The affiliates feel like they are losing money and scarce and valuable adult male viewers as a result of the migration. Moreover, ABC then has to compete with those events on ESPN.
ABC’s affiliates are not only in a battle with the network over retransmission fees, but they are also boiling mad that corporate sibling ESPN is being handed live sports events they were initially supposed to carry.
The most recent move came in January when ESPN announced it planned to take eight Nascar races this fall off ABC for the coming season to run on ESPN. Even before that, though, ABC coughed up the Rose Bowl beginning in 2011 and golf’s British Open in 2010 to ESPN, which is majority-owned by Walt Disney, the full owner of ABC.
Sports fans and people just interested in networks warring with affiliates should read the full article. One interesting tidbit in it is that ESPN, which already has the largest cable carriage fees (the amount it is paid per home that receives ESPN) by far at an estimated $4.10 is looking to raise its fees.
Yeah, I got to sit in on a meeting with the ABC affiliate liaison and an ABC affiliate sales team, right after something else was moved to ESPN. Maybe it was a college bowl? There was a lot of complaining, but the explanation was that ESPN promotes all the ABC shows, so it’s actually a good thing! No one was buying it.
ESPN has been promoting the hell out of The Forgotten the last couple of days. Really!
ABC weekend programming is brutal. There’s college football on fall Saturdays. There will be 15 NBA regular-season games this season. According to Sports Media Watch, 15 is the minimum allowable to satisfy the contract with the league.
Not even the Eastern Conference final will appear on ABC; ESPN gets every game of that series, according to Sports Media Watch. ABC will broadcast the NBA Finals, which start after the end of May sweeps. There will be three Saturday night NASCAR races during the season-ending Chase.
That’s about it in terms of sports.
ABC’s Los Angeles affiliate typically airs several hours of local news each weekend morning. There are plenty of cartoons. There have been reruns of Shark Tank and Shaq Vs. on the station recently too. The ratings have to be terrible.
Abc used to air the x games. This year it was on espn. This really sucks for those without cable.
Something wrong with the link, I can’t get to the article
oops. should work now.
Well, this summer, ESPN is going to show 44 World Cup games live, and ABC will show 10 games LIVE, and the rest on ESPN2. ESPN is going to have some great ratings for a month starting JUNE 11th-July 11th. Yes, ABC could have shown 12 games live (part of the contract)
Yes, it does work now… and, if you wish, go ahead and delete my previous (junk link) post. Thanks for the prompt help.
This is what the death of the network-affiliate model is going to look like — not some event/thing you’ll read about in the paper some morning.
I don’t think NBC would have pulled Leno from 10/9 were they not concerned that the affiliates had the political clout to put the Comcast/NBCU merger in danger. Leno — even with the weak numbers he was pulling down — made sense at 10/9 for a network that was losing millions during that hour last year.
It’s turning into a fun year to be a broadcast affiliate, isn’t it? First NBC has a full-scale revolt as a result of the stars aligning to create the Leno/Conan/Comcast/Zucker mess (among many other problems), and now ABC affiliates are upset because they believe they are being poached by ESPN on the sports broadcasts.
So, who is right on this one? The ABC folks, who are complaining they are losing potential draws for media advertising among the male audience to a sister network (cable though it may be), or ESPN, who is pointing to the overlap of NASCAR and the NFL and the belief that better ratings would be found on the cable channel for those races? I guess it’s wait-and-see for the answer since ratings vindication won’t be until after the races have been run. If the ratings aren’t better, then ESPN will be criticized (justly or not) for the move. If ABC’s audience concerns are not realized (i.e. they don’t vary much), then ABC affiliates get the unrealized-fears trophy (justly or not). Either way, ESPN is going to continue to seek out and add sports programming, collecting everything it can, including (if it can get them) March Madness and the Olympics, as soon as it can manage it.
This cabler pilfering of broadcasters has to stop, and my first step would be a legislative requirements for cablers to offer packages plus a la carte choice of cabler stations.
With a la carte, there is no way ESPN would get the clearances they currently do at $4.10 per subscriber. I would think they’d get levels about half that, at best.
I, for one, would like to be able to use my $60/month cable expenditure to vote for my favourite stations…the Big 4, CW, MyTV, PBS, ION and RTN amongst the broadcasters…TCM, AMC, American Life, Hallmark, Hallmark Movie Channel, GSN, CNN, Boomerang, SYFY, Sundance, STARZ, HBO, SHOWTIME amongst the cablers.
And that’s it! For my 20 stations, give each of them a couple of bucks from me, with the difference to the cabler for system access charges. No more subsidies of all those 100′s of useless cablers from my wallet. If anyone new with a cable network wants access to my household, let them advertise their way into my consciousness, enough to get me to order up their station.
Everything else would be removed from my set-top box access and forced to prosper or perish by finding other subscribers to pay their way.
DuMont — ION, Boomerang, and American Life wouldn’t survive ala carte. So, you’d be dooming channels that you like as well as channels other people like that you don’t.
i figured this would happen when ABC got rid of MNF.
I’m wondering how many networks would go away under a la carte and how many would consolidate, possibly creating a stronger network with the better shows from the two (or more) previous networks. Networks like ESPN would have no trouble surviving, of course (unless sports, for some reason, completely collapse as a cultural element in society), but networks that shared themes (food, fitness, travel, family values) could merge and perhaps survive, keeping the best/most popular of their shows.
As to a la carte programming itself, I think it will be here in the future, although how soon it is hard to say. The technological capabilities are there for it to happen now. The expense of implementation and maintenance of such a system, the political and regulatory considerations, and the vested interests in keeping the economics of cable broadcasting the way they are (mainly the cable and satellite providers but also the marginal networks who rely on the fees they get), are among the more significant roadblocks to its arrival. When a la carte finally does arrive, though, I suspect its impact on the television landscape will be as game-changing as the impact of cable television vs. broadcast television has been.
If I’m correct, all of the BCS bowl games are supposed to air exclusively on ESPN next year. How will this affect the ratings for ABC? (I know that FOX aired three of the BCS bowl games, but ABC got the Rose Bowl and this year’s BCS National Championship game, but FOX’s primetime ratings are decent while ABC’s ratings outside of Dancing With The Stars, Grey’s Anatomy, and Sunday nights are almost as disastrous as NBC.) As it is, ABC’s shows skew pretty female, and outside of sports, Lost, FlashForward and V, they look like an older version of the CW.
As for ESPN, part of the reason they are charging such huge carriage fees for cable companies is because the major sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA. NCAA, NASCAR) are demanding such gargantuan sums of money to broadcast their games. And as long as leagues such as the NFL continue to gain a 35 to 50 share for regular season football telecasts and 60 to 70 shares for the playoff games, then those fees will continue to rise.
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Agreed on the fees. I wonder how all that is going to play out with the NFL owners and players in the pending contract talks.
I can’t wait to see “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” on ESPN.
@a p garcia LMAO
J.R. Herbaugh says:
February 7, 2010 at 2:16 pm
DuMont — ION, Boomerang, and American Life wouldn’t survive ala carte. So, you’d be dooming channels that you like as well as channels other people like that you don’t.
+++
Well I would never advocate a scheme that would doom any of my favoured channels – I would just re-propose a more well-thought out scheme.
Surely ION, which sells commercials and is still free to those with antennas (my bedroom television), wouldn’t be affected that much by some sort of cable retrans fee arrangement. Or they might tell the regulators that they would prefer to retain “must carry” status, and continue with the status quo, as I fully expect PBS will do anyway.
American Life has a skinny but devoted viewership, and they too take ads, so they would probably welcome with open ledgers the increase of a few bucks per subscriber that watches vs the current pennies tossed to them begrudgingly by carriers.
That being said, I do worry about the long-term viability of my guilty pleasure BOOMERANG, which carries without commercials the very best animation from the broadcast glory days. Their audiences are miniscule at best. If need be, I would recommend that channels like BOOMERANG (and other arts/educational specialty channels like SUNDANCE and CUNY-TV) perhaps be listed in a special category where cable/satellite subscribers can voluntarily pay a monthly surcharge that goes to their coffers, just like you would make a donation to the Met.
ESPN can charge so much(and probably a lot more), because I don’t think many people would buy cable without it.
My ALA Carte cable would look like this: ESPN, ESPN2, MSG, VERSUS, Comedy Central, CNN. I don’t have cable now because it’s unreasonably expensive. I would pay no more than 20 bucks a month for this package.