Quote:
Originally Posted by Digetydog
Using your numbers, Direct TV is 21% of the market. While certainly significant, the exclusive deal means 79% of the NFL's potential customers cannot buy the Sunday Ticket.
Again using your numbers, that is 79.4m households w/o access to the product.
If only 10% of the 79.4m households bought the Sunday Ticket and if the NFL's share of the revenue was $150 per household, the NFL would get $1.146B per year!!!
I don't know of a single ("Solvent") business that would intentionally prevent 79% of the market from buying their product.
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Yeah, but those 79.4m that aren't getting Sunday Ticket are, more often than not, getting the NFL they want (which is most often either 'none,' or their local team). It's not all or nothing. The NFL is essentially a content provider, and the value they can attract for their content is directly relatable to the ad dollars that the content derives for the Network/MSO. On Sunday, if every cable provider has Sunday Ticket, what your offering is a choice other than your local game in one timeslot and a national game in the other. I think that choice might result in added viewers on a pay-per-view basis, where you could cherry pick a good matchup when your team is in the pits, or when the national game is a dog, but that's not what Sunday Ticket does, for the most part. These viewers would have to decide, up front, that they wanted to pay for the opportunity to not see their local team/predetermined national game at 1pE/4pE each week. So I think the total ad dollars won't go up much , so the tv rights would stay more or less the same overall - and any gains might be offset by the lack of the DirectTV/exclusivity 'premium' (they definitely pay a premium for exclusivity as the Sunday Ticket is a flagship product).
In other words, they can give viewers access to the Jets-Patriots Sunday at 1pE in multiple ways (in the NE/NY regions) and grant access via Sunday Ticket in other markets, if they like, but they're only going to change the viewership by a negligible amount in each case, I would think - not really in the local market at all, and maybe a bit in other markets, with the viewers who decided before the season began that they wanted to pay for the right to choose games over what the networks would provide for 'free' in that timeslot.
So while you may be right, it may be that they could make more money by negotiating with every MSO on the list, I don't think it would be the windfall you make it out to be, and it's definitely not that simple.