Are You Ready for Some Football?
Football season is in full swing. If you are a fan, you’ve probably watched a game or two the old-fashioned way–on television. And don’t expect that to change much any time soon.
For all the talk of the big tech companies making a big play for high-end content, the names on the NCAA and NFL contracts are very familiar (ESPN, CBS, FOX, NBC). What you don’t see are Google, Apple, Facebook or Instagram. And that is not likely to change for the next 7 or so years. The signing of the Big 10 deal with FOX and ESPN shows public media marketing that the “sports rights bubble shows no sign of bursting.”
- Big 10 FOX/ESPN* ($2.6 billion) ends 2023
- Pac 10 FOX/ESPN ends 2024
- Big 12 ESPN/FOX ends 2025
- ACC ESPN ends 2028
- SEC CBS/ESPN ends 2034
- NCAA College Football Playoff ESPN ($7.3 billion) ends 2025
- NCAA March Madness CBS/Turner ($10.8 billion) ends 2025
- NFL CBS/FOX/NBC ($27 billion) ends 2022
- MLB FOX/ESPN/Turner ends 2021
- NBA Turner/ESPN/ABC ($24 billion) ends 2025
- NHL NBC ends 2020
- Olympics NBC ($7.65 billion) ends 2032
This does not mean that big tech firms will not experiment with the broadcast partners. Twitter will have steaming rights to 10 NFL games for the price of only $1 million a game. And you may end up watching your games on your living room TV, your iPad or your phone. But the big broadcast players continue to control the content for now.
*CBS retains the Big 10 basketball championship game
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.