Paramount & NBC Bosses On Venu Sports: “We Weren’t Hurt By Not Being Invited” — IMG-RedBird Summit

Paramount‘s George Cheeks and NBC‘s Jon Miller aren’t having sleepless nights over Venu Sports.

The pair addressed the topic of the Disney-, Fox- and Warner Bros. Discovery-backed sports streamer, whose launch has been delayed by a legal challenge, at the IMG-RedBird Summit in the UK yesterday, detailing how their companies had reacted to being excluded from the project.

NBC Sports President of Acquisition & Partnerships Miller in particular didn’t pull any punches over not being part of the club, questioning how it would attract subscribers when several key sporting events would not be offered.

“I think of it both as a broadcaster and a programmer, but also as a sports fan,” he said. “Why would you ever invest in a property that loses basically 45% of the NFL, has none of the golf major championships, loses half of motorsports in NASCAR, loses March Madness every other year and will lose half of the NBA opportunity because Amazon and NBC have two NBA packages?

“To me, it would be fool’s gold to invest in something like this when you can get all of that stuff by going through your cable subscription or buying a YouTube TV subscription. So, we weren’t invited, [but] we’re very happy with the hand that we have right now. We’re continually looking to grow, make partnerships and be in business with people who see the value in what we bring to the table.”

His comments came in the same week NBCUniversal Media Group Chairman Mark Lazarus told a Front Office Sports conference that Venu was an “incomplete service.”

Cheeks, one of the trio running CBS and Paramount+ parent Paramount, was slightly more circumspect, but broadly struck a similar tone when assessing the Venu Sports bundle’s upside.

“We weren’t hurt by not being invited,” he said. “I think that’s because we’re really focused on a multi-genre offering. When we look at the stats of Paramount+, we look at subscribers who came in for sports. Ninety percent of their time is spent on the services with non-sports content, so I think a more robust offering that has sports, news and entertainment is a better offering for the consumer.”

This week we reported Fubo, which is bringing the antitrust case against Venu Sports’ owners, said it would reveal sensitive details of carriage agreements with media giants to light. Sports rights owners are sitting tight on the outcome of the case. “The Venu case is potentially going to have a major impact on the market pretty soon,” said IMG Media President Adam Kelly in opening remarks at the IMG-RedBird Summit.

The value of linear and streaming sports propositions was a key theme at the Summit this week, and Cheeks, who oversees CBS as part of his Paramount co-CEO role alongside Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins, was keen to talk up the facts.

“The value proposition of the combination of broadcast, linear and streaming to drive unduplicated reach is reinforced by the stats,” he said. “If you just take last season, CBS’ [coverage of the] NFL regular season was up 5%. It was the highest rated regular season since 1998 when CBS reacquired the NFL, and it was up more than 50% on Paramount+. We’re meeting the audiences where they want to be and we’re not cannibalizing. We’re actually growing audience even when linear is declining.”

He later added: “We’re always going to be doubling down on that marriage between broadcast-linear-streaming.” 

Miller said there were “only three companies out there that offer broadcast, cable and streaming” — NBCUniversal, CBS/Paramount and Disney/ABC. “The other competitors who are out there, who all do a great job, don’t have those three different opportunities to bring everything together, and that’s what leverages our ability to maximize the benefits to our partners.”

The value of sports rights as discussed the previous day at the IMG-RedBird Summit when Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel and RedBird Capital Partners founder Gerry Cardinale. Emanuel, whose company owns the UFC and WWE, ventured that “every” media company would “need sports” as they build SVOD and AVOD services.

He also predicted how global streamers would invest in the space, with ad-funded services a particular opportunity. “Whether Netflix goes in or not, they’ll figure that out,” he responded to a question about the Los Gatos company’s ambitions. “But there are other players that need it and want it because they’re building their AVOD services, as we’ve seen with Amazon [and others]. The greatest content for the AVOD services is sports, so that’s going to drive pricing across the globe. Whether Netflix is in or out, that’ll be their strategy. The rest of them will play, and that will be good value creation for rights holders.”

Cardinale — owner of Italy’s AC Milan, Toulouse FC and the United Football League — said sports rights would remain valuable thanks to the enduring power of linear networks and emerging bundles.

“Everybody’s jumping the gun on linear assets, saying ‘It’s all over… Everything’s binary,’ he said. “More people tonight will watch CBS than Netflix, and that is going to continue for the next 20 years. You’re going to have different modulations in that trajectory, and it’s going to be this convergence.

“The simple factor means that the reality is that most people aren’t going to subscribe to 18 different streaming services. That’s why there’s a value proposition in the bundle. There will be some that will, so the whole point is to have linear right alongside streaming and offer a menu of opportunities to economically get the IP holders what they need, [and] get the distributors what they need. Obviously you’re going to keep having these skirmishes.”