(05-11-2017 02:15 PM)JRsec Wrote: What will threaten conferences will be the ability of a school to utilize their own announcers to produce an event for somebody like Amazon. They could essentially cut the conference out of the loop. Then the conference will be for scheduling purposes other than for revenue production. The top brands would get richer and the lesser ones poorer.
All of the equity that the PAC and partially the Big 10 would have in their own networks would evaporate. And content would dominate the scheduling formats of the top schools.
What streaming will do is not only make the linear networks impractical, but the conferences' management of TV rights obsolete.
The schools could probably sync their individual broadcasts with their local radio guys and perhaps cut down on costs further. The tech side of that shouldn't be difficult and people wouldn't have to figure out a way to do it themselves. The consumer could simply choose which broadcast they want to follow, that of their favorite team or that of the opposing team, and the streaming does the rest. Shouldn't alter the amount of bandwidth used, I wouldn't think.
On that note, it might also be a way to monetize the radio broadcasts to a greater extent because you could simply make a feed available for any sport on a wide scale rather than reducing it to terrestrial radio and each individual station's website...several of which will not stream games online. It would be a great way to get out of market games and easier if it was all in one cozy location.
If I was the SEC, I might think about pooling digital radio rights and selling it to an entity like Amazon. Those rights are currently reserved to the schools aren't they?
I don't know, however, that they could completely cut the conferences out of the loop though. The technology makes it easier, sure, but the possibility exists now with standard TV. The prime example is LHN. The LHN seems like a great money making concept, but the reality is that few people are interested in just one team so the earning potential is reduced because the other schools aren't so cooperative. They have nothing to gain by doing so. A streaming version of the LHN, for example, would probably be profitable due to the lack of overhead, but it wouldn't guarantee big money on the other hand.
If the conference isn't pooling rights to sell as a package then I think everyone ends up making less money.
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Conferences looking forward to next round of negotiations?
