| On Tuesday night, a number of my colleagues and I decamped from Puck’s airy Chelsea headquarters down to the Village for a special toast to our newest partner, John Ourand. We were headed to Rocco’s, a decidedly upscale sports bar—the sort of place where you might actually eat dinner with your spouse, or share a drink with your lawyer—right off Broadway, in the shadows of NYU.
I grew up in the Village, back when it was grittier and bohemian, when you wouldn’t walk through Washington Square Park after dusk and 8th Street was a bazaar of haunted storefronts with murky business propositions. Now, of course, it’s all a suburb of Goldman Sachistan, and all for the better, too. As I entered Rocco’s, on 3rd Street, I had one of those New York moments where I recalled its three or four previous incarnations—a deli, another restaurant, and, I think, a chicken joint that once sponsored my youth basketball team—dating back to the ’80s. Great karma.
The turnout, unsurprisingly, was overwhelming. John, after all, is about the most beloved and respected journalist at work on a beat of his very own creation. As I walked into Rocco’s, there he was chatting with ESPN chairman and ubermensch Jimmy Pitaro. Elsewhere were Sean McManus, the retiring leader of CBS Sports; my buddy Connor Schell, the former ESPN content chief and brilliant mind behind the network’s landmark 30 for 30 series, who now runs Words & Pictures; the fantasy football legend Matthew Berry, and literally too many other dignitaries from the wide world of sports to mention. We marked the occasion by gifting John a Puck letterman jacket in honor of his industry-defining private email, The Varsity.
It is high season for The Varsity these days. Major League Baseball opened its season amid the backdrop of a gambling scandal involving its best player, Shohei Ohtani, who signed an $700 million deferred payment deal with the Dodgers a few months ago. March Madness is underway across a number of different networks—CBS, one of the few bright spots in the declining Redstone portfolio, and various other organs (TNT, TruTV, etcetera) of David Zaslav’s Warner Brothers Discovery enterprise. It’s not absurd to wonder if, this time next year, rights to all those games will be housed under one parent company. Meanwhile, the greatest enigma of our current media moment is what NBA commissioner Adam Silver is planning to do vis-a-vis his league’s new national broadcast rights package.
The sports business, after all, is a subset of the media industry. And Silver’s critical decision is a microcosm of virtually every secular trend we’re seeing course throughout the space. The NBA, which has a comparatively younger and wealthier ownership base than the other professional sports leagues, is choosing from virtually every suitor imaginable. The traditional legacy players—Disney, NBCU, WBD—want to buy their rights just as badly, if not more so, than the pure play tech companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Silver’s predicament is articulating a path that maximizes league revenue without alienating fans by spreading games out across too many platforms, prompting all sorts of confusion and expense.
Complicating matters, of course, is the reality that all these mediacos covet the NBA for different reasons. Bob Iger, Brian Roberts, and Zaz all presumably want to acquire as many games as possible to delay the decline of the pay TV linear bundle. Amazon, which is already wading into the NFL, sees all kinds of consumer marketing opportunities. Google, with its YouTube TV product, presumably eyes a path toward more ballasty subscriber lifetime value numbers. Netflix, on the other hand, is interested in the game’s international appeal—and its own future growth overseas.
In his typically brilliant piece, The Adam Project, John articulates these various theses and hypotheses and lays out the most compelling framework for how it might all shake out. It’s a tableau that’s compelling for anyone fascinated by our balkanizing media landscape and the new world that appears poised to replace it. And as everyone knows, interrogating that present and future is indeed the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
