Culture
New ESPN, Fox, Warner Bros. streaming venture won't solve much — at least not yet
LAS VEGAS — One day, the brilliant TV executives are all going to unite and put their programming under one roof. It will solve all your sports viewing problems. They will call it cable.
This new ESPN, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery venture is not it. At least not yet.
There is still significance to three of the biggest brands in sports teaming up this fall to give fans another option. The Great Rebundling is upon us, but it is far from solved.
For the consumer, you won’t need this venture-to-be-named later and, my initial bet is most of you will go with that option. The service will be owned equally by the three sides, but each partner will receive the same fee as they earn from cable or YouTubeTV, according to sources with knowledge of the agreement. Just ESPN, the singular network, receives around $12 per month from cable subscribers.
So what does that mean for you? The estimated price for the new venture when you add ESPN, Fox and WBD Sports together likely will be around $40 to $50 per month. There probably are some sports fans who would like to save a little money with this arrangement, but it is hard to believe there are a lot.
You already can watch nearly everything that this trio offers through places like YouTube TV for around $70 and change per month. If you want this option, it is already available, with even more channels to boot.
After a year of talks between the three sides, there is weight in seeing these superpowers come together, and it is very understandable why they did it. It is no-risk, all-reward for them. This “sports skinny bundle” — as the cool media kids like to call it — is worth a go.
Fox Sports moves into the sports subscription space for the first time with this baby step. They have been the ones to watch their competitors pour billions into subscription streaming as they stood on the sidelines patiently biding their time. Their executives have thought rebundling is the way to go, so this gives them an initial shot.
ESPN has been planning to go direct-to-consumer with its entire product by 2025 with the possibility of 2024. Now, it will start this fall with tag-team partners.
This new arrangement doesn’t deter ESPN’s previous plans. The network still intends to have a stand-alone ESPN direct-to-consumer product by next year. Plus, it still could forge ahead with an equity partnership with the NFL or other leagues and/or digital players.
WBD Sports has an always-underrated menu of rights to bring to the new product, from the NBA and MLB playoffs to March Madness.
The new sports streaming venture is a step toward rebundling sports rights, but an incomplete one. Sunday’s Super Bowl on CBS, for instance, would not be on the platform. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
But the reason these entities don’t have anything complete here just yet is the exclusion of other major players — like CBS, for example.
This “sports skinny bundle” is a little too skinny to include Patrick Mahomes, Christian McCaffrey and Taylor Swift this weekend, as CBS has the Super Bowl this year. More problematic when you compare this new product to YouTube: If you want to watch March Madness, the CBS games will not be on it. It will not be one-stop shopping.
The significance of this deal could increase down the road, as the names on the press release suggested. The quotes were from the top — Disney’s Bob Iger, Fox’s Lachlan Murdoch and WBD’s David Zaslav.
However, if they want to fight the nearly unlimited pockets of Amazon, Apple or Netflix, if those digital behemoths become even more serious about sports rights, Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav could have a stronger hand as a trio.
The new entity will have its own CEO, and it is said it will operate independently. His or her bosses, though, will still be Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav, so how independent will it be? Where could it lead in the future? Will they be able to get along? If the questions can be answered positively, it could lead to something even bigger.
For you, the fan, maybe this new CEO will find a way to put everything you want to watch under one simple service. Until then, this venture won’t change that much for most of you.
GO DEEPER
Andrew Marchand: Sports media is my passion, and I can’t wait for what’s next
(Photo of Fox Sports’ Michael Strahan interviewing the San Francisco 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey after last month’s NFC Championship Game: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
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