Labor Day symbolizes the end of summer and a three-day weekend for most Connecticut businesses, but for Bristol sports entertainment giant ESPN the holiday marks the beginning of its most lucrative time of year — football season.
While March Madness, the NBA playoffs, and special events like the Olympics and the World Cup all drive viewership to ESPN’s suite of multimedia products, the network’s bread is buttered in the fall, when college and NFL football peak sports fans interest, along with the baseball playoffs, said ESPN spokesman Mike Soltys.
Just from live games in 2012, ESPN averaged more than 2 million television viewers and 163,000 online viewers for 216 college football contests across all its channels. The most viewed game on Nov. 24 between Notre Dame and Southern California drew more than 16 million viewers.
For the NFL, the network’s Monday Night Football typically is the highest rated show in its time slot for cable or broadcast channels; viewership hit 14.5 million for the Dec. 10 Houston Texans, New England Patriots game.
This year’s football coverage is all that more important for ESPN as the sports media landscape grows more competitive with Fox launching its Fox Sports 1 network, the NFL continuing its own media efforts, and online companies like Google encroaching on the live sports market.
“The burden is going to be on us to be the best,” said ESPN President John Skipper.
For the upcoming college football season, ESPN is expanding its college football pregame show College GameDay from two to three hours, including a special four-hour show over this past weekend. The network is also airing more than a dozen college football games on its television networks each week. Next season, ESPN will launch its SEC Network to exclusively air games from the most popular conference in the country.
“We are definitely in the business of making sure you come away with good information,” said Desmond Howard, one of the three College GameDay analysts. “While the guys want to be entertaining, the show has a lot of sports information.”
For the professional season starting Sept. 5, ESPN is blanketing its NFL analysis with shows ranging from NFL Live to Fantasy Football Now; bringing in new personalities like Ray Lewis and Cris Carter to its professional pregame show, and building its mainstay Monday Night Football.
“We’re fired up to kick off the season with the Eagles and (Washington),” said MNF producer Jay Rothman. “We are only looking to improve on our success from last year.”
ESPN execs claim most of these changes have little to do with the new competition in the market; rather they say it’s part of the company’s drive to be better with each passing season.
“Let’s worry about what is going on within our four walls,” said Lee Fitting, ESPN senior coordinating producer for college sports. “We have enough to worry about with putting on the best show in the business.”
The competition from Fox and the online companies isn’t much different than the pressure ESPN has faced from regional sports networks, Skipper said. ESPN commands a reported $5.50 per subscriber from cable companies while Fox Sports 1 earns 23 cents per subscriber.
“Our goal is to grow our audience. We have never seen erosion,” Skipper said. “It is not our expectation that sports is a finite pie and we have to defend our territory.”
The reason ESPN is able to command such high rates from cable companies compared to most other networks is because sports is one of the few remaining television programs people will watch live, making them more valuable to advertisers.
“Live sports is the most valuable property in media,” Skipper said. “It is like planning on beachfront property.”
ESPN will continue to be aggressive in purchasing live sports rights, despite the increases, Skipper said. The company’s payment for the rights to Monday Night Football will rise from $1.1 billion to $1.9 billion next season.
But as the competition grows in sports media, the various leagues like the NFL are playing ESPN, Fox, and others in the market against each other to increase the value of those rights. Fox pays $1.5 billion to the NFL for rights to Sunday afternoon NFC games.
“Fox has become a very aggressive competitor in terms of what they are spending,” said Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research in Houston, which analyzes the sports media market. “I see (ESPN and Fox) absolutely going head-to-head on media contracts.”
Even as ESPN and Fox go head-to-head, the television networks do have to worry about the stampede of consumers moving to the Internet and viewing sports on mobile devices, Plunkett said.
“The cable channels are on their own to figure this out,” Plunkett said.
To grow the audience of its flagship SportsCenter show, ESPN is building a new 198,000-square-foot production facility in Bristol, called Digital Center 2, to offer up more studio space for the main product its viewers use to get their sports news.
“You never want to rest on your laurels,” said SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy. “Someone is coming after your team. You want to give them your best shot.”
With more success, ESPN plans to further expand its presence in Bristol, Skipper said. Even though the company recently laid off more than 300 people in Connecticut, largely due to stopping development on its 3D division, ESPN plans to add more to its current roster of 4,000 employees in the state.
“We are a growth company,” Skipper said. “We do not expect, in any even medium-term way, to employ less people in Bristol.”
