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Comcast announced plans this week to spin off NBCUniversal into its own, publicly traded company, and one Hollywood insider believes the move could have an immediate impact on NFL rights.
Discussing the plans on his podcast The Town this week, Puck reporter Matt Belloni speculated that rival media companies are likely “salivating” over the prospect of stealing Sunday Night Football out from NBC’s grasp.
Belloni believes that this version of NBCUniversal, without the cable networks recently spun out to form Versant (like MS NOW, CNBC and USA Network), and without the scale of Comcast, is going to come to the bargaining table with the NFL and other sports leagues with far less buying power:
“Here’s the issue, and I think this is the core problem that they have now, is that without all the revenue from the cable and connectivity business, and without all the cash flow that gets thrown off the cable networks, how is this NBCUniversal entity going to compete in the future for sports rights and for big (content) deals?”
The NFL has begun efforts to negotiate higher rates for its broadcast deals recently, with CBS Sports first in line due to the change-of-control clause triggered by Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last summer, which hypothetically would allow the league to exit its deal with CBS entirely if it chose to do so. A similar change-of-control clause could potentially be used to compel NBC to the negotiating table, where the NFL could apply maximum leverage on NBC or threaten to take Sunday Night Football to market.
In particular, Belloni pointed to Netflix as a likely suitor for NBC’s NFL package if the company can no longer afford it.
“If I’m looking at Sunday Night Football right now and I’m Netflix, I start salivating,” he said. “Because all of a sudden, NBCUniversal is a much smaller company and maybe isn’t going to be able to keep Sunday Night Football when the NFL demands a huge rights increase and (Netflix) wants that weekly, No. 1 show, event of the week to power its ad business.”
The new, separated NBCUniversal will also house Peacock, the streaming platform which NBC has, in an effort to grow its subscriber base and advertising business, pumped full of live sports like the NFL, NBA, WNBA, and Olympics.
Lucas Shaw, a contributor to The Town and a reporter at Bloomberg, added that Peacock would face the same difficult financial situation as NBC as it aims to break even on its sports rights deals and bid for others in the future.
“They’ve made Peacock all about sports, and now they have a lot less money to spend,” he said. “And the NBA deal, even though the ratings for the Finals and the playoffs are good, there are a lot of people who questioned whether it was worth considering what they get in the regular-season, out of those games.”
The post Matt Belloni: Netflix should be ‘salivating’ over ‘Sunday Night Football’ rights amid NBC spinoff appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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