The Sunday Ticket trial ultimately focuses on whether the NFL violated the antitrust laws by overpricing Sunday Ticket in order to encourage fans to watch games at no extra charge on CBS and Fox instead.
Earlier in the trial, Fox executive Larry Jones testified, confirming that Fox didn’t like Sunday Ticket. On the ninth day of the case, former CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus took the stand.
There were no surprises in his testimony. (The one thing he said that I didn’t previously know was that his father was legendary broadcaster Jim McKay.)
McManus confirmed that he didn’t like Sunday Ticket. He didn’t like it because, if fans purchased it, the CBS games broadcast in a given market would suffer “lower television ratings, fewer people watching our broadcasts, and a lessening of our advertising sales since the sales are based on how many people are watching your game.”
“So if,” McManus said, “there’s competition in an individual market and fewer people are watching CBS, that affects our revenue and our television ratings.”
He felt the same way about RedZone; if it were up to him neither product would have existed.
By the time he testified, it was all predictable. One wrinkle that wasn’t obvious in advance, but that helps illustrate what out-of-market games could be without Sunday Ticket, relates to the proliferation of March Madness games as of 2011, when CBS and Turner Sports partnered up.
From the transcript:
Q. And viewership increased considerably as a result of this. Right?
A. It increased, yes. Q. In fact, the ratings exceeded even CBS’s expectations; right?
A. Yes.
Q. And in 2011, March Madness had the best overall ratings it had in years; right?
A. Yes.
The NFL could do the same thing with out-of-market games. CBS and Fox broadcast games tailored for the various markets, and other no-extra-charge networks televise the rest of the games at 1:00 p.m. ET on Sunday (and in the late windows).
But the NFL’s party line when it comes to potentially putting all games on TV is that the end result would be chaos.
“I think if that were the case, I think it could be chaos in the marketplace just in terms of the marketing, the selling, the producing, and the programming of games,” McManus said. “And obviously, the NFL package would not have anywhere near the value to us that it has at the — in the current agreement.”
It’s easy to say that without knowing what would happen. Given the immense popularity of the NFL, it’s easy to think that if all games were televised, more people would watch — and more money would be made. Maybe CBS and Fox would pay less for the in-market games. The other networks, collectively, would pay a lot more than what the NFL is currently getting for Sunday Ticket.