CBS isn’t too worried about competition from digital media companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter when it comes to vying for future sports rights, even as sports streaming continues to grow in popularity and rights continue to pour into Silicon Valley.
On a call with analysts following the company’s second-quarter earnings report late Monday, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said he believes digital players and traditional broadcasters will be able to operate harmoniously, thanks to support from major leagues such as the NFL.
While digital players, such as Amazon, which nabbed a deal to stream Thursday Night Football games from Twitter starting this season, will become “more important” in the space, they’ll “go along with broadcast” and not operate alone, he said.
“I think the NFL has always stated there’s a reason that the Super Bowl is always on network television,” Moonves said. “It’s just higher rated, nobody has the reach that we do.”
CBS, which has the rights to stream the NCAA men’s basketball tournament through 2032 and also has partnerships with the PGA Tour and SEC football, will air the Super Bowl LIII in 2019.
Moonves’ confidence likely stems from comments made last month by NFL Chief Operating Officer Tod Leiweke at the National Sports Forum Summer Summit in NYC, who said the NFL remains “very loyal” to its current broadcast partners even as it explores digital streaming deals.
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“They’ve done such a magnificent job of helping us make the league what it is with innovations, and how they cover the game, it’s just amazing,” Leiweke said. “And I think our partners today have been responsible for the massive fanbase we have.”
In July, the NFL noted that the 2016 regular season reached 204 million unique reviewers, with household ratings on each NFL broadcast partner continuing to outpace all other programming.
CBS, on its call with analysts late Monday, equally gushed about the NFL, saying that since the addition of some NFL games on its $6-per-month digital streaming service CBS All Access last year, weekly sign-ups were an average 75 percent higher than in the week before it was added to the platform.
Earlier this year, CBS struck a multi-year partnership with the NFL that will allow it to stream all Sunday NFL games that appear on CBS TV through CBS All Access starting this season. Moonves called the deal a “very important development” for the company. CBS also announced this week that it plans to launch a 24/7 digital sports channel later this year.
“In terms of the other rights, look, the NFL has always been extremely supportive of broadcast television. Yes, there’s going to be a digital component, and you’re right, this service could allow us to be a bigger player in that and perhaps get certain digital rights as these contracts come up more and more,” Moonves said.
Not everyone is as convinced that the two will be able to so harmoniously coexist, of course. BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield during a presentation at the Global Sports Summit last month said legacy TV buyers will “not be able to pay meaningful premiums in future sports rights negotiations, as they suffer from declining advertising and increased cord-cutting/cord-shaving/cord-nevering.”
Greenfield believes the “single biggest swing factor in determining the future value of sports broadcast rights” will, ultimately, be the level of competition and engagement from new digital buyers.