ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro has shared his opinion that streaming platforms out of the Silicon Valley will be the next to make an offer on buying up NFL TV rights.
Silicon Valley Could Make an Offer for NFL TV Rights
ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro recently spoke to press, saying that Silicon Valley may soon be looking for NFL broadcasting rights contracts. Mr. Pitaro pointed out that as NFL TV rights are expiring, the Silicon Valley might be the next place to offer big money to broadcast one of America’s most-watched athletic competitions.
So far CBS, NBC, FOX and NC all have deals to broadcast the NFL until 2022. All of the companies represent mainstream broadcasters, but news media companies are now looking into the same opportunities, their names include Amazon, DAZN, Hulu, YouTube, Google, Facebook and others.
Speaking about the possibility of tech giants snapping up multi-billion contracts (presently the contracts for TV rights are valued at $15.2 billion), Mr. Pitaro had the following to say:
“I have no idea if they’re going to be interested specifically in ‘Monday Night Football,’ but I do believe that several new media companies are going to be interested in acquiring more NFL rights.”
He then continued to elaborate, cited by the Associated Press:
I still very much like ESPN’s hand, if you look at what we offer in terms of production expertise, in terms of the scale and scope, in terms of what we can do with the game, around the game, ‘SportsCenter,’ all of our original programming, how we can drive value for our league partners I think is really the differentiator.
The Difficulties ESPN Faces
Mr. Pitaro said that competitors are popping up from everywhere, making it difficult for ESPN – and any broadcaster for that matter – to quite keep up with the competition. Disney and ESPN have been trying to diversify the crowds they attract.
The companies launched a sports betting show dedicated to tipping bettors as to the possible outcomes of events, and the networks have been focusing on electronic sports, collectively known as esports.
There have been quite a few things happening in broadcasting space. Mr. Pitaro also commented on how different production problems are addressed in general, including a confusing element in Monday’s Houston-New Orleans game whereby a yellow background had spectators confused that a flag had been thrown in the field.
Addressing the threat of tech giants snapping up NFL broadcasting rights is going to be what ESPN needs to talk about, Mr. Pitaro explained. He’s not the first executive that understands that competition is going to get stiffer.
Netflix, a video streaming platform – perhaps one of the first popular pioneers of the service – has been coming under a lot of pressure to attract viewership. Most people, for example, preferred playing video games, or divvying up their time equally between Fortnite – a computer game developed by Epic Games – and checking out the next binge worthy show.
