Local Sports Distribution Doesn’t Have to Be This Hard or Expensive
Today’s guest columnist is Todd Achilles, co-founder and CEO of Evoca TV.
“My team has never been more popular,” a team owner told me a year ago, “and it’s never been harder to watch them play.”
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The owner was frustrated by the shrinking reach and rising costs for fans to watch games. Sadly, this is a common theme among most professional leagues and college conferences.
As a farm kid from Oregon, my first sports memory was game six of the 1977 NBA Finals, when the Portland Trail Blazers came back from 0-2 in the series to improbably beat the Philadelphia 76ers. With a busted-up rabbit ear antenna sitting atop a barely color TV, we watched every game. Everyone in our town did. On that afternoon, our modest city of Portland erupted at once and together. Rip City became everyone’s mantra. It was a powerful moment of community, because everyone had access equally.
Jump ahead 45 years, and watching the hometown team has never been more challenging or more expensive. Weak competition among pay TV distributors and inflexible regional sports network economics combine to undermine fan access and community. Just take a look at Denver, where local pay TV distributors have given up on local teams. While Altitude Sports and Comcast have been battling over an agreement for three years, fans have few options to watch their local teams on TV. We stepped up with Evoca, a new, locally focused skinny bundle to offer Avalanche, Nuggets and Mammoth fans an easy and affordable way to watch games and support local clubs and athletes.
In outer markets, the access problem is even worse. In our home market of Boise, Idaho, 85% of homes cannot watch the RSNs. The local cable company has effectively ditched TV as a service. The big streaming providers do not carry the RSN. This leaves one expensive satellite option that is beyond the budget of most families in a largely rural state where the median household income is 10% below the national average. Instead, those hometown fans follow whatever team is carried on a national sports network, and regional teams lose a base of loyal fans.
Boise also has the highest share of households watching TV over the air and is the first U.S. market to cross 50% according to SNL Kagan data. Other high OTA markets like Phoenix, Dallas and Salt Lake City provide a window into the future. Teams and leagues need to meet the fans where they watch sports—on all screens, including cable, satellite, mobile, streaming and broadcast. There is no crystal ball to know the future distribution among these viewing options, but they all must be part of the mix.
As an industry, it is past time to exercise our atrophied innovation muscle. Breakthrough new technologies like Nextgen TV (aka ATSC 3.0) merge the reach and efficiency of broadcast TV with the monetization of cable and the flexibility of streaming. Sleek new digital antennas can now pick up 4K channels over the air. And there are seamless connections with NextGen TV to enormous libraries of content delivered via internet streaming to supplement local channels from familiar broadcast networks. When you add a web-delivered interactive overlay, you can create an experience that personalizes the live experience.
NextGen TV can offer exceptional picture quality and incredible sound along with virtually unlimited channel choice—and deep personalization based on what the viewer really wants to see. It is not the cable bundle of the distant past, which is both inflexible and infuriating to most subscribers.
When we combine these new streaming technologies with business-model innovation, we break through the old dichotomy of reach versus revenue.
Whether college football, women’s professional soccer or baseball, offering fans an easy and affordable way to watch their local teams is a win for the team and the community. We have a golden opportunity to use innovation and new technology to redefine the fan experience. Let’s take advantage of this once-in-a-generation moment to apply new distribution methods and business models to reconnect with fans and build community.
Prior to Evoca TV, Todd Achilles served as a U.S. Army tank commander and held executive roles at T-Mobile and Hewlett-Packard. He has four patents and lectures on strategy and innovation at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
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