(07-01-2015 08:48 PM)IceJus10 Wrote: Fox Sports is only semi-competitive when they're running baseball vs baseball against ESPN... otherwise, during the rest of the year - THEY'VE BEEN GETTING SLAUGHTERED... pulling in terrible numbers. These cuts are in a response to having some shows pulling ZERO rating points during the rest of their schedule. People are just not tuning away from Sports Center and ESPN News for their sporting news.
Actually baseball isn't one of the places they are as competitive and they can't run national games on FS1 against ESPN. Just local TV/regional games on FOX Sports Net affiliates.
FOX can only do exclusive games on Saturdays between two teams who have their local rights held by FOX (ie. Tigers vs. Twins or Braves vs. Marlins). Have to allow for regional co-exists for a lot of large market teams (Dodgers, Giants, Astros, Orioles, Nationals) and some small market ones (Pirates, Mariners).
The launch of FS1 and FS2 was botched by some execs that allegedly didn't get along and have since been moved to other parts of the company. Will Jamie Horowitz (former ESPN exec producer hired at FOX to head up studio programming), who was not a decision maker in these cuts, make a difference? Not sure.
Live events on FS1, in terms of ratings, have done a lot better.
* MLS is up vs. the package that NBCSN had. ESPN is up as well. Much of this is due to consistent scheduling of TV windows (Sundays) compared to NBCSN's being all over the place and at od times.
* They gained a lot of live NASCAR racing from February-June for the Xfinity & Sprint Cup, which draw pretty well
* US Open, while panned for its quality of coverage, drew a decent number.
* Women's World Cup has done extremely well.
* Champions League & FA Cup matches were up overall by a healthy margin.
One down spot: Big East basketball. I think they assumed it was a bigger draw that it is. College basketball as a whole doesn't draw great numbers. If you're getting a 0.2 on a game, you're not doing bad. Only the best of the best really draw well.
And in a few cases, those national MLB games have done decently because they've had lead-ins. For most of June, FS1 has been without MLB due to the NASCAR, WWC and US Open coverage.
They've added Bundesliga starting this year, which will run up with their Gold Cup, International Champions Cup and US men's soccer friendlies & qualifiers.
The one guy pissed off in all of this is Mike Francesa, whose show gets bounced or outright pre-empted. And its kinda fun to hear him *****, but its also true that the pre-emptions, usually NASCAR or soccer, usually outrate in on at least a 2:1 basis.
Did they miss the mark in straight up competing with ESPN? Yep and it was too lofty of a goal to pronounce publicly. ESPN2 should have been a starting point and ESPN's also in cost cutting mode. See the reports about Disney's earnings incurring a slight drag due to ESPN operating costs (Mike & Mike are not moving to NYC anymore) and some firmer stances in contract negotiation (Olbermann). Some of those cost increases at ESPN happened to be in response to FOX starting FS1. They went out and hired Olbermann, hired Whitlock, made some programming changes, and now they're having to look at the long term viability of maintaining those programming decisions.