Streaming Wars For Live Sports, Entertainment, and Gambling

Comcast Already Drifting Content and Exclusivity Away from Peacock

I noticed over the weekend two other interesting developments down this road, beyond the two cited above, of Comcast steering content and exclusivity away from Peacock, even as otherwise Comcast did increase the monthly amount for Peacock before the NFL season and peak viewing season in the winter. SUCKERS!

But I wonder how long those higher rates will stick now that NFL football on NBC is over and with only so many fans of Premier League willing to pay for Peacock for years now?

  1. Via quite a bit of clicking and after attempting to lead one to sign up for Peacock, NBC puts free access, including to live sports like today’s Eagles’ playoff game, to what is already free on over-the-air broadcast online on its website now. Telemundo may be doing the same as well. Fox had already done so last summer. CBS of course has almost always simulcasted live sports to Paramount+.

  2. NBC Sports Now, reminiscent of the discontinued NBCSN cable channel in 2021, shows up as an app via the Google TV menu now, though one must download and install Comcast’s Xumo app, which once appeared exclusively for Comcast cable subscribers. It’s also at hand because NBC Sports has been getting their asses kicked by CBS Sports, which runs a free channel on the CBS Sports website as well as on Pluto TV and via various streaming platforms.

Given the losing business proposition of Peacock, there is no real reason any more for Comcast to have both the Xumo and the Peacock apps when they can stream to a single app and then license some content to another app like Max, which as noted previously appears to be in the works.

STAMFORD, Conn. – Jan. 8, 2024 –The NBC Sports FAST Channel, a digital channel providing viewers with free video content, was rebranded today as NBC Sports NOW, featuring daily 24/7 programming, popular sports-talk shows, live events, content marathons, and more.

NBC Sports NOW is available via Peacock and all major FAST Channel distributors, including Roku Channel, PlutoTV, Samsung TV Plus, Amazon Fire TV, XUMO, Crackle, Fubo, and Sling Freestream. The channel is also available on the NBC Sports App on mobile and tablet devices.

Note that Comcast had already taken these steps with the NBC news division months and years ago, but look how long they tried to hold out with the sports for their Peacock piece of crap!

Now they have waved the first white flag. SCREW YOU COMCAST!

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More Live Sports on Free TV, and Some from Formerly Cable TV, Now Easily Accessible Everywhere Else for Free

And on this front after years of simply doing little or fighting losing battles, both Fox and NBC are waving the white flag to some degree instead of trying to charge people money to watch on other devices than a big screen and to have them subscribe to whatever, but free app downloads are becoming more popular along these lines.

Rather than indirectly subsidize the pirate sites and lose all that ad revenue, Fox and Comcast have simply decided to put what is already free on regular TV to be accessible free anywhere else.

Now it took them a very long time to figure that out instead of trying to get people to sign up for something that is otherwise free and then to pay for it simply because they are not watching on a TV at home, and it’s taken them a decade to figure this out and millions in wasted resources, including on the legal front, but some greedy media executives are who they are after all and generally behind the times with technology as well.

  • Fox seems to be moving much of its live sports content, like the NFL playoffs right now, right on its website during the game, much as Fox did for the World Cup games in late 2022 and other sports ever since. There is a time limit of one hour, but one can clear cookies to restart the clock. Then there is a free app for content via the website and also some new sports coverage on Tubi, which basically makes that steaming hot piece of trash that is the cable channel FS1 obsolete along with all those bojacks and bojills still with airtime on there for no good business reason.

  • NBC has done as noted in the previous post to move more sports content, including live sports, away from their crappy Peacock app, which they appear to be phasing out or perhaps making it perhaps more centred on non-sports entertainment in an integration with Xumo or a rebranded interface.

  • CBS seems to make much work far more easily with Paramount+ and Pluto TV along with on the CBS sports website. What’s coming next that is more integrated, via the new ownership, is likely not until 2026 at the earliest.

  • Disney and ABC? Well it’s going to be a while as they figure out what to do, including with their crappy ESPN+ app that far fewer care about any more and all those overpaid blowhards on ESPN, now all salespeople for ESPN Bet.

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The owner of the Capitals and the Wizards has made the local regional sports network work in the Washington DC area, but of course this is an area in which overwhelmingly most jobs are for or associated with any given government entity or publicly-subsidized entity, so I don’t buy any implication that the company is necessarily a model that can be copied for other markets, though of course one can always learn from what is working for others:

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Look at Comcast now about five years too late and once again reacting to the competition instead of innovating on their own accord, lest it involves trying to sell folks a bundle involving mobile phone service that few want or need:

Just nine days after DirecTV introduced its MySports streaming package, Comcast is rolling out its own competing bundle of channels designed to cater to sports fans. The new Sports & News TV offering from the country’s No. 2 cable distributor will combine more than 50 broadcast, sports, and cable news channels in a cheaper and more condensed selection than a traditional cable or satellite TV subscription.

And of course the referenced hikes in pricing by the established “cable TV on streaming” services were predictable back in 2023 in this thread.

And notice how Comcast buries Peacock within the service, so once again as asked weeks ago, why is a separately-branded service for live sports even needed if there is this new service?

Like the DirecTV package, Sports & News TV will feature major networks such as ESPN and Fox—two of the key partners of the recently shuttered Venu Sports. Pricing will be essentially identical, with the $70 per month fee for the Comcast offering matching up with the non-promotional price of $69.99 per month for MySports. But like MySports, Sports & News TV omits many prominent sports outlets, with the absences here including Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT and TBS, regional sports networks not owned by Comcast, and key streaming entities such as Amazon, among others.

There are some particular elements to Sports & News TV, however, including the addition of Comcast’s Peacock streaming service. NBA basketball will also be a more prominent part of the package this fall once NBC Sports begins its rights deal with the league.
**> **
> Comcast is seeking to position the package as a more affordable alternative to Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV, each starting at $82.99 per month after the latter’s price increase last month.

As this article is written by Eric Fisher, it contains a fair amount of spin.

The move also arrives in a period of corporate transition, as Comcast in November announced plans to spin off most of its cable network holdings.

Nah, there won’t be hardly a spin-off to somebody else offering cable networks. They’ll either recycle the brands into some other service or they will be belatedly tossed into the scrap heap.

Expect more transition in the road to the NBA back on NBC in autumn.

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More on trend here is what the Texas Rangers decided to do.

The Rangers are going their own way by launching their own media company, instead of relying on some sorry-butt regional sports network or local cable company jerks, such as Comcast here in Philadelphia:

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Stopped dead in their tracks in court by Fubo in the summer of 2024, Disney, WBD, and Fox lost big here on mounting antitrust concerns:

Meanwhile Fox has gone ahead and started putting more of its live sports content right on its website or otherwise on free Tubi.

Disney’s ESPN, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery have thrown in the towel on their joint sports streaming service, Venu Sports, a venture that was first announced last February.

The three would-be collaborators acknowledged the decision to walk away from Venu in a statement released this morning. “After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service,” the statement read. “In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels.”

By "careful consideration, what they really mean was after careful consideration with their LEGAL COUNSEL, those greedy fools!

But as Disney could not beat Fubo, they decided to join them:

The move to fold up the tent came at the close of a week marked by Disney’s deal to merge its Hulu + Live streamer with Fubo TV, which in turn brought a tidy end to the latter’s legal challenge against the Venu partners. The withdrawal of Fubo’s lawsuit raised eyebrows at DirecTV and Dish Network, which responded to the news by firing off separate letters to United States District Court Judge Margaret M. Garnett in New York.

But other interested parties in the case than Fubo retain antitrust concerns and are considering their legal options with regards to the case.

As Venu passes into what-might-have-been, Disney returns its laser focus to ESPN’s fall direct-to-consumer launch. The yet-to-be-branded offering (code name: “Flagship”) is set to roll out ahead of the 2025 college football season.

I can tell you right now, based on the recent heavily-annoying ads that use ESPN faces, such a new service will be very heavily sponsored by ESPN Bet no matter what you pay for it, so expect even more annoying ads than what we see already with Kevin Hart for DraftKings or Jamie Foxx for BetMGM during NFL games.

It’s going to continue to be the brave new world of cheap or free sports sponsored all the more by casinos.

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I’m not starting a new NBA thread because the NBA is such crap now anyway, so I put this here and if it takes off, we can perhaps spin it off into a separate Gambling Scandals thread or something like that.

Add this to your mounting pile to clean up there, Adam Silver.

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Clark Howard, who has had a consumer advocacy show for decades and with most of his audience now likely easily over 60 like many shows that were formerly merely popular radio shows,
did a great basic overview here of what is going on now with mainstream users of streaming video and other internet options beyond the early-adopters and earlier users since at least 2020.

As many more former cable TV subscribers have migrated to YouTube TV most especially,
as well as often have moved their internet away from cable internet or big telephone company internet,
the recent jump in price for YouTube TV to $82.99 per month before any taxes,
something we have seen coming here back in 2023 as posted and akin to the cable TV price increases that most of us remember and left behind,
as Howard explains,
NOW many more subscribers are fed-up with YouTube TV’s antics and leaving.

And it’s not like we don’t have far more alternatives than ever to watch whatever we want whenever we want than what we knew as cable TV and its channel guide and restricted “on demand” menus and the like.

But lag time and increased ad time and functionality across streaming apps continues to be an issue for many who have cut the cord, especially since 2021 as did I.

For those in more populated areas of Canada including especially from Ontario to the east, the options of course are different, but the strategies are comparable.

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On last Friday’s show Bill Maher did a piece on how technology is hurting us in that tecchies make decisions for us without asking, usually for the worse. He opens with a talk about how streamimg is ruining football. I totally agree with him. Well worth the watch and hilarious as always.

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I agree, THAT GUY whom we all know, who always recommends any reverse improvement, instead of working on some real problem that really needs to be addressed, also generally happens to have a punchable face.
It’s an epidemic especially in the last ten years.

And no, some new app is usually NOT needed to solve any given problem,
and I don’t need an app for every single business with which I spend money,
and it’s laughable how even many mainstream websites that worked just fine over the years,
including even one of my banks, migrated to some crappy unified app.

All the online banking functions had been such that only by late 2023 was its performance no longer unpredictable and overall lousy, after what turned out to be an expensive and problematic migration for years not months, plus it was one of the large banks hacked for a ransom in recent years.

Like Bill Maher implies about THAT GUY:
“Oh hey! People don’t like cable right!? Okay, how can we screw up regular TV too!”

Then in 2020 in every major media company sounded off Bojack Loser B:
“And then how can we monetize it for extra revenue too!”

And here we have been with few performers amongst all these streaming options, such as Netflix and for those who shop a lot with Amazon, Amazon Prime, and a small few of the others.

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Of note here is the vast difference in approach to streaming by Fox Corporation as opposed to competitors - make it free and easy to watch! DUH!

A fine case in point, with Tubi already free and easy and gaining market share, is how Tubi was used for the Super Bowl for the first time by a FREE streaming service:

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And the tea leaves are well out by the NFL, which will have more games as streaming-exclusives, including more by Netflix.

It will also be interesting to see what Fox does if using Tubi for simulcasts of more games on Fox, rather than that stupid Fubo alliance, which Fox did for an otherwise record-setting audience on TV in the US for the Super Bowl.

CBS will continue to simulcast its games on Paramount+.

The crappy ships Peacock and ESPN+ have sailed, so I hope the NFL does not regress there.

Disney and ABC are supposed to launch some new sports-oriented streaming service, but who knows for sure, especially if they wish to rely on their heavily-tarnished trash ESPN brand in especially the last decade.

They’d be in better shape to rebrand for this service and include ESPN offerings, amongst others, that are not branded as ESPN. It’s not like we won’t be hearing far more advertisements for ESPN Bet than already in the 2024 season, for that service could be their moneymaker during coverage, working to carve out market share from the other online betting apps like the popular BetMGM and DraftKings.

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With record TV ratings for some games in the post-season, including the AFC Championship and the Super Bowl, and record revenues in gambling in Nevada and beyond, the current TV model works fine NFL, and fine, throw in some Netflix and well, Amazon on Thursday nights, not okay but whatever.

But don’t get greedy and screw things up like you almost did in 2016, NFL.

I hope these business owners remember those hard-earned lessons that cost them billions, much like the mishandling of the matter of head trauma for players one decade before that.

Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered.

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The bottom of the article discusses the prospect of a new strategy for Tubi, after it achieved record viewership via free no-nonsense streaming after this Super Bowl.

I’ll have to read it another time, for I am paywalled.

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And the following is yet another example of the cable TV crap that streaming was also supposed to solve, but as I stated years ago, YouTube TV is simply a crappy cable TV lineup on streaming, so basically though you are paying less, everything is slower!

I guess lost on those supposed brains at Google behind YouTube TV is that many former cable subscribers not only did not like their cable bill or company, but they have not liked the cable TV concept of all those channels you don’t watch and won’t watch stuffed into your lineup, minus all the channels that are missing or on some “higher tier,” and anyway, you remember all that noise.

YouTube TV qualifies as “reverse improvement” in EVERY respect except of course its lower price than cable, but the difference is likely less than ever right now.

With YouTube TV increasing its price recently during the holiday season, on short notice too as noted in the previous post, this is NOT going to fly in March.

It also does not pay to screw around when Jim Nantz is lurking about at CBS Sports, as you know.

The bumpy transition into a streaming-led media industry could leave many viewers without March Madness and the Masters this spring.

Paramount-owned channels, including CBS on broadcast and the CBS Sports Network, are set to go dark Thursday on YouTube TV, the fourth largest U.S. pay-TV provider with more than 8 million subscribers. The sides have been unable to reach a new carriage agreement, and the dispute is escalating just weeks before a key moment in the annual sports calendar for CBS with the two high-profile events upcoming.

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