The sports media world was rocked this week by news Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery had found common ground on creating a new sports streaming joint venture.
As Yahoo Finance's reports, this deal protects a group of "old media" mainstays against the new entrants from Big Tech that have begun throwing their weight (and money) around in the world of sports rights fees.
Moreover, a unified distribution plan may take the "competitive tension out of the mix" when it's time for the major sports leagues to renegotiate their deals, as Solomon Partners' Mark Boidman told Yahoo Finance.
But as chart shows, when we're talking about sports rights fees in the US we're really (mostly!) just talking about football.
The NFL is the biggest cost center for every major player except Warner Bros. Discovery, which through its TNT channel is one of the NBA's national broadcast partners alongside ESPN.
The college sports fees that show up across the spectrum are also heavily tilted towards football, especially at Fox and ESPN. (Paramount, through CBS, and WBD, through Turner, broadcast March Madness.)
This weekend's Super Bowl will probably break viewership records, but not only — or necessarily — because of Travis Kelce's significant other. As Sportico wrote earlier this year, the NFL "swallowed TV whole" in 2023 with 93 of the top 100 most-viewed events of the year.
The primacy of the NFL as a cultural and media industry force is barely worth stating at this point. What else would the answer be?
How hard the league's power brokers choose to use this leverage to squeeze their media partners in the years ahead remains to be seen.
But this week's developments suggest, at a minimum, some media leaders would rather face this pressure together than alone.
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