(08-09-2017 12:02 PM)goofus Wrote: I am looking forward to a streaming option that will include college football games with no commercial interuptuons. That would be worth paying fir.
I doubt we will ever reach the point of commercial-free CFB broadcasts, because subscriptions are unlikely to compensate for the loss of TV revenue.
This article estimates that a 30-second ad on a broadcast network CFB regular season game cost an average of just under $100,000 in 2011.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241...3744436554
The price has probably gone up since then, and the price per spot is probably less on ESPN and a helluva lot less on FS1.
For an ESPN game this year, let's use $100,000 per 30-seconds as a guesstimate and also because math is hard and using round numbers is easier.
Others have guesstimated that a CFB broadcast includes about 38 minutes of commercial time, not including halftime. Let's guess that 5 of those minutes are things like network promotion of their own programming or other things that they don't charge for. That leaves 66 30-second blocks at $100,000 per, or a gross to ESPN of $6.6 million/game -- again, not including halftime or pregame or postgame ads.
So if ESPN ran no ads between the start of the 1st quarter and the end of the 2nd quarter and again between the start of the 3rd quarter and the end of the game, they'd want to make up that $6.6 million/game, at least, with money from subscriptions or pay-per-game charges. An above-average but not outstanding audience for an ESPN CFB game (per Sports Media Watch) is about 2 million viewers. If half of that audience would choose not watching over paying (and it might be more than half), then those 1 million paying customers would have to pay $6.60 each to watch that one game. Or maybe it would work if an annual all-you-can-eat subscription to watch ESPN's CFB games cost about $200, but even that would not work for them unless the subscriber numbers were huge, and I doubt they would be at that price.
If all the ESPN channels were sold as a subscription package like the HBO channels, ESPN could probably get as many subscribers as HBO (about 50 million) at the same price point (about $15/month) -- but that's for everything on ESPN channels and it's still a lower annual cost than $200.
So I don't see how the TV guys could give up in-game advertising without losing money. If someday sports TV is on a subscription basis like HBO or on a pay-per-game basis, the commercials will still be there.