The National Football League is planning to make its RedZone Channel available to cellphone users next season, a move that has its broadcast partners questioning whether they will still get the same bang for their buck on their multibillion-dollar television deals.
The move, which would free fans from their living rooms on Sunday afternoons, is a significant shift in media strategy for the country's most popular sports league, whose focus has long been to protect the value of its lucrative television deals.
The RedZone cable-TV channel provides coverage of games all day on Sundays, cutting to the action any time a team is within 20 yards of a touchdown. It acts as a viewer's "remote control," switching between scoreing plays, key ball turnovers and other plays of interest.
If the RedZone Channel becomes available on mobile devices, viewers would see the same stream of important plays as people watching at home as the coverage bounces from game to game.
"This is tailor-made to be able to watch during your kids' soccer games," said Brian Rolapp, the NFL's vice president for media strategy. "We want to put it on the Internet and wireless phones for next season, so we're thinking about how we do that."
For News Corp.'s Fox and CBS Corp., an expansion of the RedZone Channel has the potential to erode the audience for some of its most reliable—and expensive—programming. The two companies pay the NFL about $1.4 billion each season to air live games on Sunday afternoons.
"RedZone hasn't hurt us yet, but we watch it very closely," said Sean McManus, president of news and sports for CBS. "Anything that would adversely affect our ratings on a Sunday afternoon would be a major concern to us."
David Hill, Chairman and CEO of Fox Sports, declined to comment.
The NFL has enjoyed a record season of television ratings. The league announced Monday that for the third time in three weeks a larger audience had watched each playoff game this year than for comparable games last year, a stunning achievement at a time when every other sports league is struggling to hang on to viewers. For the regular season, NFL games attracted an average audience of 16.6 million viewers, an increase of two million viewers, or 14%, over last year and the highest average audience since 1990.
The growth has come even as the NFL has pursued a media strategy substantially different than other leagues. In an age when every other sports league has tried to win the digital age by making their games and highlights available everywhere at all times, the NFL has used scarcity to its advantage, limiting both the number and distribution of its games and highlights.
NFL highlights currently are available on the Internet only via NFL.com. For the most part games are available only during Sunday night broadcasts or for people who pay for DirecTV Group Inc.'s Sunday Ticket package and live in an area that can't accommodate a satellite dish.
The NFL has limited its wireless ambitions to two deals, with modest reach. It had a wireless deal with Sprint Nextel Corp. this season, but only for eight, non-Sunday games in the second half of the season.
It also has a deal for Sunday afternoon games with DirecTV, but subscribers have to pay $280 for the Sunday Ticket and then another $100 for the mobile feed, available on gadgets such as the iPhone, Palm Pre and select Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Android devices.
Prices haven't been set yet for the mobile RedZone.
This year, Sprint's NFL Mobile package was included as part of the company's Everything plans starting at $69.99, including Simply Everything, which combines unlimited voice, messaging and extensive data services– such as NFL Mobile Live—for $99.99 per month. Other Sprint customers paid $15 a month for the added service.
"We want to be on the best available screen, whatever that is," said Bob Dupuy, president of Major League Baseball, which offers fans the ability to watch games wirelessly and over the Internet through MLB.com.
While the growth of the RedZone channel may ultimately erode the broadcast audience, so far the additional coverage appears to have sparked more interest.
"There seems to be an insatiable appetite for NFL games," said Lee Berke, a leading sports media consultant. For the other major sports leagues, the size of the audience for a team's local broadcasts depends largely on team performance, while audience size for the playoffs depends on whether the teams participating represent major media markets.
"Right now the sentiment among broadcasters is that this kind of wireless and digital product is only building fans' attachments to the broadcasts," said Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS sports. "So far, if you can avoid it, you're not going to choose your two-by-two-inch cell phone over your 52-inch, hi-def television."
Wall Street Journal
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