NFL’s Top Media Officer ‘Trying to Understand the Value’ in Joint Venture Streaming Platform
The league’s chief media officer Brian Rolapp says he has a hard time envisioning the ultimate success of a platform with only half of NFL games.
Is the NFL warming to the idea of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s joint venture streaming platform? The league’s chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp spoke during this week’s NFL owners meeting in Florida and had the chance to share the league’s thoughts about the platform with the media. The executive expressed both skepticism and encouragement to the three companies, suggesting the league is still leery of the platform, but is also unwilling to alienate two of its most important broadcast partners with precipitate public comments.
- Rolapp said he has a hard time seeing the value in a streaming platform that only offers half of football games.
- He also praised the streamer as a new attempt to deliver sports to fans amidst a faltering cable environment.
- The comments suggest the NFL is warming to the idea of allowing its games to be shown on the JV platform.
According to Front Office Sports, Rolapp began his comments by suggesting that a streaming platform with only roughly half of the NFL’s rights may not raise customer interest from a value perspective. In his mind, it could be a tough sell to get fans to pay $50 per month for a service that’s missing such a large swath of NFL offerings each week. As a joint venture carrying NFL games from ABC, ESPN, and Fox, the JV streamer would offer Fox’s Sunday afternoon slate of games and “Monday Night Football.” It would be missing CBS’s portion of the Sunday slate, as well as “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video, and “Sunday Night Football” on NBC and Peacock.
“So I’m trying to understand the value proposition,” Rolapp said at the Orlando owners meetings. “You are missing more than half of football. I’m not sure how comprehensive of a sports bundle it is.”
Rolapp stopped short of using the sometimes-fiery, always-derogatory language employed by Fubo CEO David Gandler when discussing the JV, however. In fact, he offered what could be described as lukewarm encouragement for the streamer, pointing out that in a world where sports is transitioning from linear to digital spaces, at least the three companies involved in the JV are attempting to find customer-based solutions.
“Having said that, the fact that they’re going in and trying to do something different, really trying to figure out this model is that’s always it, because you need to sort of be proactive in this environment because it’s changing so much. I think that’s good,” Rolapp said.
Rolapp has a point that the JV streamer would indeed be missing a big portion of NFL games. But it would also be the most comprehensive sports streaming product ever to hit the market, with apologies to ESPN+. The platform is slated to carry full livestreams of 14 channels, and will offer contests from the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, as well as every major college conference. It will mark the first time that ESPN-exclusive “Monday Night Football” games are available to stream anywhere besides the cable bundle and the occasional ESPN+ simulcast, and fans can sign up to Paramount+ for an extra $5.99 per month to get access to CBS’s Sunday lineup of NFL games and Peacock for $11.99 to watch “SNF”, helping to round out the product while still costing far less than an average cable subscription.
Is the NFL Warming to the Sports JV?
It’s been widely reported that all major sports leagues in the United States were completely in the dark about the joint venture platform until it was announced. Worse yet for the NFL, the news dropped during Super Bowl week, when it’s used to holding the media as a more or less captive audience.
Word leaked in the days following the announcement that the NFL might try to use contractual fine print to keep the JV streamer from airing its games. At the very least, Rolapp’s words suggest that the league has backed off that position, and is willing to see where the experiment leads.
From the NFL’s standpoint, there’s not a great deal of risk involved in allowing its games to air on the service. Disney, Fox, and WBD assume all the responsibility of drawing fans to the service, and pre-existing contracts that run through 2033 with ABC, ESPN, and Fox mean the league will get its money from those channels no matter what happens with the JV service. Of course, the league is invested in the future of its games being on streaming services, but it also doesn’t want to alienate viewers who are most comfortable with watching on traditional TV platforms.
Even without outright resistance from the NFL, the JV service has plenty of issues to iron out before it can achieve a targeted launch date of fall 2024. It faces a Department of Justice review, an antitrust lawsuit from Fubo, and a self-imposed time crunch. The league may be struggling to see the value of the Disney/Fox/WBD service, but for now, it appears that it won’t drag the three companies into court to try and prevent NFL games from appearing there.
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