FavreFan wrote:
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
You think that's worth 2 bil?
Of course, simply because I believe he will be able to sell it for at least that when/if he wants in the foreseeable future.
Not so fast. Buying the Clippers for $2B today is like buying a major metro daily newspaper for the going rates 10 years ago. Or buying a McMansion in Will County for half-a-mil in 2007. Sports cable bubble is about to pop. When it does, pro sports franchises will plummet in value:
Quote:
Sooner or later, change will come. Maybe cable and satellite companies will move sports channels -- all of 'em -- on to an optional sports tier, with ESPN becoming the rough equivalent of HBO. (Verizon is experimenting with a "Select HD" 140-channel bundle that dumps sports and costs $15 less per month than its standard package; the company also has proposed paying networks for their content based on viewership, which would likely rebalance the roughly $4 affiliate fee gap between ESPN and USA, given that the latter averages slightly more viewers.) Maybe a Cablevision victory in its antitrust case against Viacom will speed up that process. Maybe Apple, Google or a Silicon Valley upstart will crack the pay TV code and find a way to blow up the entire industry; maybe they'll simple outbid Fox and ESPN for future sports rights, then make affiliate fees a thing of the past by distributing programming online and a la carte.
Whatever the case, sports fans finally will have to pay market rates. The Sports Cable Bubble will pop. It has to. Just do the math. Fifty-seven million cable and satellite subscribers who don't care about Dwight Howard's decision or Yasiel Puig as the baseball reincarnation of Bo Jackson currently pay at least $100 per person into television sports kitty, each and every year. Someday they won't have to. According to Dave Warner, the creator of the What You Pay for Sports website, losing just 10 million subscribers would cost ESPN $732 million in found-money affiliate fees. Now quadruple that number. Who makes up the difference? In a pay-only-for-what-you-actually-watch world, is Kentucky's basketball coach John Calipari worth $5.2 million annually when his entire sport's signature postseason tournament averages fewer viewers than CBS's "Under the Dome?" Does the Big Ten Network even exist?
"So few people are watching these sports channels and yet they are still paying for them," Warner says. "We pay to have ESPN and Fox pay the Big 12 $200 million per year, which pays Oklahoma $20 million a year, which pays [football coach] Bob Stoops $4 million a year, and then he gives a lecture about how they're not the only ones going hungry on a Sunday night. There's something so broken about that.
"Right now, the sports networks are simply collecting a subsidy. The question is, are the people who want and love sports willing to pay double what they are now? Sports fans are willing to pay. I don't know how much. If someone can disrupt the cable model, sports could find itself with a lot less money to spend."
http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/53498716#!SeUG1Disruption is coming to the sports-broadcasting biz model over the next decade, as it did with the newspaper industry last decade. Newspapers value has plummeted in the last 10 years:
