beIN SPORT USA speculation thread

Not gonna happen, as FOX cannot afford losing expanded basic or digital basic carriage of FOX Soccer on Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, and Bright House. Rebranding FOX Soccer into FOX Sports 1 or 2 and loading it up with UFC and college sports would be a better move.

Junk such as the Turkish or Russian Leagues aren't even good enough to be on FOX Soccer Plus, yet alone FOX Soccer.

 

FOX Sports South & FOX Sports Florida currently get the 5th pick ACC Football Game via sublicense.

Anything worse than the 5th pick is not worth trading for.

Heck, anything worse than the 3rd pick ACC football game is not worth trading for, as the ACC is at best 4-deep in a typical year: Virginia Tech, Clemson, Florida State, and Georgia Tech. Miami (FL) will be down for a while due to sanctions. The 4 North Carolina schools are all too basketball-centric. Maryland is a mess. The 3 northern schools (Boston College, Syracuse, and Pitt) are now mediocre in football.

A ton of leftover basketball will be available from ESPN, Inc., especially if the Big East were to stay with ESPN, Inc. for everything other than college football (which should be headed for NBC Sports Network.) ACC, Big 12, SEC, and Big East games that were syndicated or were ESPN3.com only would be trade bait. The quality of the matchup does matter, but there should be 70-80 basketball games of sufficient quality available for trade.

 

Forgot about Virginia. That makes the ACC 5-deep. 5th pick would be the absolute lower limit on what ACC football games are acceptable as trade for EPL matches.

 

RPL is not even good enough for FOX Soccer Plus, yet alone FOX Soccer.

A same-day taped EPL match should draw 50,000 viewers.

An RPL match on tape may draw 5000 viewers or less.

There is a reason who so many domestic league TV products are available for $1 plus transmission cost: they can't draw flies.

FOX Soccer has the right formula in 2012-2013: EPL, EPL, EPL. Nothing else but EPL on weekends with the exception of college soccer during the autumn as time buys.

If FOX Soccer were to lose EPL after May 2013, not a problem at all. Hand the channel over to George Greenberg, rename it FOX Sports 1 or 2, and load it up with UFC, college sports, boxing, and beauty pageants. The channel will jump from 41 million subscribers to 60 million subscribers in 6 months. That will be the best thing to happen to the channel EVER. UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and CONCACAF Champions League can still air on the channel.

Don't lose sight of the big picture: get the int'l soccer products that can draw 300,000 viewers or more onto channels that are available on digital basic or above.

The sports tier is where niche sports TV channel die a slow death.

Any channel that has college sports, no matter how poor, gets on DIRECTV Choice Xtra, including CBS Sports Network, which is as bad a college sports channel as you can find with junk such as Conference USA and Mountain West. That "junk" is still better that the dead air after 7pm ET on FOX Soccer, GOLTV, and beIN SPORT 1 USA.

Programming a U.S TV channel with 100% soccer with no live events after 7pm Eastern Time that is capable of drawing 200000 viewers is NOT the way, as we have seen with FOX Soccer, which is a complete waste of bandwidth during evening prime time and is considered a joke by many local cable TV franchise managers.

(That is lesson that Youssef has apparently refused to learn, now that he and Antonio still doesn't have a deal with a single MSO to carry beIN SPORT 1 USA 7 days before its launch date.)

 

Portuguese league will draw less than 10000 U.S. viewers per match on GOLTV, so it really doesn't matter to the big picture.

DIRECTV is waiting for the MEDIAPRO-PRISA TV war to resolve itself.

If GOLTV were to lose La Liga completely, then there is no reason for DIRECTV to keep GOLTV on the sports tier.

 

Raycom is a regional syndicator of college basketball. It isn't worth much if anything in the big picture anymore with ACC's new deal which cuts down the influence of the North Carolina triangle. The sheik can buy Raycom with the passive income he earns while he sleeps overnight for the purpose of punting it out of the way.