Early negotiation of new TV deal might be occurring

Cougar Football
23

We are talking about Jeff Bezos, who has the ego to go with the size of his company. The AAC is not on his radar. When Amazon goes into the live sports world, it will be big, like everything else they do.

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I wish the conference could negotiate something the contract about early kick off times for its southern teams citing safety and health concerns due to the heat.

1 Like
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Hopefully he learned his lesson from the Amazon smartphone debacle. You can’t always jump right in with the big boys and succeed.

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The difference here is Bezos can in fact buy success in this realm. They can buy the best conference available, and the best infastructre and TV guys. Boom success.

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A few things you might not know. Amazon already does exclusive sports content. Amazon owns Twitch which has streamed live sports. Facebook and Youtube have streamed live AAC sports that weren’t already under tv contracts.

New contracts coming up, Facebook and Youtube will be competing to stream sports events that were previously under exclusive contracts. Amazon will not just sit and watch Facebook and Youtube grab more of the sports streaming market without at least competing for those markets.

There are many other streaming forums that aren’t as widely known. These companies know they can’t just sit on what they have and exist 10 years from now. This is why we will not only get a much bigger contract in the next 6 months or so but it will cover more games and more sports.

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Or these other streaming companies may have learned the lesson of the dot com bubble and decide to pick and choose what streaming best fits them. Just because aac content is coming available doesn’t mean there’s going to be a plethora of bidders.

ESPN rules the roost. Everyone else is just entering the market with no need to gamble.

29

Just get used to 11am games. I will believe the league is getting a big raise on the tv rights when they actually sign a deal for more money. The ESPN layoffs and cord cutting that has costs them a lot of subscribers make it hard to believe the offer will be much higher than what the league is getting now.

30

We need to sign an autobid deal with the Peach Bowl. They have both slots open, and that would instantly confer “Contract Conference” status as constantly referenced in the CFP constitution. Then we would be worth a lot of money, being part of the cartel that needs to be propped up.

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Here’s the thing, most of these companies don’t even need to offer to host. If ESPN doesn’t offer good enough value for games they intend to broadcast on ESPN+, the AAC can pass and host the games themselves on those sites. Those sites pay a direct share of advertisement revenue and subscriptions.

Also to be clear, the dot com bubble wasn’t due to internet companies over-reaching too fast. It had to do with the stock markets over valuing stocks based purely on speculation and chances to get rich quick.

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32

What’s worse is UH could have gotten an invite to join the Big East and play a schedule containing Pitt, Syracuse, TCU, West Virginia, Rutgers, Louisvile, Boston College, USF, Uconn and Cincy in Football and adding the Catholic 7 and Notre Dame to basketball. While still making 10.3M and possibly still holding a power status.

3 Likes
33

Yea. When the deal was happening I thought how great it was. Then suddenly it just collapsed.

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I do agree Amazon and Facebook could always be an option, but currently they don’t produce any sports. They just stream material produced by other networks. Production costs are super expensive. I don’t see them spending production costs on AAC football, but for sure could be an outlet.

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More than likely, any deal like that would require the University to spend money to upgrade their production capabilities. The ACC is currently having to do that in order to get the ACC network online with ESPN.

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Well the ultimate plus is for us to have an option if ESPN adds no value to the contract for our “less marketable games.” ESPN can’t just say, showing games like Tulane vs UConn on ESPN+ is doing the AAC a favor. Offering some kind of low ball deal where they offer to stream what the home school records and share the subscription revenue during stream as the only form of compensation. We can pass on a low ball offer like that.

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We can never say never. There are quite a few production companies that would love to have the opportunity to work for Amazon. We shall see.