Our resident and forever media examiner Jim Williams returns to discuss the murky ESPN and MLB media breakup and how David Rubenstein will utilize MASN to better serve Orioles and Nationals fans while everyone figures out the future of streaming.
Nestor Aparicio and Jim Williams discuss the breakup between ESPN and Major League Baseball (MLB), highlighting ESPN’s decision to end its contract due to high costs. Williams explains that ESPN’s rights fees have dropped from $100 million to $50-60 million, affecting its financial viability. They also discuss the challenges of cord-cutting and the impact on sports fans’ viewing habits. Williams suggests that MASN, which serves Orioles and Nats fans, should collaborate to improve their regional sports network. He emphasizes the need for free content to attract viewers and the potential for streaming services like Amazon and Apple to dominate the market.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
ESPN breakup, MLB rights, cord cutting, streaming services, MASN issues, Orioles fans, Nats fans, regional sports, cord-cutting impact, sports media, streaming platforms, sports viewership, sports networks, sports rights, sports revenue
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Jim Williams
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore, positive, positively into another crab cake tour. March 6. We get back out to fade. Lees, I make good on my couple Super Bowl. We’ll have scratch offs for the magic eight ball. It has been a lucky one for us. We also have the monopoly scratch off. So later on in the month, grab K tour getting back out. It’ll be March. It’ll be spring training, further extended. And Luke and I have talked about the Oriole games being on spring training and streaming. I thought, you know, I was driving past Cross Keys couple weeks ago, and I said, I’m going to reach to my friend Jim Williams. He is a media examiner at one point, the examiner’s examiner, and long, long time insider for all sorts of networks and televisions and sports and tennis and even some politics thrown in there. And the first guy that ever told me this streaming Roku thing it’s going to set the ESPN and the Fox Sports is and the mass and regionals on their ears. You and I have been talking about this going back 15 years. Jimmy, first off, welcome in. How are you? Health, school. Life’s good.
Jim Williams 01:09
I’m good. Everybody’s good. You know, I don’t think anybody gives you credit, or certainly the credit you deserve for your in depth, look at Mass and from pretty much the day it’s starting till today. So what he was buying
Nestor Aparicio 01:27
it, I was trying to explain to them. And Luke and I have been talking, Luke lives in Pennsylvania, what’s happening with cord cutting? You know, Luke’s 41 years old, is finally doing the cord cutting thing because of Direct TV. There’s a lot of sports fans out there that bought Direct TV to get NFL games, specifically in this market right, and every market the NFL right, and then if the breakup happens. And I’ve explained that, I haven’t had to figure this out, my wife is a Verizon employee. I have Verizon I do. But that being said, I don’t have no Apple TV. I don’t have no Paramount TV. I don’t have no peacocks. And when all of these things happen Orioles on Apple TV on Friday night, the peacocks come rolling from the NFL. I want to watch that yacht rock thing on HBO. I thought we had HBO. I don’t I, I and, dude, I’m not paying another $400 to watch the three things that I missed this year, that I that I talked about. And I think we’re getting to the point with sports fans, specifically, my mother was alive and saying, How am I going to get my A’s? How am I going to get my Oriole games and the mass and people? And I think Major League Baseball, they wouldn’t have an answer for you. And you’re a student, they don’t really know what they’re doing. Do they Well,
Jim Williams 02:38
can we start with major baseball and work back on that thing? Because it kind of works that way. Sure, you probably how many, I don’t know how many people saw it, but there’s a story about ESPN and and Major League Baseball doing a breakup. And, you know, they, had two more years left on the contract, and they let it go. So why did they do that? Excuse me, just for a second, what did it? Why did they do that? Well, they did it because ESPN feels they’re paying way too much money for the rights for Major League Baseball, given the fact that they now were down to, depending upon whose number you listen to, 60 to 50% of where they were at 100 million, they’re now down to 50 to 60 million, okay, which is likely going to be the bottom.
Nestor Aparicio 03:36
Well, Major League Baseball is not getting the distribution it wants. An ESPN is just by its own self, sort of dying on the vine, right, as a single entity that people want to buy just ESPN or Disney that hasn’t been as good as sell as Amazon or something else, right?
Jim Williams 03:53
No, what happened is that major league baseball in the teams got a little fat, dumb and happy when they thought all this money was rolling in to from streamers and from other places. So excuse me. Said, I’m fine. So anyway, the deal is that right now, major baseball pays $40 million to each team, approximately what they’re trying to do when they limp into 2028 is try to get the same deal ish that the NBA got, which was $77 million which would give each team approximately $70 million a year for low, for rights, before they even, you know, do local. So that’s the theory of the case from Rob benefit. Whether it work or not, we don’t know
Nestor Aparicio 04:50
what’s the NFL model, which is, we’ll get more money if we come into this together, right,
Jim Williams 04:54
right? Which actually started with David Stern in the NBA. And. It worked out for them for a while anyway.
Nestor Aparicio 05:02
Well, the local thing, you say it worked out for a while, you know? And certainly the massing thing worked out really well for the Angeles family like no one else won. I mean, literally in the beginning, the way Peter negotiated it and then fought to literally his death. He fought to his deathbed on that money for 20 years, and the Nationals got screwed for 20 years. Major League Baseball reached into the kitty and gave that. I don’t know how it’s going to all wash out, because Angelos is dead, and Rubenstein is perceived as being flush with cash, and the wealthiest man, like you know all of that, but he was asking friends for money last year, like everybody else, to get in on this thing. And that’s how Eric Getty got in on this, and it’s a billion eights, 1,000,000,008 and I keep trying to say to Oriole fans, $5 beers and the Birdland value menu that’s not going to buy gun or Henderson, it’s going to buy you a $5 beer at the ballpark this year. But when it comes time for this franchise to really go and compete financially with the top eight teams in Major League Baseball, they’re going to need to figure out where revenue is coming from. And I just Jimmy, I think I’m smart about it. I don’t think I’m a dummy. I don’t think 98% of the population doesn’t care about any of this. I try to drill down with people like you about it, and I’m not getting any of the answers that I want to get that look like math that’s going to add up to one day, a $200 million payroll. That’s going to be self supportive here, that’s going to be supportive of ticket sales, media and whatever Major League Baseball’s overall contribution to media is going to be. This thing needs to be better run here. If it’s going to be successful
Jim Williams 06:40
or sell it. And, you know, an Amazon or somebody like that, you think he’s a flip guy. You mean, not the baseball team, perhaps the the perhaps massive,
Nestor Aparicio 06:54
oh, well, I don’t know who would want to network without the team, right? I mean, where that used to be? Yeah.
Jim Williams 06:59
I mean, it’s right now. We all know we talked about you and I spoke off camera yesterday about, you know, Sinclair starting diabetic group and bought the the old fox, Ill Fox regionals. And
Nestor Aparicio 07:15
nobody liked that deal when it happened, right? When that deal happened, people like you looked at the math and said, That’s dirty math. That’s the and then the Padres are out of business in the middle of the season, and don’t have a carrier, right,
Jim Williams 07:28
right? Well, I mean, it’s, you can’t spend, I think it was $19 billion on those, on those rights when you’re outstanding rights, you know, top 60 billion so,
Nestor Aparicio 07:42
but the advertisers have to support this, or what the Baltimore banners model is, which is, you’re just going to subscribe and it’s going to pay for it. I if they put subscription out for the Orioles, how many real oral fans there are? And it’s $100 a year, $200 a year, $300 a year, which is less than $2 a game, right? It’s only $1.12 a game. Or like, Okay, fine. How many people are going to a la carte that? And I don’t even mean nationals fans, I mean Orioles fans. Let’s split them, because eventually they’re going to be split, right? Because they’re not one team, they’re not one market, they’re not one ownership. They both. Both of them have, I mean, the orals didn’t have any problem getting sold because they were so depressed. But the Nationals learned to even want to sell anymore because he’s like, I don’t like the way my media is valued. I don’t like that. Angelos has been ripping me off. We’re not going to sell this for a billion, less than it’s worth,
Jim Williams 08:34
right? The I think the key to local The funny thing is, when we, when I started this business, as you know, because you, you and I came in, you know, I was a little before you, but then that’s it. But when I first started, person seeing, directing, excuse me, against my, um, we had, there was no cable in major cities. New York didn’t have cable. Baltimore didn’t have cable, right? So what did they do in some cases? What did in some cases is, you had your local broadcaster, right? The normal place that we all, I think it was supposed to, w, M, A, R, had one point. Had it all. You remember Sheldon shimmer
Nestor Aparicio 09:18
and all those guys? Oh, Greg Masoni and Scott Garcia, yeah, absolutely okay. So
Jim Williams 09:22
all that was, was fun, but in many places where we did, you know, regional stuff, it was a deal where you bought a subscription and what, you know, local TV station. They would lease 6pm to 6am they’d play movies. Prism started this way in Philadelphia, by the way. And what would happen is you get a little box, which looks kind of like a cable box. It was called
Nestor Aparicio 09:54
Super TV here, that’s what it was.
Jim Williams 09:56
Super TV in there it was, it was a. There was preview. There was on TV, almost pay situation. And so if you want to season a ticket to the Orioles, or you want to see the ticket to whomever in, in our case, it was Eddie Einhorn. Eddie had the White Sox and and the black, the Black Hawks and the bulls all on, on that package. And so it was
Nestor Aparicio 10:23
Sportsnet Chicago, right? Well,
Jim Williams 10:25
it was actually, I don’t it was sports ticket to begin with, and then they changed it five, six at the end of the day, where that was is, you take a you get a season ticket, right? So each month would have a little, you know, card. You take that card, like the card you have in hotels to get into your room, punch that in there, and then you sit back and watch the game. And that was that theory of the case when you’re talking about, in those days, maybe 60 games, and certainly not, you know, certainly not an entire schedule. It worked for a while, and then when ESPN launched, and you know those days, because you were down, ESPN was a restaurant. They had, I mean, it was, it was a situation where ESPN had to get on cable. They got on cable courtesy of President Reagan’s 1984 cable TV back which allowed bundling, which allowed them to make money. Now circle all that back to today. The reason ESPN has become so you know, cost conscious lately is because they overpaid for everything. And so by hyper, you know, by overblowing it, they basically ruin the market, not only for others, but for themselves. When
Nestor Aparicio 11:56
you say they overpay, I want people because we’re if you’ve been listening this long Jim Williams this year long time media exam. And if you’re out in the car, one of my most trusted resources knows all of this stuff and reports on this as a real media member. Now that Phil Jackman is not doing reading time two minutes or being the TV repairman, I’m going to make you the TV repairman here. But the notion that all of these rights fees became for the Andrew marchands and my pal John Iran, who cover, you know, media these billion dollar takeovers of buying rights fees, they’re going to spend this many billion there. And I would think the NFL, it kind of works out like when Fox got into the NFL, put Fox on the map 30 years ago, my buddy, Kenny Albert, Baldinger and all the, I mean, I got a job at him. George Krieger hired me. Yeah, at Sporting News Radio. He was the one that hired Jimmy Johnson. And, you know, all those guys back in the Terry Bradshaw, all these guys might have been there for 3535
Jim Williams 12:51
years doing it, um, Billy Brown, and Billy was no problem,
Nestor Aparicio 12:55
of course, from penalty sports, right? So I would say the amount of money always had a bunch of zeros, and nobody understood it. But what I’ve always understood is that’s basically ESPN saying to whatever sport it was, the NHL, at one point after the sports channel couldn’t get their games on, and like all that, it was their way of saying, we’re going to make the league important. We’re going to put you on SportsCenter. We’re going to legitimize you where you know you’re going to be on, certainly for college basketball recruiting, if you weren’t on, ESPN, you couldn’t get a kid right. That was what the big the big east and the ACC kind of found out. But I would say, for the leagues and for the teams and for the entity itself, ESPN says some executive says we’re going to spend $1 billion on this sport, then they have to take their sales department and team and get their, get their, you know, their, their dossiers together, and then go out and find, you know, Gillette or Schlitz or southwest. They have to find sponsors to underwrite all of these packages. And they wind up much like B, A, L and W, J, f, k, here, competing with the actual entity to some degree that ESPN is on the street trying to sell baseball for Major League Baseball to role aids, to the firemen, and Major League Baseball is trying to sell web ads and MLB Network to the same thing. And it winds up being very, very competitive on a sales thing. ESPN says we have major league baseball. Major League Baseball says we are major league baseball, and the Orioles come locally and say, no, no, no, we’re the Orioles. Or the Yankees. Do that in New York, and so do the Mets. So I think that there really becomes a for the money itself. The bid sounds nice for the network, but then the network has to take it in. And the network really isn’t the same as the team that, you know, the network has things it can offer, but not the All Star Game packages and the experiential things that all of these clients, if they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars, if it’s the Coors Light train coming down on, you know, on the tracks, on the NFL, they’ve spent a billion dollars doing it, they don’t. Have any money for ESPN Sunday Night Football? They gave it that. They gave it the office already. Right To your point,
Jim Williams 15:07
when I say they overpaid, when talking about ESPN, at the height of ESPN, they were they had about 100 million subscribers. They were getting $7 a subscriber. Okay? They were banking money like they were printing money. So advertising, and advertising always is important, but it was less important at the time because the revenue was coming in from cables. You know, cable subscription.
Nestor Aparicio 15:37
Subscription is a good number. When you get $7 ahead, and there’s 100 million of them. It’s really, really bad math when you’re trying to get $20 from 6 million of them. Yeah, you know, I mean, the math changes dramatically. I
Jim Williams 15:51
didn’t major in math, but I realized that’s, you know, that ain’t work. Um, but I wonder how
Nestor Aparicio 15:56
many people are going to pay for any of this, these things? How many millions of people. You said 100 million at the top end, back 15 years ago, 20 how many people are really going to pay for Paramount at this, this breakup of all of this, that all of them are going to have a much, much smaller party with a much, much higher price. And I don’t know, I I’m not sure how important television is, where I have all of this stuff for free that I want, and that’s why I don’t pay for anything
Jim Williams 16:27
Well, I mean, look at the end of the day. Part of the problem, the dynamic that’s changed, it is you’ve got Apple, Amazon, YouTube, you know, Roku, these are not their core businesses, okay? Apple is not in the television business. They’re in the computer and they’re, you know, in the smart watch and and your phone business. You got Amazon, who’s in the business of basically selling things, right? They can lose a three, four, $5 million and it won’t even closely attempt, you know, mess up their their balance sheet. It’s
Nestor Aparicio 17:09
kind of like when Fox overspent to get the NFL. It was a play to make. Who was the the host that did the Johnny Carson Show, or Arsenio Hall, right? You know, it was literally an ad for for their survivor show, right? Like
Jim Williams 17:26
they promoted Prime Time CBS. The
Nestor Aparicio 17:29
reason 60 minutes worked and became a star was because the NFL sort of delivered it to some degree, right? Well,
Jim Williams 17:36
your audience, right? The game ends, you’re right there, all right, so well,
Nestor Aparicio 17:42
that was the NBC and Disney and Heidi incident back in the day that the that the Disney movie on Sunday night was a family, you know, was a thing, and the NFL delivered it. It was the chiefs in the raiders in 1971 delivering that. I football has been such a part of this. And I think in the end, during our lifetime, especially since I’ve known you last 50 or 20 years, we talk about football as a different sport than the rest of them. It’s not football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and soccer’s lifted and the MMA and like boxing and all of these other niche things that served on the worldwide, Wide World of Sports on Saturday afternoon. But there’s football and there’s everything else, and with football’s numbers, baseball is just not going to be that anymore, right? And and part of ESPN dumping them is baseball finding its equilibrium, finding its fans, finding its subscribers, and finding its price range. And that might not equal with Scott boross has been taxing these owners, these poor owners all these years to get these contracts. I think baseball might be the one thing that goes in the other direction. The top salaries might not go up. And people would say that for 50 years, but I’m trying to figure the math. And I I feel the community feel here in Baltimore for this baseball team, I saw the 10,000 empty seats at the playoff game Jimmy, you know what I mean. And that stuff wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have gone on here 2030, years ago. That’s that’s the Angelo’s tax. That’s the Angelo’s damage. And the one time that I met Rubenstein, I told him that I looked him in the eye, and I said, there’s 10,000 seats. That’s trauma. That’s civic trauma to the thing you just bought. That’s the depreciation of your one point billion, $8 billion asset that you now have to figure out, Peter’s dead. You have to figure out how to sell baseball in a lacrosse town.
Jim Williams 19:28
It’s funny because I sat down right Madison was getting started with Angelos in his office downtown, and we had a conversation, and the first thing he said to me, he says, I I don’t want to talk about who’s playing second base, blah, blah, blah. I said, Look, I’m not here to talk to you about who’s playing second base. I frankly, I don’t care. Okay, I want to know how you’re going to run a regional sports now. Work where you’re going to lose money for the first four years. And he looked at me like I was insane. And I’m like, Look, dude. I didn’t say dude to Mr. Angels, but nevertheless, I just basically said, you know, I’ve been in this regional sports business now for a while, to ramp up a network that didn’t exist two days before. Cost a lot of money, and that’s money you’re not going to get back until you’re down the road three four years. Because the first few years you’re going to have, you’re going to spending most of your time, you know, arguing with cable companies why they should pay you and take you on their cable you know, I mean, on their cable system. By the way,
Nestor Aparicio 20:41
I have the funniest story from the Comcast guy who sat in the room with him, the Comcast guy who negotiated that deal with him. I got that one for the book, but good. I never wrote I never wrote it, but I, I know how that went. When Mr. Angelos was hoodwinking the the cable companies, and he was personally the one meeting them. Like, to your point, like, yeah, it’s like, Trump, you know, like he’s just gonna, you have to go up to his office and talk
Jim Williams 21:05
to him, with him. It only took me five months to get there. But you know, the point being that I think that people are consuming sports now in different ways, and they they always have, if you take a look, unless you you know, let’s go to the big dog on the NFL. Right? The Big Dog in the NFL, basically is, is, if you look at the streaming numbers on Amazon, on the last three, last two years of Thursday night football, it’s been their exclusive. You look at the cross taps right in ratings, you want, you know, you want to see what the total rating, but you really want to drill down. When you drill down the numbers on on Amazon, on Friday, Thursday, Thursday night football, they are getting a audience. In double digits. From a standpoint of rising in the audience, 15% rising of the audience of 18 to 34 men, 14 to 15% difference up above the old Thursday night football in which was on Fox, and then first was CBS numbers. So they’re also staying low. They’re engaged long. So you look at it, you go, all right, fine. There you go. I see what’s going on. The dynamics, the way people are consuming this stuff is, is, you know, a lot of people don’t even have television.
Nestor Aparicio 22:46
Oh, right. I watch in the bar, right? So watching
Jim Williams 22:49
either on the on your phone, on a tablet, or maybe
Nestor Aparicio 22:53
my wife and I went into a sports bar in the fall, and there was a game we wanted to see. I think we were at Nacho mamas, late. Great. Nacho mamas, okay? And you know, it was an apple. It was, it was a a non broadcast, a non broadcast, broadcast gym. And my wife literally pulled it up and we watched the game through her subscription on her phone, right at the sports bar, because the sports bar couldn’t get it right. And I think to myself, that’s bad business for the sports to have bars where the games aren’t on and and I thought, I mean, I think that for the Orioles, when they’re on Apple TV on Friday night, and I go to Costas and the game’s not on, but you know where the game is on, it’s on your phone if you have it, right? So you can still go to Costas and watch it on your phone if you want, but it’s I we’re in a different place on all of this. And the way we think about it, right, the way older people think about it versus the way younger people would think about it, and the come on of sports even watching it on my computer. I mean, I saw Bill Maher did a bit two weeks ago where, like, picture in picture, if you have the game, you have to stop the game, move it around. You got in the old days, just back and forth. You’ve had two games on I just I hit last channel, and it works on the computer. Not so much. I’m sure they’ll figure that out for the kids, as far as an experiential thing. But to your point, it’s not making people not watch the NFL. It’s making them not watch the NBA. It’s making them not watch other things. And I keep thinking with baseball, where it’s this long, sloggy, old white guy thing in a general sense, and it happens every single night I worry for baseball because I don’t, I don’t know what they can do to sexy up their game and make it more attractive to people it’s not already attractive to.
Jim Williams 24:29
You know, developing new audiences. And here’s where the crazy starts, right? The Dodgers who got paid that ridiculous amount of $7 billion years ago? The Dodgers have a very bright man running the show there. And I don’t know, you know, Stan, right? Stancast, sure. Okay. I was when Stan was at the nationals. We. A couple of phone calls. We known each other for Turner and and I said, What’s going on here? And he said, at the end of the day, he said, baseball has to be a worldwide sport. He said, We need that, you know, we need that, that ability. We need to be like the Premier League and, you know, on a worldwide basis, and, and that’s where Apple and Amazon and Netflix come in. They offer an A World platform. Okay? So the dynamic is, there’s going to be, there’s people aren’t going to get rid of Cape, okay? Certain people, I’d say, and then certain kids coming out of high school, in college and the Gen Z group, they don’t need a television. They’re used to watching stuff on their phone. They’re used to watching stuff on the computer. They can share less healthy consumer and
Nestor Aparicio 25:58
that’s been true for a long time. I mean, they’re not kids anymore. They’re 35 now, these were kids when they were in high school, when Obama was president, right? Like, so these are, these are kids that, from the moment they were 16 years old, had a phone and never, ever had a dream of having a big screen TV. Like, just don’t, yeah. Like, and that would be anybody almost under the age of 40. Now, anybody under the age of 40 does not feel like they have to have a man cave TV. And they certainly are never going to pay a cable television bill. Never no
Jim Williams 26:28
and, and they’re used to it. And that’s the thing they’ve they’ve drawn themselves out to what we like to. We used to call it the second screen, right? There’s third screen. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got your you can watch it on your phone, you watch it on your iPad. You can watch on, you know, computer. You watch it wherever, wherever it is. And that’s the only thing, um Nestor, that I think is is important here, is to know that we all are changing our viewing habits in one where some of us prefer to watch nothing but streaming, because prime time is when you want it to be. If you you know, you your lovely wife, sit down and you want to watch a movie, and you know six o’clock at night or eight o’clock at night, you have to worry about grabbing your TV Guide and deciding on what wait it just start yet. You know, what am I doing? We are
Nestor Aparicio 27:22
still in our 50s, so we do when, when something’s on at eight or nine o’clock at night, my wife will plan around it much, much more readily than taping and watching it. And that’s a mindset, I mean, literally, just about us being old. We
Jim Williams 27:35
used to, we used to recall, you know, we used to call that appointment television, right? Sure, if you want to watch Dallas on Friday night, man, you missed that show. Okay, now Prime Time is anytime. Nestor you want it to be, or I want it to be the only, the only difference, it’s and it’s 2.1 live sports and live news. That’s it. Everything else, people are cool with either watching it on a stream when they feel like it, but network television numbers have dropped and and a lot of it has to do with the fact that these streaming organizations, you know, any Q, runs Apple, the and it’s not even he’s not even called the program director, as we might have called him, or the Vice President programming, or he’s the vice president of content. Okay, this is content. I know you’re sitting there going, but think about this Nestor when you and I got in the business. Me Again, I’m older than you, but when you get into business, you know, the cool thing about it was that there was newspapers, there was, you know, stronger radio stations, or everything had an impact, right? Because there was very little in the way of choices in that aspect today, part of the problem is we don’t have local media anywhere near what we used to have local media, and so people tend to like All right? Well, watch the news, but sports is the one thing that will do it. And what Netflix did last week when, you know, Roger Goodell floated the idea that he was going to build another package for for sports on the morning, and he wanted to do Sunday mornings, he wanted to do at least six to eight games in Europe, or, you know, perhaps South America, the 10am package, 10am package. And so he floats it out there and, and, you know, Amazon, Apple, you know, Netflix. Look at it. That’s cool. You know, Netflix is the. Know, that’s nice, but I want Fox’s package, or I want CBS back now, I guarantee you, yeah, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, they can write checks that no one at Paramount or
Nestor Aparicio 30:18
Comcast, see, it’s funny. We think of them all as these, these names. And if you just put the logos up and said, rank the logos by wealth, rank the logos by wealth, we would look at Amazon and say, well, Coca Cola has got to be bigger because they’ve been here longer. And I’ve been seeing that for, you know, and and Xerox, and just these names of brands, Starbucks, you know, whatever, these international brands, but Apple, Amazon, to equate them even to Disney, is Amazon’s bigger than Disney. And that doesn’t that sounds ridiculous, because Disney used to sound like the biggest of the big but they’re not right to your point, they’re not any,
Jim Williams 31:00
any Q at Apple told me that what I want in a perfect world is for you to pick up your phone, your iPhone and and watch whatever you want us. For us, it’s a lost leader. T Mobile gives away either Netflix or major league baseball or Major League Soccer. I don’t, I can’t remember was Verizon or or ATT that would give away, uh, Sunday Ticket. Okay, so all of these people who aren’t or you and I would have not classified as as options, course options or programming people are now in that business because they want you to keep that phone in your pocket for everything. And if that means they have to buy the NFL to get you there, they’ll buy the NFL to get you there, because they can, you know, they print money, and they can do that. So that’s why we’re seeing these mergers. And I say mergers, not physically, but that we see the mergers where you’ve got the where you get the consolidation. So you may have five or six major league baseball packages, or four or five hockey packages, or three or four, you know, NBA packages, like they just did this deal with $77 million cut turnaround of it, and brought Amazon as a partner. Why? Because they can get that money. I mean, if Roger Goodell went today and opened the bidding for the Super Bowl and everything, they’re possibly, and I’m not going to be hyperbolic here, there’s possible, it’s possible that NDC, universal, CBS, even Disney, couldn’t come close to the kind of money that the streaming people will give, because the streaming people don’t even look at this as, as I said before, it’s probably, it’s content. It’s no different to them than if you’re going to go in and read the athletic it’s content. But people have to
Nestor Aparicio 33:17
come to it. That’s the thing you can buy only MBA you want. If nobody wants to watch the Milwaukee Bucks, then they’re not coming. Jim Williams is here, long time Media Examiner inside. I want to end on this, Jim, just the massen part of this and the Orioles part, which is where I began, because we went 50,000 feet, and that’s cool. Well, that’s that’s why I have you on. But the massen in the in the the Rubinstein and the Lerner and the National Orioles, and throw leonesus into this with the monumental thing and all of that locally. What does this look like to you? Mr. Expert guy? Oh boy.
Jim Williams 33:52
If I were, I’m not. If I were Rubenstein and Lerner, I would sit down and say, look, we’ve got, we’ve got a regional sports network. How do we get people to be interested in because we don’t have anything else. We don’t have basketball, we don’t have football, we don’t have, you know, hockey, we have baseball. That’s the one thing we can sell. How do we do it? And I think that there’s a, I think they’ve got to get back to giving away 30 games a season. Maybe it’s a Monday, you know, every Sunday, Saturday, evening, Friday, whatever they need to be getting, you know, people back watching TV on traditional, you know, rabbit ears, as you and I talked about before
Nestor Aparicio 34:42
you’re echoing Luke’s statement, by the way, too, Luke, Luke said the same thing. So we give
Jim Williams 34:47
it. You give you’ve got to give the audience something before they you know. And then, from that standpoint, you can kind of ease them into, you know, a streaming possibility. We’re. Something in that regard. But you gotta get that’s where I would start. I’d bring back Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon baseball. Regionally, from a standpoint of the Orioles are on Channel 1311, 10 to whatever. And the nationals are on in DC and and, and that’s the situation around the country. That’s where I would start. And then I would start to say I, rather than being an adversarial position, which we have been since the actually signed the deal back in 2005 how can we make this work together? We need to work together in 19 that’s quarter
Nestor Aparicio 35:41
of a century, dude. Yep, it’s 21 years since he got the rights on this, and he’s dead, and it’s still he’s, you know, it kind of, it always reminds me of Trump. Anything that came in its wake is diminished, you know, either spiritually, ethically, financially, just in a general sense, or Yeah, or all Yeah, anything in its wake of Peter Angelo’s is left lessened, including me, quite frankly, as a human and and this network for you to have gone in there 20 years ago, I’m sure that you, Mr. You know media guy, wanted to have a guy in a suit and a gal in a suit and a news desk and all the things that Nesson had that looked like a sports network, as you would know, a sports he never had that in mind. It was a way to siphon money and just it was just a it was an ATM, it wasn’t a television network. They never really took it seriously to make it a television network. It was fishermen on and and highlight games, and anybody that gave him 10 cents to buy an infomercial. It the vision of it. He was right all along. You know, he took all of that money, told all of you experts, go away. I don’t need to have a stinking news desk. Who, who would the news desk even investigate? Oh, me, right? I mean, like, So there, there is none of that and but that’s an old fashioned way of thinking, because your programming mind was, people have to watch it. He’s like, no, no, no. People have to watch it. They just have to pay. I don’t care if they watch it or not.
Jim Williams 37:13
He couldn’t believe that was going to take him four years to make money back. That was until Comcast, as you were just alluding to a little earlier, sat down and said, Guess what? You want the Nationals on and, you know, on anywhere. We’re not in any we’re not interested. We’re not interested in marketing revenue. You know, you can remember the first two years and our buddy, Kenny Albert. I mean, hell, Kenny spent more time in DC doing nationals games and then he did New York at that point in time. So to me, the mass and situation, if you’re a fan of mass, and as we both like baseball teams and want to see things happen, they’ve got to get together and form a unified front. They may bring leotes in and say, Look, guys, two cable sports networks in this region make no sense. Never have, and we need to figure this out. And if that means bringing in Amazon to help us, or, you know, Apple TV or whomever, let’s sit down and let’s get it done. I don’t you can’t have competing interests here. It doesn’t work. The fact that that massen started off, you know, with high quality stuff, and from a standpoint of the equipment, covering the games and all that, and now they’ve kind of degenerated into, well, you know, we’ll put on what we put on, and they’re only sending announcers to games in spring training.
Nestor Aparicio 38:46
Well, Mr. Rubenstein will fix that. I’m sure he’s got some money. We’re in spring training. Jim Williams can still be the company where you’re working, what you’re doing, and where people can find you, because I know you’re always out. I see you on social still chirping about any time anything happens in this space, and not just baseball or football. I mean, literally every sport that you’ve been involved in you, and I could do another hour just on college and PAC 10 and Yeah, well, they’re taking you down that lane. But, but it is complicated right now for people like you that have been following it forever. And I mentioned Andrew Marchand and the John durans People have had on Eric Fisher, different people that I know that follow all of this. It is a fascinating time, specifically for baseball, but for all of them, because they look at the NFL as being a leader, but they don’t. They’re not the same business as the NFL anymore.
Jim Williams 39:30
No, not even close. And John, John, of course, and I work together Sports Business Journal for a long time. Eric’s a great guy. Andy, Andrew Bucha, the king of the we used to joke with Andrew as being the king of if any network president wanted to just sneak something out, he would call Andrew, and Andrew would suddenly break this story. And it was like, you know, it’s an inside deal. But to your point. Point, there’s got to be a price point where people are just going to say, You know what? Much is too much. If ESPN launches this upcoming thing this summer at $40 a pop, I’m not going to buy it. You know? I just, it just can’t happen. But let’s, let’s just, with you, finish your point on the massive thing. This doesn’t work unless you have cooperation. And right now they don’t, and I’m not, is that? Is that the new owner’s problem? It will be, it is maybe he’s not prioritizing. Is this point? But that’s if they either, they either want to do it right and do it together, or sit down and sell there one of the well. And
8Nestor Aparicio 40:44
I think Leo’s is going to be the eventual owner of the Nationals anyway. Alright, Jimmy, I’m going to let you go. Jim Williams is here, long time examiner, always in Baltimore, always local and and always informative. I miss you, man, thanks for coming on. It’s great to visit.
Jim Williams 40:57
My pleasure. And, oh, by the way, you can get me at rant sports.com where you can find me, at Bloomberg and and Newsweek. So any one of those
Nestor Aparicio 41:06
ran news. See, I told you, he’s a he’s a multimedia sensation. All of my stuff can be found at Baltimore positive. We’re out on social media. Luke is running around covering Orioles, uh, we’re figuring out what the ravens are doing. It’s a busy time around here. Next trap gate tour is March 6. We will be at fadelies with the magic eight ball scratch offs. I am Nestor. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore positive. You.
