With last week’s story in the Raleigh News & Observer citing sources at the ACC’s league office in Greensboro saying their most conservative estimates have the conference’s new linear network injecting about $10 million per school into the league’s payout structure, now seems like a good time to ask if conference networks are all working the way leagues and broadcast partners had hoped.
Awful Announcing’s Joe Lucia has a piece up on the site asking what the long-term prognosis is for The Longhorn Network. It is a joint venture between the University of Texas and ESPN. When the network first launched in 2011, it seemed like a perfect test case. Texas was a school with a history of success in both football and basketball and had a massive fanbase. Almost from the word go there were problems. They ranged from stare downs with other Big 12 Conference members over the plans to broadcast high school football games to a lack of carriage agreements.
Lucia asks three of his colleagues what the future holds in his new piece. ESPN and the University of Texas entered into a 20 year contract in 2011. With 13 years left on that deal, Andrew Bucholtz says he expects LHN to shift to a digital product.
Making this an extra-fee option within ESPN+ would make a whole lot of sense on a lot of levels, allowing Texas fans all over the country to buy it without regard for cable provider but without the challenges of carriage negotiations. And this might also lead to a scaled-down version of LHN, where they could just run the events people care about without the need to fill a whole day of programming.
Matt Clapp isn’t even that hopeful. He says that serving a very niche audience with a product who’s quality has been on the decline isn’t a recipe for success.
But unless you’re a Texas fan, you have to be a sports nut to tuning in for a random sporting event like that, and this certainly wouldn’t be a regular thing. Additionally, so many people are cutting cable that fewer and fewer Longhorns fans are likely to have the channel. And it’s not a channel that sports bars — outside of Texas, at least — are going to put on unless requested.
It also hurts that Texas football hasn’t been a 10-win team since 2009 (and last had at least 8 wins in 2013), and the basketball program has been pretty mediocre in recent seasons despite the hiring of Shaka Smart. There’s still a lot of intrigue (with Smart coaching the hoops team and Tom Herman coaching the football team), but these haven’t been elite programs in a long while.
Clapp went on to say that he doesn’t expect the Longhorn Network to survive to the end of the contract.
Ben Koo writes that LHN may have life after the end of the initial 20 year contract if Disney decides to hang on to the Fox RSNs that it is set to acquire in that $71.3 billion dollar deal to acquire 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets.
My best guess is if Disney does end up acquiring the Fox Sports regional channels, they somehow offload the property to that division and integrate it with the Fox Sports Southwest, which oddly doesn’t have much distribution in Austin. There is a chance Austin might get an MLS team, so perhaps ESPN can start the process of adding more regional content onto the Longhorn Network and rebranding it down the road when the deal expires.
Ultimately, I don’t think ESPN wants to be paying for the overhead of that network, nor the $15 million to Texas each year, and will look for the easiest way to wind down that arrangement without drawing attention to the fact it was a really dumb idea. Sure, some type of maneuvering could allow ESPN to use LHN as a way to launch a Big 12 Network, but I think the window for that idea is closing and would require way, way, way too many people to buy in to such an idea.
So the one thing that is clear is that nothing is clear. The initial agreement expires in 2031, so we are even a ways off from negotiations on an extension.
