Comcast has entered the sports skinny bundle chat.
On Thursday, the nation’s largest cable provider announced it would offer a sports and news TV-video package for $70 a month. Sports & News TV is a slim bundle of sorts, featuring several nationally distributed sports channels such as ESPN and FS1, as well as three top cable news networks: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. Also includes local affiliates of major broadcasters (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Telemundo, Univision).
Sports and News aims to enter a market led by YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV, and will also face a challenge from DirecTV’s new MySports bundle, which launched on January 14th. Of course, all this movement comes a week after Venu Sports. was shut down, and then Disney announced an investment in Fubo.
“We’ve been on a bit of a journey over the last few years to make sure we offer great value across multiple price points, depending on our customers’ budgetary needs,” said John Dixon, Comcast’s SVP of Entertainment. I am. Video interview. “We started with a more value-oriented segment with Now TV, and now we are focusing our energy on the middle segment between premium and value products, and this is where sports and news become more popular with consumers. This is where we think we meet the need.”
Comcast says the need lies in high-profile nationally televised sporting events. Sports and News provides national television coverage of the five major men’s professional leagues, the WNBA and NWSL, as well as the major college conferences. But outside of the NFL and some MLS games, the lack of a regional sports channel on FOX that broadcasts games of other local pro or college teams is a glaring omission, at least on the surface.
Comcast has migrated most RSNs to its higher-tier Ultimate TV packages, with two notable exceptions. One is New York City-based MSG Networks, which has been blocked from access by customers in New Jersey and Connecticut since September 2021, and CHSN, a U.S. wireless network. Last fall, Chicago hosted a game between the Blackhawks, Bulls, and White Sox. (Retransmission agreements must be entered into with cable and satellite carriers to carry broadcast channels on their systems.)
“There’s no question that RSNs are popular, especially among highly engaged sports fans,” Dixon said. “But at the end of the day, games cost a lot of money, and big games are usually broadcast on broadcast networks, so they’re also broadcast on cable networks. We always go back to the RSN argument and give these customers a lot of money. We will also explore ways to offer RSNs (probably outside of the Ultimate plan, but that’s the path for now).
The RSN model has seen some resurgence with Main Street Sports Group (formerly Diamond Sports Group) officially emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy this month, but professional sports teams continue to experiment with new options. There is. This week, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who own the NBA’s best record at 36-7, joined the Rock Entertainment Sports Network, an over-the-air channel launched last summer for local teams such as the AHL’s Cleveland Monsters and the NBA. We moved a few games. Cleveland Charge of the G League.
Dixon said the skinny bundle was not intentionally created to ease the company from the woes of its RSN business, but with customer flexibility in mind as consumers continue to ask for cord-cutting. said it was designed.
“At the end of the day, what we want to do with RSNs is give customers who want them the ability and flexibility to get them and not burden customers who don’t want them,” Dixon said. says. “Frankly, we felt it was too confusing to tell customers, ‘You can’t get it[in the popular TV package]but you can get it in sports and news, but you have to give up on entertainment.’ “
The new bundle doesn’t include RSNs, but it does include Peacock Premium, an ad-free version of the Comcast streamer. Mr. Peacock had already become a prominent player for Comcast in recent years with exclusive NFL playoff games and the Olympics, including a record $1.96 billion increase in revenue from the Paris Summer Olympics. When the NBA and WNBA return to NBC in the fall, Peacock will provide exclusive national television coverage of the NBA regular season and playoffs.
It remains to be seen how much any of these new bundles will be able to stem the bleeding for cable carriers, even giants like Comcast, which has lost 31% of its video subscribers over the past three years. .
