College football will be watching at what US viewers will be willing to do to watch their favorite team or teams as the digital age of broadcasting impacts the soccer market this season.

Essentially, four main outlets brought the content of the English Premier League, Champions League, Europa League( Champs League for the second best set of clubs), Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and USA’s MLS. Coverage was as follows:

NBC: Premier League (every game available online if not shown on TV)
Fox: Bundesliga, Champions League, Europa League, MLS
ESPN: MLS
Bein Sports: Serie A, La Liga

The golden age of value in watching soccer is changing. Here are the US English broadcast rights holders for this year’s soccer seasons:

Mark Fishkin
@MarkFishkin
So:
NBCSN has Premier League
FOX has Bundesliga
ESPN has Serie A
La Liga still with BeIN, who has been dropped by Comcast & FiOS
Turner has Champions League
1:53 PM · Aug 7, 2018

The most watched league, the English Premier League, will still get 4-6 nationally broadcasted games a week on NBCS and NBC, but if your club’s game is not on that national feed you will have to buy the $50 subscription for NBC Sports Gold to watch those matches live or on replay.

Fox loses the Champions League and Europa games that filled up three midweek days worth of games and programming on FS1 and 2. Now Fox can only show Bundesliga games on the weekend. This is probably leading to FS1 and definitely FS2 getting kicked off major cable carriers.

In a worse position, Bein Sports just lost one of their two main superstars that casual soccer fans would watch play the game as Cristiano Renoldo leaves Real Madrid and La Liga for Juventus and now ESPN’s coverage of Serie A. Bein Sports May get dropped from the majority of US networks and have to function on its own streaming service or get bundled into a fun o style service for survival. I hope ESPN or Fox buys them out when their value drops out.

One improvement has been ESPN and Especially ESPN+, the $5/month streaming service that allows you to watch out of market MLS games, Canadian football games, and now Cristiano Renaldo/Serie A games.

Turner, TNT/TBS, has taken over the Champions League and Europa League games and plan to only show a very small portion of the games Fox showed last year on traditional nationally broadcasted TV channels. THIS is ticking off the soccer community as Turner will use their Bleacher Report streaming service to charge customers to watch any of these non broadcasted games; still not sure if service will have replay function as the majority of these games occur during American work hours.

The point is, what will the viewing public be willing to pay to watch certain games and leagues during a campaign. Will fans just skip paying for and watching the Big European power house clubs beat up weaker competition in the first half of the season and jus t pay/watch the second half of the season? What if a popular team loses early in a tournament? Will fans stop watching /paying?

This will be the first study into how the American viewer is willing watch and spend to view individual content that was once easier to access or was previously covered under normal monthly cable/satellite subscriptions. College football payouts and viewing habits will be impacted. Will the AAC and MWC schools of he world be looking at weekday games on ESPN again or buried in the ESPN+ subscribtion? What about the P5 schools?

This will give us an early hint at what to expect and the American viewer will make some choices that broadcasters will use in future sports tv contracts.

(08-08-2018 01:03 PM)murrdcu Wrote:  This will be the first study into how the American viewer is willing watch and spend to view individual content that was once easier to access or was previously covered under normal monthly cable/satellite subscriptions. College football payouts and viewing habits will be impacted. Will the AAC and MWC schools of he world be looking at weekday games on ESPN again or buried in the ESPN+ subscribtion? What about the P5 schools?

This will give us an early hint at what to expect and the American viewer will make some choices that broadcasters will use in future sports tv contracts.

I've enjoyed ESPN+ so far if for no more reason than it's cheap and with ESPN's reach I'm sure they'll have something decent on most weekends. These other services don't offer enough content to really worry about it. I enjoy EPL, but I'm not paying $50 to watch a few extra games. I enjoy Champions League, but I'm not paying a fee for extra games.

In other words, ESPN+ is a pretty good value and nobody else has put that forth yet. This is one of the reasons I don't mind paying a cable bill...because a lot of different types of content are bundled together. There's no way I'm going to buy into 40 different services just so I can catch anything and everything. I want it to be simple.

I'm not going to watch a lot of G5 content this fall, but you never know. I might catch a game or two if I can't find anything interesting on broadcast TV.

I do see ESPN shifting some of their P5 content to the streaming platform in the not too distant future. Soccer will help sell a few subs, but if they really want to make a splash then eventually they'll need games that a large number of American fans want to watch. And I think that's where ESPN has an advantage.