“Nobody really wanted to deal with the idea that they were going to be paying for a product that had been free.”
That sentence could fit in any modern story about newspapers that put up pay walls as they address they key funding issues facing media organizations today. Instead, it’s about a cable company that in the 1980s began asking cable systems to pay for the right to carry its programming.
That company? ESPN. The result was a dual stream of revenue — subscriber fees + ad money — that allowed the network to grow into the behemoth of the sports world it is today.
The quote is from Roger Werner, ESPN’s COO in the 1980s. It’s from “Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. They use what can only be described as a crap ton of interviews with the founders, executives, anchors, reporters, agents and competitors to trace the company’s 30-year history from its inception as a muddy field in Connecticut to a sprawling digital empire.
The format at first annoyed me, since it is basically relies on chunks of direct quotes one after another with very little narration in between. I found it disjointing and difficult to get in a flow of reading, but eventually that waned as I had to do less and less work remembering who some of the non-talent people were. I read a similar “from-the beginning” story about CNN a number of years ago, and it’s interesting to see how far each has been able to come from very, very humble beginnings.
There are some fascinating anecdotes about what’s going on behind the scenes. One of my favorites involves when Monday Night Football moved from it’s longtime home at ABC over to ESPN. The interviews tell the story of ESPN wanting to keep Al Michaels as the play-by-play guy, but he ended up leaving to do Sunday Night Football on NBC. It seemed like a simple move at the time, but negotiations to get him out of his ESPN contract brought in Disney company executives who made a list of things they wanted in return from NBC Universal. One of those items was the rights to a cartoon rabbit. I can only hope my career involves a deal like that.
In talking about the future of how we get ESPN content and experience sports media, Disney CEO Bob Iger says, “ESPN has deals with several leagues that call for content distribution on platforms that have yet to be invented.” I would love to hear how the negotiation for that part of the contract happens. Does ESPN have the rights for NFL games projected on the moon? Baseball broadcasts that resonate in your brain through Wi-Fi? NASCAR races you watch in your dreams?
One other thing I thought was interesting is the way in which no matter what technology we have, fans will always have the same irrational reaction to people talking about their teams. Hockey analyst Bill Clement shares in the book that no matter what city they were in, inevitably fans would criticize him saying he was favoring the other team:
“But I would get it from both sides,” he said. “If I was doing the Rangers-Flyers series, I would be accused by Rangers fans of favoring the Flyers and I would be accused by Flyers fans of favoring the Rangers.”
I see this play out on a weekly basis now with ESPN baseball analyst Buster Olney. He appears on their Sunday Night Baseball broadcast, and on Twitter faces a barrage of comments every time he says something about one of the teams that somehow makes him some kind of superfan of that squad who is hell-bent on destroying the other team. At least he has the sense of humor to retweet these people so the world can see how in five minutes he can be criticized of having that favoritism for both sides at the same time.
Interesting book for those who want to know about the ESPN empire — good, bad and ugly — and get some insight inside the Bristol universe.