Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the sports media business, and all the machinations from the corner offices to the owners’ boxes. Happy Olympics denouement to all who celebrate.

The only Olympics I ever attended were the London Games, 12 years ago, which NBC quaintly dubbed the first real streaming Olympiad. After all, each and every event was broadcast on TV or over the internet. This year’s Games, however, were a true streaming-first (or at least fully streaming-adjacent) conquest. That Olympic spirit is the leitmotif of tonight’s private email. (Reminder: Those caught forwarding this email will be subject to Marchand’s traveling Canterbury Tales revue.)

Okay, let’s get to it…

1. A gold medal deal: During Netflix’s upfront presentation, back in May, the streaming service announced the production of three documentary series focused on the Paris Games—one on gymnastics legend Simone Biles, another featuring track superstars like Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles, and a third focused on some of the men’s Olympic basketball teams, including the U.S. and French squads. The docs are likely to succeed and bolster Netflix’s standing in the auteur-ish world of documentary filmmaking because, for the first time, the I.O.C. pledged to grant the sort of privileged, behind-the-scenes access that these projects require. Cameras were able to follow athletes into any venue, including the Olympic Village, training facilities, and the arenas.

   Connor Schell’s Words & Pictures, the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions, and the Olympic Channel partnered on the basketball doc series, which will premiere next year. The sprinters’ series, aptly named Sprint, produced by Box-to-Box, will be ready this fall. The Biles documentary series, Biles: Rising, is already a hit on the service, and the last two episodes, which include great access, will also debut in the fall.

2. The Peacock Olympics: In an Olympics press release yesterday, NBC included a small item that illustrates why streamers have been so focused on sports. “In addition to scoring a Team U.S.A.-high 24 points in its gold medal victory, Steph Curry won with his new comedy series Mr. Throwback, which ranked #1 on Peacock [Saturday], reaching more accounts than all other series on the platform.” Sports fans, of course, love seeing their in-game heroes in non-sports contexts. But all streamers have also come to the apparent agreement that sports is a fantastic gateway for general entertainment.

   In a pre-Olympics interview with my partner Matt Belloni, NBCU Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus noted that Peacock had successfully used its NFL wild card game to introduce new subscribers to the service, many of whom stayed to watch non-sports content. In fact, he told Matt, nine of the 10 hours that football fans would watch over the next month had nothing to do with football. NBC officials recently said that 70 percent of their new NFL sign-ups were still Peacock subscribers after two months.

3. Venu on the menu?: Puck’s resident legal expert Eriq Gardner spent last week hunkered down in a New York courtroom watching FuboTV’s case against Venu (né Spulu), the sports streaming service coming from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. And while you have to wait until tomorrow to read Eriq’s excellent analysis in Puck’s What I’m Hearing+ private email, I couldn’t help asking him for a quick summary. Here’s a teaser…

   “From the several days of testimony I witnessed, filled with executives, consultants, and economists making their case, it feels like a preliminary injunction might just be on the table,” Eriq told me. “My assessment might startle those accustomed to decades of largely unchecked consolidation and vertical integration in entertainment. Yet, in these days of colossal sports rights valuations, I sense that U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Garnett grasps, and is concerned by, the extraordinary influence potentially wielded by an alliance of the sector’s behemoths.”

   Two weeks ago, I broke the news that Venu was looking to launch this month, coinciding with the start of college football season. If Eriq’s prediction comes to pass, that launch date, said to be Aug. 23, will certainly be delayed.

4. Super Bowl ad sales: Congratulations to Brian Steinberg, who published the year’s first major Super Bowl ad sales story nearly six months before the big game. Here are the stats that matter: Fox only has a “handful of spots” left in its inventory and is charging a record high of more than $7 million for a 30-second spot.

   Sure, the ad sales market for traditional linear TV may be cratering, but the Super Bowl ad market is hot, and Fox is using it to bolster and protect other sports. According to Steinberg, Fox’s ad sales executives are “insisting that anyone who wants a berth on the Super Bowl ad roster commit to an advertising package that includes other Fox properties to seal the deal. One area of importance to Fox sales executives, according to one of the buyers, is lining up ad support for its telecasts of postseason Major League Baseball.”

5. LIV still can’t get on the fairway: Did you catch Phil Mickelson’s comments about LIV Golf’s plans to shun broadcast TV in favor of a streaming deal? “Television and viewership for sports, especially golf, is changing,” said the three-time Masters winner who came back in 2021 to win the PGA Championship at the age of 50. “The old-school media and the way that we’ve done it—which is to be on a network and so forth—is not the way of the future.”

   Translation: LIV, which of course is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, still can’t work out a real TV deal in the U.S., which is where the big money and biggest audiences still reside. It just hasn’t been able to draw audiences to The CW, or successfully pressure other TV channels to pick up its rights. Despite the increasingly colorful Mickleson’s bluster about TV being an outdated strategy, LIV would take any truly national TV deal in the U.S. if it could get one.

   Granted, sports viewing habits are obviously changing, but few networks or streamers appear willing to put up with the LIV package for various reasons. CBS, NBC, and ESPN have their own deals with the PGA Tour. Fox, you’ll remember, dabbled with pro golf before getting out four years ago, seemingly for good. Warner Bros. Discovery is a wild card as it frantically hunts for live sports to replace NBA programming. Word is that WBD’s relationship with the PGA Tour went south when it shut down GolfTV in Europe a couple of years ago. But sources tell me that a WBD-LIV deal would be a very long putt at best.

Netflix is slowly but surely priming itself to become a player in live sports, taking its time progressing from sports-adjacent content (Drive to Survive and Quarterback) to event sports (WWE) to sampling very major sports, like the NFL. And while I previously reported that Netflix was interested in a bespoke NBA package, such as the league’s in-season tournament, the company was eventually scared off by the capital expenditure required to produce 67 games. Netflix, at least for now, views itself as a streaming company that can handle one-offs, like a golf or a tennis match, but it’s not in the capital intensive live-events business. Thus, its executives’ calls to network honchos asking for their help standing up those Christmas games.

And yet, it only seems like a matter of time until Netflix discovers the recipe to the live-events business’s secret sauce, as it has with much of the TV and movie industry. Network sports executives, you might not be surprised to learn, have contemplated this idea once or twice. So even though TV networks have a long history of producing games for their supposed rivals—Amazon used NBC crews to produce Thursday Night Football, and Fox and CBS have produced NFL Network’s games over the years—Netflix’s ask seemed bigger and riskier.

Netflix also considered tapping an independent production company, but that seemed like a plan of last resort. If Netflix wants to be in the NFL business, so the thinking goes, why risk its $300 million investment on a less experienced partner? While talks remained dormant for close to two months, Netflix eventually re-engaged with CBS and Fox. And while both remained skeptical about helping a competitor, CBS seemed to have softened its stance.

Their rationale seemed based on the fact that Netflix ostensibly appears more interested in growing its advertising tier than becoming a player in sports media (at least for now). Secondly, even if Netflix were interested, there isn’t anything to buy, given that rights for most of the biggest sports are tied up until the end of this decade at the earliest. Plus, CBS already had experience producing several sports for other networks, including golf for ESPN and live games for NFL Network.

Oh, and there’s one more thing, too. CBS, of course, is a subsidiary of Paramount Global, which is currently changing hands from Shari Redstone to David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird. CBS may be a long-tenured and trusted NFL partner, but this might not have been a bad time for CBS to demonstrate its own loyalty to The Shield.

As I’ve written about before, the NFL has a “change-of-control” provision that will be triggered when Skydance Media merges with Paramount Global to consummate the Ellison-Cardinale deal. Even though the NFL was involved with these negotiations, I’m told that this provision wasn’t brought up even once in the conversations with CBS. Sure, the provision could lead the NFL to open up its CBS deal to try to work out a bigger rights fee, although the more likely outcome is that the league will use its leverage to squeeze some extra value out of CBS. But that won’t happen until the merger makes its way through the regulatory process, which will probably take a year or so. Regardless, now seems like a good time for CBS to remind the NFL that it’s a great partner.

But CBS certainly wasn’t desperate, either. After the network opened negotiations, it extracted several key concessions. Netflix will pay CBS an undisclosed amount to produce the games, and CBS will receive local rights to carry the games in the teams’ home markets: Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Houston. The games will be broadcast on two CBS-owned stations (Baltimore and Pittsburgh) and two CBS-affiliated stations (Kansas City and Houston), which means that CBS will also pick up ad inventory in those markets. The deal also provides CBS with promotional opportunities within the games.

Netflix also plans to use NFL Network talent, including Rich Eisen, and an outside production company led by former NFL Media producer Mark Quenzel to handle studio programming around the games. Quenzel will serve as an executive producer for the day, helping to make talent and transaction decisions as programming moves from the studio to the live games and back again. Netflix has experienced and well-regarded sports executives, but they don’t have an experienced live producer like Quenzel, who left NFL Network after the 2023 Super Bowl. He spent 13 years with the network, eventually rising to become senior vice president and head of content, is well-liked by NFL executives, and has remained an advisor to the league. It should help to have a steady hand behind the wheel. As Netflix is learning, this is a relationships business.

Venu conspiracy theories: “MoffettNathanson’s Rob Fishman seemed fairly confident that [Venu] will work something out with CBS for launch. While I believe that is almost a must for them to guarantee a successful launch, I’m hearing from people on the inside that it’s going to be tough to pull off.” —A media executive

On David Zaslav in Paris: “Will Zaz be fired by the board? He is making a case with all the cash he is burning through in Paris.” —A veteran sports media executive

[Ed. note: Zaz isn’t getting fired.]

On the shutting down of B&C and MCN: “It was never called Broadcast magazine; it was Broadcasting. ” —A longtime media executive

[Ed. note: This old Cablefax reporter regrets the error. ]