Texas Longhorn Network a joke!

#2
#2
Yeah, but Texas still gets a cool extra $15 mil each year from ESPN that it doesn't have to share, regardless of how small or large that subscriber base ends up.

(Doesn't help ESPN's own numbers, however, that it's only one team, and thus they can't charge as much per subscribing household as they can for providing a network for a full conference.)
 
#3
#3
TrueOrange said:
Yeah, but Texas still gets a cool extra $15 mil each year from ESPN that it doesn't have to share, regardless of how small or large that subscriber base ends up.

(Doesn't help ESPN's own numbers, however, that it's only one team, and thus they can't charge as much per subscribing household as they can for providing a network for a full conference.)
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I never thought about that. So they get the extra 15...but they are not looked at as the powerhouse anymore by anyone. And I'm just wondering how they fell off in the first year like that and never got back up. Bama never fell off due to the new network.
 
#4
#4
TrueOrange said:
Yeah, but Texas still gets a cool extra $15 mil each year from ESPN that it doesn't have to share, regardless of how small or large that subscriber base ends up.

(Doesn't help ESPN's own numbers, however, that it's only one team, and thus they can't charge as much per subscribing household as they can for providing a network for a full conference.)
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That's cool. We got $31 million from the SEC network
 
#5
#5
VolsNSkinsFan said:
That's cool. We got $31 million from the SEC network
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Not exactly.

Each SEC team got $31.2 mil from the conference in shared revenue, but that was from all the combined revenues (so the SEC Championship football game, bowl games, the SEC men’s basketball tournament, the conference’s share of NCAA Championship events, and the TV network deals: the CBS deal, the ESPN deal, and the money from the SEC Network)...in other words the SEC Network money upped the amount each team received from whatever it was going to be to $31 million.

Each SEC team got around...I need to double check the number, but I think it was either around $5 -$7 mil or at most $8-9 mil in additional revenue from the SEC Network.



Along those same lines, though, Texas would have still gotten money from the shared revenue from the Big 12 conference along with its yearly money from the LHN contract with ESPN (apparently TCU and WVU are only receiving 80% shares for another year, so the shares range from $23 mil to $27 mil...probably safe to guess who gets the $27 mil in that conference though), so that $25 or $27 mil plus $15 mil, for around a $42 million maximum last season from these sources.
 
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#8
#8
volberry said:
I never thought about that. So they get the extra 15...but they are not looked at as the powerhouse anymore by anyone.
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I mean, right and that thought's fine (though let's be honest, if they started 9-0, everyone in national CFB media would be all over them), but the Clay Travis article from May was what I was responding to. The article that you linked is more Clay Travis talking about some of the Longhorn Network’s financial aspects and how it’s not doing as well (and failing) because its subscriber base is lower and its not making as much flat out total revenue as the big conference networks (the latter of which also work with much larger population pools). But whether it does or doesn't, it’s more ESPN's gamble than Texas’s. The way the deal was written, Texas doesn’t have full ownership until so much revenue is reached down the road. Until then, ESPN has to give them yearly minimum royalty payments of an average of $15 million each year.

ESPN’s the one losing out or getting the bad business end; the network could only have a small handful of subscribers and ESPN - either fortunately or unfortunately - would still have to give Texas that same considerable amount addition of money ($15 mil) at the end of the year on top of whatever else they’re getting from the Big 12 revenue shared (like an extra 60% more overall, compared to what the other Big 12 teams are getting each year);

Simply, that school and it’s athletic departments certainly aren't hurt financially / floundering because of how the LHN is currently doing. They could have hit much higher projections, yes, and the slower start is likely going to make it less successful than any projections, but taking the brunt of that part all ends up more as impairments/losses/suffering towards ESPN, not the school.



(I'm also not sure whether or not Travis's comparing straight up network revenue is the most accurate/balanced approach. ESPN can't charge as much per subscriber since it's only 1 large team as opposed to a network covering 14 teams - I believe the number he used was charging $3.48 in the footprint versus subscribers in the SEC Network being charged $16.80 since it covers 14 teams - so flat out totals are going to have drastic differences, along with the maximum footprints being so different (the state of Texas has a population of 26 mil; the whole SEC covers around 95 million people, just looking at states) that the numbers for a single are going to differ greatly from a grouping of 12-14 ...but it's also Clay Travis, there have been times in the past where he has liked to skew of choose things to better suit his article's argument.) (Edit: The prices/amounts and revenue numbers he's showing also seem to be showing seem to be more relative to the cable companies would get off of this, not what the conference or each school would get after the cable companies and ESPN all got their "takes" out of it.)


And I'm just wondering how they fell off in the first year like that and never got back up. Bama never fell off due to the new network.
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I'm not sure I or anyone else was saying that a new network deal caused that fall off. The change in how a team performs after just a year or two isn't going to be resulting from or related to changes in TV/broadcasting rights or money.
 
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#9
#9
TrueOrange said:
Yeah, but Texas still gets a cool extra $15 mil each year from ESPN that it doesn't have to share, regardless of how small or large that subscriber base ends up.

(Doesn't help ESPN's own numbers, however, that it's only one team, and thus they can't charge as much per subscribing household as they can for providing a network for a full conference.)
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And that caused the Big 12 to lose half its members and nearly dissolve
 
#10
#10
508mikey said:
And that caused the Big 12 to lose half its members and nearly dissolve
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Well, a quarter.

Not arguing against their doing this having caused some issue (although, to be fair, Colorado had already been looking at the Pac-10 and Nebraska's move was more for the greater amount of money from the Big 10; both conferences at the time -2009/2010 - had their teams making more per school because the revenue was being distributed equally unlike the performance tiers and such the Big 12 had used at the time...Missouri's 2011 move might have partly been more about stability).

But the rest of the conference that was still there also did this willingly; back in 2011 they all knew (or at least felt) that - outside of Texas and Oklahoma - the rest of them were unfortunately going to have a harder time finding another home in the other major conferences if those two left.
 
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#11
#11
TrueOrange said:
Well, a quarter.

Not arguing against their doing this having caused some issue (although, to be fair, Colorado had already been looking at the Pac-10 and Nebraska's move was more for the greater amount of money from the Big 10; both conferences at the time -2009/2010 - had their teams making more per school because the revenue was being distributed equally unlike the performance tiers and such the Big 12 had used at the time...Missouri's 2011 move might have partly been more about stability).

But the rest of the conference that was still there also did this willingly; back in 2011 they all knew (or at least felt) that - outside of Texas and Oklahoma - the rest of them were unfortunately going to have a harder time finding another home in the other major conferences if those two left.
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West Virginia being there is really strange - I always thought the ACC would offer them .
 
#12
#12
VolsNSkinsFan said:
Right right but the sec network started in August 2014. Check should be much bigger next year
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Yes and no.

I'm less familiar with the contract itself, but the SECN revenue increasing seems to be a bit more towards the number of subscribers increasing, not the length of time it's on during the year (plus there's not really really any sort of significant athletic event between the end of May and beginning of August that would have drawn the levels of significant viewership to make terribly much of a difference ...not to mention that if it were due to length of time on-air, there's only a 2 month difference, which wouldn't really result in too large of a change).



That said, everyone's deals with the main TV networks as well as will also be increasing each year, so the amounts everyone else makes (SEC members, Big 12 members, Big 10 members, Pac-12 members, ACC members) will also increase (not to mention the payouts from the bowls, CFP, and NCAA tournaments will also go up a bit).


But while there were around 63 million subscribers at the end of May, the projection for the end of next year is only at total of 69 million (and I'm not sure how many of those new subscribers would be "in footprint" - which ups the number to $1.30 per subscriber - but we likely already have a lot to most of that segment) so that aspect probably is isn't likely to get too much higher (that's only a 9% increase, going by the projection)...or at the very least it doesn't seem too likely that it would do anything like, say, double...for it to do that, the number would be jumping up to a similar level of like the same number of subscribers (nationally) to ESPN.

(I'd would also have to see the language of ESPN's contract with the SEC for the network, though, were I to be more accurate on all this though.)
 
#13
#13
TrueOrange said:
Not exactly.

Each SEC team got $31.2 mil from the conference in shared revenue, but that was from all the combined revenues (so the SEC Championship football game, bowl games, the SEC men’s basketball tournament, the conference’s share of NCAA Championship events, and the TV network deals: the CBS deal, the ESPN deal, and the money from the SEC Network)...in other words the SEC Network money upped the amount each team received from whatever it was going to be to $31 million.

Each SEC team got around...I need to double check the number, but I think it was either around $5 -$7 mil or at most $8-9 mil in additional revenue from the SEC Network.



Along those same lines, though, Texas would have still gotten money from the shared revenue from the Big 12 conference along with its yearly money from the LHN contract with ESPN (apparently TCU and WVU are only receiving 80% shares for another year, so the shares range from $23 mil to $27 mil...probably safe to guess who gets the $27 mil in that conference though), so that $25 or $27 mil plus $15 mil, for around a $42 million maximum last season from these sources.
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So what you're tellin me is that Bama is rich AF.
 
#14
#14
508mikey said:
West Virginia being there is really strange - I always thought the ACC would offer them .
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WVU honestly wanted to get into the ACC and SEC, but neither conference wanted WVU (there was some word that it preemptively applied to each, but neither accepted).

That round of conference expansion was almost entirely about adding schools with larger population footprints and markets that schools - stemming from language that allowed them to renegotiate their TV contracts with the major networks afterwards - which wasn't one of West Virginia's strongest areas (its population in 2010 was 1.86 million...by comparison TN's was 6.46 million, KY's was 4.38 million, and Missouri's was 6.02 million). Their population wasn't enough to get a significant increase from people like ESPN, etc.

Worth noting, another part of the point used to sell all these schools (along with large market footprint, being a major program, and not already being in the conference's coverage area) was also - since the presidents of the member universities make the actual vote on extending invites - the university's academic reputation (people don't like to hear this and it wasn't by any means the deciding factor, but it did helped further the sale that both Texas A&M and Missouri academically were AAU-level schools). It didn't help WVU either (it wasn't near the level of what the ACC wanted for a team...nor did it help with the SEC).



As far as WVU and the Big 12, one of my friends had always explained that addition as what he called, in his words, a "saving throw." When Colorado and Nebraska left in 2010, the Big 12 had talked to ESPN/ABC and FOX (to try to stabilize the conference and prevent too much chaos among the others) and gotten them to agree to continue to pay the Big 12 the same amount of TV money as they previously had (so rather than receive less, they were getting the same amount they had been for 12 team, but only had to share it between 10). ESPN and FOX were not willing to continue to do that with any fewer members , though; the Big 12 had to have at least 10 schools to fulfill the TV contracts. They found a (not as large brand-wise) replacement for A&M two months later in TCU, who had been about to join the Big East (it turns out they reached out but fell through with Arkansas and Notre Dame, and had walked away from talks with BYU, among others). Then later the same month, when it was becoming clear that Missouri was also going to leave, the Big 12 had to find yet another school to keep 10 members.

If I remember correctly, Texas was more the one pushing for West Virginia's addition... to add a team that had been performing very well / recently been successful, possibly to try to up the conference's value and make it look stronger for negotiations (WVU had just had 3 straight 11-win BCS bowl appearing seasons, followed by three 9 win seasons). This got partially hindered when OU president David Boren, Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance, and Senator Mitch McConnell began to lobby heavily for Louisville's addition, instead... however the Big 12 went with WVU less than a week later.

In hindsight, had the Big 12 gone with Louisville, the ACC probably would have been forced to add West Virginia when Maryland left for the Big 10. (So, the Big 12 inviting WVU probably worked out better for the ACC, though WVU's recurring travel cost issues probably would have been better the other way around.)
 
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#16
#16
Could be worse, you could be talking about the Brigham Young Network. :)
 
#18
#18
TrueOrange said:
Yeah, but Texas still gets a cool extra $15 mil each year from ESPN that it doesn't have to share, regardless of how small or large that subscriber base ends up.

(Doesn't help ESPN's own numbers, however, that it's only one team, and thus they can't charge as much per subscribing household as they can for providing a network for a full conference.)
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Actually they don't get $15 million a year. The contract is for 300 mil for 20 yrs but is prorated so it pays less on the front and more at the back end. They were paid between 10-11 mil last year but IMG gets a cut and then the athletic dept. has to split the rest with the school (50/50). That cut was around $4.5mil last year.

The school produces some of the content so it's not all sports. It has been a terrible deal for them from a branding standpoint IMO because their ratings have been so bad.
 
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