How AAC TV deal could impact the future of college football rights

How AAC TV deal could impact the future of college football rights

What’s the most likely outcome? It’s difficult to predict, but industry sources see the confluence of a primary deal with ESPN and some subsidiary deals with other channels or digital networks. (That’s been the model of the Big 12, Pac-12, and others). Maybe ESPN buys it all and sells some off? Maybe Facebook dabbles on a second-tier package like it did for Major League Baseball? As for the financial numbers, there’s fluctuating predictions on exactly what multiples the AAC will receive.

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“Essentially, each major conference program in the Power Five gets more television revenue annually than all 12 teams in the AAC”

Good article. It sums up the situation very well.

I think AAC could become the Amazon Athletic Conference.
place mwc and aac with byu into a contract with amazon. they can use this to launch amazon prime sports network
they get into the live televised sports game and we get more $.
In addition they would then be in the best place to shake up the current p5 cfp picture. amazon could sue for antitrust to get thier teams into the new years bowls and championship mix, they have the deep pockets to affect change.

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I know nothing about Aresco’s competence, but a superior negotiator would be in touch with
Amazon, Fox, ESPN, and any other business capable of a competitive bid. I would even go
to GOOGLE which could match the present incomes of the P5 programs with its small
change. It seems to me that ESPN as a corporate entity is already at its limit.

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The University of Bezos Bulls vs the mighty Pioneers of Prime University. The grandaddy of 'em all!

Not a bad idea. Pro soccer leagues around the world sell commercial rights to name their respective leagues, car racing does it all day long, so why not college football.

It’s a brave new world, and sometimes being the first to market can pay big dividends.

I’m a traditionalist by nature, but I’ve seen corporate sales of stadium names, league names, advertising on professional uniforms (soccer, NBA) so why not move to the next level and get some money and exposure for the conference?

American Athletic Conference sponsored by Amazon or even the Amazon Athletic Conference.

This news just broke today (well, for me anyway), and it relates somewhat to the topic at hand.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-soccer-england-mun/manchester-united-launch-team-channel-on-streaming-services-idUSKBN1KF2RR

(Reuters) - Manchester United have launched their MUTV channel on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku and Xbox in the latest effort by the Premier League club to grow their fanbase in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, the team said.

So a quick question for you guys. Could maybe even do a poll. If it would get the new TV revenue up to nearly half of what P5 schools make, would you be ok with a deal that requires all AAC teams to do twice as many Thursday, Friday and 11am Saturday games as the teams currently do?

Yes. Exposure is exposure. Thursday, Friday whatever.

We probably won’t even get half as much money and still have to play on those days

You have to have something marketable in the eyes of the buyer to get any bid at all. Why would a smart company like google and amazon and facebook want to pay more than the bare minimum for the AAC? Reality sucks.

Facebook doesn’t (openly) publish content. When you see sports on Facebook, it’s other agencies producing the video. They legally can’t produce content because their lack of liability depends on not being a publisher. Just a little FYI.

As for Amazon, they keep expanding. Owning Amazon and Twitch, which does occasionally stream sports. Even owning an arena team that allowed viewers to vote on plays for the team. I can picture them being in the market and competing against Youtube for sports publishing. At the very least, financial competition for games ESPN relegated to ESPN3.

ESPN created the Power 5 narrative and killed the Big East with moving schools to the AAC. I don’t expect them to do anything to help our cause.

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ESPN doesn’t operate in a vacuum.

ESPN is the “Big Dog” in college football and will be until some other entity is willing to step up with big bucks and bid against them.

The big east/aac contract proves that. No one else wanted to outbid ESPN despite having some pretty good media markets.

So for college football it may as well be a vacuum.

And they love putting us on national games because we turn on more tv sets than at least half of the P5 schools but for 1/25 of the price… .

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The Big East/ AAC contract was negotiated with a lot of teams coming and going. We will get more money this time, I am going to guess $10 million per school. That is north of the BYU contract.

My strong gut feeling is that with that contract BYU joins for all sports and Army joins for football only. Who knows maybe Gonzaga or an Atlantic 10 school joins to even out basketball.

I strongly feel BYU will be in the AAC for the next contract.

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BYU and Boise State would be AWESOME!