(03-15-2019 08:50 AM)fsujd Wrote: The ACC had no T3 TV rights under the ESPN contract. ESPN is the one who sold Raycom its rights and had to get them back in order to make the ACC Network work. What I meant is the SEC had to deal with getting certain rights back as well. But in the ACC's case my guess is the conference didn't because ESPN had all the rights and sold some games to Raycom. I'm also guessing ESPN probably worked out a deal that gave them work plus maybe more to claw back those rights. Notice I said guess. None of us know how the deal was structured. However it makes sense for ESPN to use Raycom as a sub and take advantage of its experience and equipment.
Here is another guess when talking profits. The ACC may be a big surprise once it gets rolling. Its in house territory has massive population and all those DirecTV and cable subscribers will be paying the in territory fee. Plus add on Hulu, ESPN and other streaming services. People forget about Notre Dame, but that brings in the Chicago market and bolsters the Northeast as well. Going to be interesting once it gets established.
Saying ESPN sold it's rights to Raycom is totally disingenuous, that's true on paper only. The ACC made ESPN sell a package of rights to Raycom as a condition of the deal. It was an artificial carve out, otherwise ESPN would have never sold those rights, and wouldn't have had to buy them back.
Acting like ESPN was the one who sold them by choice, and ESPN bought them back, and ESPN decided it would be good to have Raycom produce games for them is just being purposely obtuse.
In the last TV contract, the ACC required ESPN to turn around and sell that package to Raycom to keep Raycom alive. Had the ACC not required it, ESPN wouldn't have done it. You can know that by the fact that ESPN has sold nothing back to Raycom to broadcast.
The ACC forced a middle man into the deal that was unnecessary and wouldn't be there, and ate some of the value. The maddening thing is that Raycom just turned around and resold some of those rights to Fox. So for a lot of the games, Raycom did nothing but middle and take a piece of what would have been a ESPN-Fox transaction. Absurd.
Maybe giving Raycom a production deal reduced the up front cost of the buy back, but they wouldn't have even had to do the buy back if they hadn't forced Raycom into the deal to begin with.
If you want to defend the ACC's subsidization of Raycom on some grounds of nostalgia or partners or whatever, please do so. But don't make it out to be a sound business move for the ACC to have subsidized Raycom in the last contract, or that the production deal makes any sense outside the context of trying to mitigate that bad decision.
There's no business reason or financial benefit for not cutting ties with Raycom in the last contract. There may be financial benefit to cutting this production deal in exchange for a lower buyback of content you should have never put in Raycom's hands in the first place. At BEST it's making the least awful of a bad situation.
Of course, it could be much worse than that, because there's no history that the ACC is making prudent financial decisions when it comes to protecting Raycom. For all we know, the ACC paid a premium for the buyback, AND signed a production deal. That would have been the advantage of buying them out clean...if the ties were cut, then at least you would know. But now in perpetuity, you'll always have to wonder what percentage of the schools' disbursements are being siphoned off to subsidize an obsolete business that wouldn't otherwise exist without the giveaway.
