(06-02-2016 02:43 PM)Goldenbuc Wrote: Big12 Network with current members
39.1M potential "footprint" subscribers
$44.9M potential with "footprint" subscriber fees
Big12 Network with current members & FL and OH
70.9M potential "footprint" subscribers
$81.5M potential with "footprint" subscriber fees
Big12 Network with ONLY FL and OH
31.8M potential "footprint" subscribers
$36.6M potential with "footprint" subscriber fees
We need to clear up a few things here. First, your numbers are WAY off. You are using population in place of households. Households are the potential subscribers, not individual people. There are only 106 million households in the US as of the last census (perhaps a million or two more now), and you have 40% of them in the Big 12 states. That is not true. . The household information for the current Big 12 footprint is as follows:
Texas 7.5 million
Oklahoma 1.5 million
Kansas 1 million
Iowa 1.2 million
West Virginia 750k
There are a bit under 12 million households in the Big 12 footprint, with only 4.5 million of those outside of Texas. The standard calculation used has been $1.00 per subscriber within the footprint (not always attainable BTW, as even LHN gets less than half of that), which would be potential subscriber revenue of $144 million per year, before the owning entity takes at least half (if not more depending on the set up), leaving $72 million in carriage fees max, before expenses (and additional revenue) before splitting, or no more than $7.2 million per team. As you can see, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas already make more than this.
So any additions would be considered based off those numbers. Now in regards to the calculations you used above, if some combination of Cincinnati, USF, and UCF were to be added to the Big 12. I think a far better true representation for potential subscribers would be
their metropolitan area, not the entire state. PR and reality should not be confused with each other.
That said, the numbers would still be impressive on a per school basis in comparison to what they have - Cincinnati/Dayton 1.6 million*, Orlando 1.6 million, Tampa 2 million, and a host of surrounding households - which in each case would expand the Big 12 household footprint by at least 10% with each one, and would represent a minimum of a 33% increase in non-Texas households. If the same dynamics work, and we will add in UConn (1.3 million) just so I have an even 14 teams, you now have closer to 19 million households in the footprint, plus a better chance of getting more out of market subscribers (likely in the $0.10-$.20 per month range, but it could add another 30 million subscribers), you now have potential subscriber revenue in the neighborhood of $228 million per year, or $114 million for the conference.
Now that is only $8.14 million per team, only about a million per team more, but that also gives them a much larger base to subtract expenses from - the expenses are likely to be mostly fixed no matter the number of teams, so the more gross revenue earned, the less the expenses per team (this is also true with payments to the conference office). This is often forgotten when comparing set ups per conference. The more teams you have, the less the fixed costs are per school. This is also important because those extra gross dollars, and the expenses they help cover, are likely difference between having a network, and not having one.
Now to be sure there are drawbacks, such as less games vs. the marquee opponents. But looking at dollars from a pure "per team" basis often misses a lot of financial data.
*Cincinnati would probably lose some numbers as part of their metro area extends into Kentucky, and carriage fees in "home markets" don't tend to cross state lines, even with Rutgers in NYC and MD in DC, so that might come into play