNY for the women's package and then it all gets shared by the rest of the conference. None of the other schools generate any Tier 3 revenue from their women's programs.

One good thing about the ESPN+ deal is they are going to televise other AAC sports, like soccer and baseball, which gets some exposure for the Olympic sports teams, but the potentially negative effect on recruiting in the revenue generating sports is troubling.

We may be able to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million per year when all is said and done, but the lowest payout P5 league gets about 25 million. The largest payout league, the Big 10, gets over 40 million per school per year. We're therefore competing against conferences that can outspend us anywhere from 2.5/1 upwards of 4/1 or worse. The only good thing is this deal should quiet some of the UCONN fans advocating that football be dropped and we should return to the "new" Big East for all other sports. our media deal is now at least a couple million better than theirs, and the ratings on FOX absolutely suck for NBE basketball.

Mike Aresco was supposed to be a savvy media rights negotiator. While it was important to keep the rights on the ESPN platform for exposure, a 12 year deal is far too long, and toward the end of it they'll be buying these rights for a pittance. Still, football will be the only way to get into a P5 league. No grant of rights was made, so any AAC school can leave the league anytime they want to, without forfeiting any media rights revenues to the other schools.

 

[Sven23]

ESPN+ is very poor production quality. It's throw some stuff up, often youtube quality essentially. UConn better fight with all their might to keep SNY with its high production quality, commentators, Geno Show, All Access etc.. The logical pitch from SNY/UConn point ofview would be to offer ESPN+ content....ie...ESPN+ can broadcast the Geno Show, All Access, and other UConn ancillary content if they wish on ESPN+ outside of the SNY market. SNY handles all production costs for games like the current deal w/ UConn games shown on ESPN3.

PS: UConn is not getting into a P5. 1)Fball is horrible 2)If you're not fball is not good , you have to bring a market(ie...how Rutgers got in the B10). Hartford not a bid market and not close enough to Boston to include in the market numbers. Rutgers was close enough to be considered NYC market and be able to "jam" the B10 fee (reduced price)in to cable packages, NJ has about 2 1/2 times as many people, which means a lot more homes to "jam" with the fee at full price.

 

[wbball novice]

The link to the AAC-ESPN-SNY-ESPN+ business was on Nan's news links for this morning:

The AAC TV contract with ESPN would be garbage to UConn if SNY is pushed out of the picture

 

[HuskyAlum012]

The link to the AAC-ESPN-SNY-ESPN+ business was on Nan's news links for this morning:

The AAC TV contract with ESPN would be garbage to UConn if SNY is pushed out of the picture

 

[Sven23]

I'm very skeptical of the notion of 10 UConn WCBB games besides the high profile ones they get know. I don't see them putting games on vs any AAC opponents besides USF(usually 2nd best team in AAC). Much of this is dictated by rights, ie.. when UConn plays an away game the opponents conference has the rights & some conferences often have deals that split rights between ESPN, Fox(FS1/FS2), CBS Sports and their conference network

Looking at 2019-20 UConn national tv games possibilities
Home-TN, Baylor,ND,Oregon- guaranteed... Cal(?), VA(?)-ESPN likely atleast 1 from SNY
Away- SCarolina, Ohio State(FS1/FS2)- guaranteed , Vandy(?)-ESPN has deal with SEC, Depaul(?)- BE deal w/ FS1/FS2
Plus-the season closer which they always seem to make USF



Looking at 2020-21 UConn national tv games
Home-TX,MD
Away-TN, Baylor
Plus-the season closer which they always seem to make USF
---ND & SCarolina contracts would be games but contracts have not been renewed as of December.

 

[ConnNY85]

i think what will happen is ESPN will agree to let them show the UCONN games (local/Tri State) on SNY but streaming on ESPN+

 

[UcMiami]

I'm very skeptical of the notion of 10 UConn WCBB games besides the high profile ones they get know. I don't see them putting games on vs any AAC opponents besides USF(usually 2nd best team in AAC). Much of this is dictated by rights, ie.. when UConn plays an away game the opponents conference has the rights & some conferences often have deals that split rights between ESPN, Fox(FS1/FS2), CBS Sports and their conference network

Looking at 2019-20 UConn national tv games possibilities
Home-TN, Baylor,ND,Oregon- guaranteed... Cal(?), VA(?)-ESPN likely atleast 1 from SNY
Away- SCarolina, Ohio State(FS1/FS2)- guaranteed , Vandy(?)-ESPN has deal with SEC, Depaul(?)- BE deal w/ FS1/FS2
Plus-the season closer which they always seem to make USF



Looking at 2020-21 UConn national tv games
Home-TX,MD
Away-TN, Baylor
Plus-the season closer which they always seem to make USF
---ND & SCarolina contracts would be games but contracts have not been renewed as of December.

The important thing to remember with this is that:
1. Some conferences have not historically included anything but MBB and FB in their media contracts, though at this point I think all the P5 have (broadcasters could get the rest of the sports basically for free so they included them.

2. Even when the rights belong to a company, that does not mean they actually want to spend money to produce a broadcast. It isn't cheap to do, and if you do not have a developed audience, you aren't likely to gain back the expense of the production. If they are not interested in producing the product but someone else is, they are not likely to be overly difficult about negotiating something. Streaming rights was sufficient for ESPN in terms of SNY producing Uconn WBB - SNY did not pay anything for the rights to ESPN, but did pay Uconn directly.

3. The various conference networks have an advantage in that they likely have equipment permanently located at all member schools, but as at least the Pac12 is learning it costs a lot more money to produce all the sports products than they likely thought, and marketing them is not cats play either. Not sure how the other conference are doing and how much they are actually producing for WCBB but I believe it is not 100%.

 

[Sven23]

The important thing to remember with this is that:
1. Some conferences have not historically included anything but MBB and FB in their media contracts, though at this point I think all the P5 have (broadcasters could get the rest of the sports basically for free so they included them.

2. Even when the rights belong to a company, that does not mean they actually want to spend money to produce a broadcast. It isn't cheap to do, and if you do not have a developed audience, you aren't likely to gain back the expense of the production. If they are not interested in producing the product but someone else is, they are not likely to be overly difficult about negotiating something. Streaming rights was sufficient for ESPN in terms of SNY producing Uconn WBB - SNY did not pay anything for the rights to ESPN, but did pay Uconn directly.

3. The various conference networks have an advantage in that they likely have equipment permanently located at all member schools, but as at least the Pac12 is learning it costs a lot more money to produce all the sports products than they likely thought, and marketing them is not cats play either. Not sure how the other conference are doing and how much they are actually producing for WCBB but I believe it is not 100%.

The P5's execept B12 will all have conf networks come August, when ACC starts theres. They produce/air essentially every WCBB game game. The conf networks while started for fball need the content & have production at every school for almost every sport & especially WCBB, which is the highest profile womens sport. They broadcast most non revenue sport, soccer, volleyball, wrestling, gymanstics, swimming, etc... to different extents, but they all get significant time. The P12 problem is they went solo and did not partner with Fox or ESPN, like the other P5's. P12 should have given up 50% like others conferences did to a major broadcaster. P12 gets all of a smaller pie and are having major distribution problems. Revenue projections are way less than P12 told the schools.