NWO Golf Links November 2016

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The biggest news in sports this
year is the declining number
of network television viewers
for live sporting events. The
NFL has been witnessing
double digit declines in 2016
and that has never happened.
The NFL has been the stalwart
of the sporting world in the
United States. Every football
fan’s hunger is quenched by
the seemingly continuous,
Thursday, Saturday, Sunday
and Monday coverage on
their big screens.
With various options of
televisionviewershipavailable
today, cablevision subscribers
are saying good-bye to high
cable package monthly fees
and going to live streaming
for their weekly fix of sports
coverage. In golf, the majors
are all live streamed and the
PGA Tour and Golf Channel
provides live streaming every
week of the PGA, LPGA and
Champions Tours.
reports that ESPN has been
losing an average of 300,000
viewers monthly for the past
couple years. Plus, ESPN
experienced their worst loss
ever inOctober with a decline
in subscribers of 621,000.
Cable providers pay ESPN
$7.00 per subscriber for their
broadcast rights, which is a
loss of $4.3 million in gross
revenue for ESPN in a single
month.
In turn, ESPN pays the
NFL $1.9 billion alone for
broadcasting rights, $1.4
billion to the NBA and $700
million to major league
baseball. In total ESPN
doles out $7.3 billion to
various sports leagues for the
exclusive rights to air their
programming.
ESPN currently has approxi-
mately 90 million subscribers
at $7.00 each that’s $630 mil-
lion per month or $7.5 billion
per year. In addition, they
collect over $1.5 billion from
advertising income for a total
of $9 billion annual revenue.
Broadcasting rights cost
$7.3 billion per year and
if operating costs are in
the $1-$1.5 billion range,
the profit margin becomes
uncomfortably thin.
If ESPN continues to lose
subscribers at their current
rate of 3 million per year, that
calculates to an additional
loss of $21 million in gross
revenue per year. ESPN’s
parent company Disney
is concerned and their
shareholders are noticing too.
The stock has been active and
experienced declines.
This discussion leads us to
how it affects golf. Much of
the revenue for the major
tours, PGA, LPGA and
Champions Tours comes via
the broadcasting rights and
advertising. If the networks
are losing viewership and
have less income, they can’t
pay the tours. In addition,
tournament sponsors will be
unwilling to spend millions of
dollars to put their corporate
name on a golf tournament if
no one is watching.
ESPN Losing Viewers in Record Numbers:
Sports Viewership on Television is Rapidly Changing
By Fred Altvater
NWO Golf Links