Calling history at Nebraska, the ESPN/Charter dispute and more: Media Circus

Connor Onion estimates he has called 150 volleyball matches during his broadcasting career, including 50 matches over the last four years as a broadcaster for Big Ten Network. He learned many of the intricacies of the sport while watching his cousin, Tayler Onion, compete for titles at Illinois in the early 2010s.

One of his earliest memories of watching volleyball on television came in 2009 when his high school, Lyons Township, was playing for an Illinois state championship. The broadcasters on the call for IHSA TV at the time were Adam Amin and Joe Davis, two of the most prominent play-by-play voices in the business today.

Last Wednesday, Onion was sitting courtside for a history-making night in Nebraska. The women’s volleyball match Onion called for the Big Ten Network between Nebraska and Omaha drew an audience of 92,003 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, the largest crowd ever for a women’s sporting event. As for television viewers: There were 518,000 watching the BTN broadcast, the network’s second most-watched regular-season volleyball match ever.

“The goal was to document this world-record-breaking event, and an added benefit was exposing people to this sport that our crew and our network love deeply,” Onion said. “When people discover volleyball on TV, they are usually hooked. The reaction from so many was, ‘Nebraska did what? For a volleyball match?!’ It was a strong impression for first-time viewers of the sport that I think will draw them to watch more volleyball.

“I’m glad a big audience got to hear Emily Ehman, our analyst. … She’s an excellent partner and a skilled teacher of the game. At some point, she’ll call a college volleyball national championship match. Larry Punteney, our game reporter … was terrific interviewing past Husker legends throughout the show.”

What is the most important skill set needed for a play-by-play person when it comes to calling volleyball? Onion said it’s understanding and identifying the most important contact when the ball exchanges sides of the net.

“Each team is allowed three contacts when the ball is on their side, and with the fast pace of the game, you usually only have time to concisely identify one of those contacts,” Onion said. “There are questions I’m asking myself in real-time while calling the match: Was the set on target? Did the libero make an outstanding dig to keep the point alive? Did the outside hitter get off a clean swing? Was the first contact good, allowing the setter to have multiple hitting options to distribute to? If one of those scenarios shapes the point, that’s the person and the thing I choose to identify. If nothing stands out, I’ll say nothing and let the natural sounds take over.”

Onion said prior to last week, the most-attended game he had called was April’s Penn State football Spring Game, which drew an estimated 63,000 fans. He also called two Cincinnati football games in 2021, which each had around 40,000 fans at Nippert Stadium.

“My preparation was much less matchup- and personnel-driven and much more directed toward the sights and sounds of the stadium and the history of how Nebraska and the sport arrived at this moment,” Onion said of the record-setting night. “My approach was to be as minimalist as possible and let our director and audio operator bring viewers inside Memorial Stadium with us. Our game director, Pat O’Connor, is an artist.”

Onion said he typically broadcasts 15-20 volleyball matches each season, mixed in with other college assignments for BTN and ESPN. (Here’s a sample of his work.) Just 28, his dream broadcasting gig is to land a job in his home market of Chicago similar to Amin and White Sox broadcaster Jason Benetti.

“I’d like to be the voice of a professional team and pair it with network television play-by-play on football, volleyball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, baseball and softball,” he said.

We were curious about what you were interested in this season when it came to NFL broadcasts — your preferred pairings and networks, whether the NFL will be around 50 years from now, among other questions — and nearly 4,000 of you responded to our survey last month. We hope you find the results interesting, and thanks for weighing in.

As longtime cable subscribers know, carriage disputes are an annual rite of frustration. The latest skirmish involves The Walt Disney Company and Charter Communications, as last week Disney pulled its popular channels (which includes ESPN network channels and ABC) from Spectrum, Charter’s cable-TV service. Charter is the major carrier in New York and Los Angeles, and the stalemate impacts about 15 million video subscribers across the country.

Customers are always the losers when the financial bayonets are ultimately put down. Such battles result in higher prices, disruption to your service, or the annoyance of changing services.

Both sides have pushed their talking points into the marketplace. Last Sunday, Disney released this blog post that claimed, among other things, “Although Charter claims that they value their customers, they declined Disney’s offer to extend negotiations which would have kept Disney-owned networks up for consumers in the middle of perennial programming events like the U.S. Open and college football.”

Charter put out a presentation to investors proclaiming the current pay-TV system is broken. “We still believe video is an important part of our connectivity offering, but the video product has been devalued and the ecosystem is broken,” said Charter. “Disney so far has insisted on a traditional long-term deal with higher rates and limited packaging flexibility.”

If there is a pressure point for a short-term end to this, look toward the upcoming high-profile “Monday Night Football” opener between the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets. That’s a significant game on the calendar given the New York debut of Aaron Rodgers, featuring two Spectrum market teams.

But a huge sticking point revolves around the future of ESPN. Disney executives say it’s not a question of if but when they move all of ESPN’s offerings to a direct-to-consumer option. Charter wants any future ESPN DTC service to be included at no additional cost for their existing linear subscribers. Disney has said no. Where programmers usually have leverage, Charter seems willing to leave the video business. The company estimates it pays Disney about $2.2 billion each year in fees for its programming.

“Charter seems genuinely willing to walk away from Disney, and even the entire linear video model, if necessary,” the MoffetNathanson research firm wrote last week in a note titled “U.S. Media and U.S. Cable: What is the Future of Video?”

“As Charter put it,” the firm continued, “Disney in creating a DTC ESPN offering would be attempting to have its cake and eat it too, using the money generated by the fees Disney demands from MVPDs (which stands for Multichannel Video Programming Distributor and includes traditional pay-TV companies such as Charter, Comcast’s Xfinity TV and DirecTV) to carry the sports network to subsidize an offering that ultimately undercuts the very business of MVPDs.”

Sports Business Journal writer and podcaster John Ourand offered interesting thoughts in a Labor Day newsletter on the possible long-term implications, including a possible media rights reset if other cable operators followed Charter in a scorched-earth policy. Brian Steinberg of Variety examined how Charter’s demands on Disney could also pressure Fox, NBCU, Paramount and others. L.A. Times writer Stephen Battaglio had a piece under the headline, “Can ESPN survive while cable dies?”

“This whole Disney/Charter thing feels much different than your typical programmer/distributor rate dispute,” wrote former Fox Sports Networks president Bob Thompson on his social media page. “Charter seems intent on tearing the bundle apart and reimagining the business model. It could be a long, painful, and ultimately transforming moment for sports on TV. One thing I can pretty much guarantee: Sports fans/viewers are going to end up paying a whole lot more than they have in the past to get the same amount of content. The days of non-sports fans subsidizing sports fans through the bundle approach may be coming to an end.”

MoffetNathanson has highlighted the trend of media companies leaking their best sports rights out of the pay-TV bundle and onto their respective DTC services at monthly prices, which are a discount compared to their wholesale rates to distributors.

Wrote MoffetNathanson: “We assumed that MVPDs and vMVPDs (which stands for Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor and includes companies such as YouTube TV, Sling TV, FuboTV, Hulu and others that provide packages of streaming channels over the internet) would not react kindly to this leakage and take a stand against paying more for the inclusion of these services in their bundles than a consumer would pay a la carte.”

That’s now playing out in real-time.

Some football notes:

• Florida State’s blowout of LSU last Saturday averaged 9.1 million viewers on ABC, which was up 20 percent over the same matchup one year earlier. That’s very impressive, especially given the carriage dispute.

• NFL Network announced six new analyst hires.

• Fresno State says its Sept. 9 home opener against Eastern Washington will be the first exclusively Spanish-language television broadcast in FBS college football history. In partnership with Univision Fresno and Bakersfield, the game will be broadcast on UniMás throughout the Central Valley. It will be the first American college football game to air on a Univision channel. Details here.

Patricia Lowry, an ESPN vice president of production who oversaw the production of women’s college basketball across ESPN networks, including the NCAA Tournament for many years, is leaving ESPN after 21 years. (I’m told it’s on her accord for another job and not a layoff.) She’s appeared in this column before and was one of the major champions for women’s college basketball at that company. Viewers will miss her work.

Episode 330 of the Sports Media Podcast features Ty Schmit, a producer and on-air personality of “The Pat McAfee Show,” a live weekday sports talk show that launches on multiple ESPN platforms on Thursday. In this podcast, Schmit discusses his job; how guests and story ideas are selected; the challenges and frustrations of booking guests; how much he and the staff were kept in the loop when McAfee was meeting with potential employers for his next move; why ESPN can be a good fit for the show; using non-ESPN people; why he decided to apply to work for McAfee as an intern; moving to Indianapolis full-time without having a guarantee that McAfee would keep him on after his internship; his ability to do a Lou Holtz impression on demand; the possibility of booking Iowa women’s basketball standout Caitlin Clark, and more.

You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and more.

ESPN and Omaha Productions announced this year’s ManningCast schedule:

Some things I read over the last week that were interesting to me (Note: There are a lot of paywalls here):

• Before he was a star, Steve Carell was a college hockey goalie. By Peter Baugh of The Athletic.

• Hawaii residents fear ‘the next catastrophe.’ By Darryl Fears, Allyson Chiu and Elahe Izadi of The Washington Post.

• How a Man in Prison Stole Millions from Billionaires. By Charles Bethea of The New Yorker.

• A warning for the planet from Annie Gowen, Niko Kommenda and Saiyna Bashir of The Washington Post.

• Via Amie Just of the Lincoln Journal Star: Volleyball Day in Nebraska inspires volleyball players of all generations.

• The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website. By Nitasha Tiku of The Washington Post.

• When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row. By Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project.

• I am dying at age 49. Here’s why I have no regrets. By Amy Ettinger of The Washington Post.

• How cynical leaders are whipping up nationalism to win and abuse power. By The Economist.

• A Culture of Silence. By Keith Sargeant of NJ.com.

• They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation? By Alex Boyd of The Toronto Star.

GO DEEPER

Can Deion Sanders help Fox’s ‘Big Noon Kickoff’ beat ESPN’s ‘College GameDay’?

(Photo: Steven Branscombe / Getty Images)