Insights: Can The NFL Beat Pay TV’s Disconnection Blues?

Insights is a new weekly series featuring entertainment industry veteran David Bloom. It represents an experiment of sorts in digital-age journalism and audience engagement with a  focus on the intersection of entertainment and technology, an area that David has written about and thought about and been part of in various career incarnations for much of the past 25 years. David welcomes your thoughts, perspectives, calumnies, and kudos at david@tubefilter.com, or on Twitter @DavidBloom.

This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE.

Tonight on Thursday, September 8, the NFL launches its regular season with a rematch of last February’s Super Bowl. The game is minus one now-retired Hall of Famer, though plenty of interest remains in everyone who’s still playing. But after years of cord cutting

, softening ratings, and a summer that saw declining viewership of NBC’s Olympics and MTV’s Video Music Awards, can the NFL throw a Hail Mary this season and fend off viewer flight to digital medial? Or will the league’s festering issues such as concussion pathology further hasten TV’s stumbling transition to an ad-challenged online future?

Some positive bits of news have surfaced suggesting the Old Guard isn’t quite dead yet:

• Upfronts advertising commitments actually rose for this fall’s shows, after what seemed like eons of decline. The Big Four broadcast networks plus whatever the CW is secured price hikes in the 10% to 14% range. Even better, the hikes came with modest increases in actual dollars committed.

• And over in Cable Sports Land, ESPN rose some 1.07 million subscribers in August, Nielsen said. This comes after ESPN lost an alarming 10 million subs the past three years, triggering last year’s mini-crash in media stocks amid lots of investor handwringing. Other sports networks joined ESPN on the rise, including a jump of 3.2 million subs for Fox Sports 1 and 7.5 million subs for the NFL Network.

• That Super Bowl last February was the third-most-watched, and most lucrative, ever. It remains one of the two or three most important dates on the dial, viewers by the tens of millions flocking to watch the ads and the halftime show as much as the game itself (quick, name the teams that played). Only the Oscars and, to a lesser extent, the Grammys come close.

• You’re not going to miss Hall of Fame huckster Peyton Manning (his admission to the Pro Football Hall of Fame must wait five years but as a TV ad pitchman, he’s already on Mt. Rushmore). Yes, Manning retired after winning that Super Bowl, but he’ll still be omnipresent this season, if ads during preseason games are any indication. Now the ads just make fun of all the time the genial Manning has on his hands.

• Twitter will live stream 10 games, powered by BAMTech, the streaming service created by Major League Baseball. The 10 games represent a tiny portion of all 512 regular-season games but are a big jump from Yahoo’s single online gamecast last year.

• Meanwhile, those “skinny bundle” offerings by virtual Pay-TV systems such as Sling TV have about 700,000 subscribers, most with ESPN as part of the package, says SNL Kagan. Those numbers aren’t counted when we total up declines at ESPN.

The good news comes with caveats, of course. That whopping jump for the NFL Channel was due to a carriage deal with Dish Network, which ended a blackout. ESPN’s estimated numbers increased in part because the Census Bureau released a higher figure for the number of U.S. TV households. And those Upfront price hikes came at the expense of broadcasters’ smaller corporate cousins on cable, some of which were reportedly sacrificed to the needs of the mothership.

Meanwhile, total subscribers to Pay TV companies continued to drop over the past year, by 1.4 million from Q2 2015 to Q2 2016. And that second quarter was the worst ever for Pay TV, down 812,000 subs from Q1. Admittedly, Q2 is always bad. That’s when families move, students leave college and cancellations are common. The question is how many sign back up for cable or satellite service at their next home.

Amid all this, that Cassandra of Cable, F/X chief John Landgraf, continues to warn that we’re at Peak TV, even more than last year when he first raised the issue. So, we’re at Peaker TV?

Regardless, Landgraf has a point. Making more than 400 scripted shows a year across all networks and the streaming giants doesn’t pencil out in the mid-term. Someone’s going to be stuck with a lot of relatively expensive shows that not enough people are watching. That’s not going to end well.

And it’s not a great sign for the networks that the summer’s buzziest shows were on HBO (The Night Of) and Netflix (Stranger Things). Yes, it’s only the summer, but what network show is going to break through into the cultural conversation this fall? Personally, I’m not betting on that MacGyver reboot, or the TV translation of Lethal Weapon, especially for anyone under 45.

So it may just come down to the NFL and its cover-the-calendar scheduling between tonight and mid-February to boost the fortunes of its broadcast and cable partners, and their advertisers. Can the game get past the head cases and the head injuries and keep pulling fans back to live broadcasts?

It’s a big question. Therefore, I suspect I won’t be the only one watching how the NFL does as it extends its reach into new platforms, even as many viewers seem more consumed by their fantasy teams than, you know, the actual teams. But hey, having a fantasy team is still better for the NFL, and for its advertisers and network partners, than no team at all. Get ready for kickoff.

This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE, the premier app building company that houses all of your content in one place for any device, and monetizes it automatically with their built in programmatic video advertising platform.