Football World Cup strains to reverse sports-viewing trends

Networks press for Emmy telecast changes

LOS ANGELES, July 4, (RTRS): Executives at 21st Century Fox and NBCUniversal are hoping they can shout as loud about World Cup goals as many of the athletes on the field. The soccer teams may have the easier task.

Sports broadcasts were once the last thing standing in the TV industry, the only broadcasts that proved able to stand against the ongoing migration of viewers from linear day-and-date TV shows to video-streaming on demand. In the last few years, however, even sports have proven vulnerable.

In April, viewership of the NCAA men’s basketball championship telecast across TBS, TNT and truTV fell about 28% when compared to 2017’s broadcast on CBS. Without taking streaming into account, linear viewership of NBC’s primetime Winter Olympics coverage fell 16% when compared to the network’s 2014 telecast of the same event. Live-plus-same-day Super Bowl viewership this year fell about 7%, according to Nielsen, capping off an NFL season in which the audience for regular-season games was off by 10%.

The World Cup offers US viewers a different kind of football, but will that be enough to prevail against seemingly insurmountable forces?

There was a severe plunge in overall linear-TV audience early in the proceedings. Consider that 48 game telecasts across Fox and Fox Sports 1 won an average of 2,069,000 viewers, according to Nielsen - a tumble of 42% compared to an average of 3.54 million viewers on World Cup games broadcast across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 in 2014 and down 15% compared to the approximately 2.43 million who watched games across those networks in 2010. NBCU’s Telemundo has seen similar trends. More recently, some games have broken out in a bigger way.

Both companies still benefit from having rights to the sort of property that continues to draw a passionate crowd on a sustained basis. Fox and Telemundo in 2011 won rights to US broadcasts of the soccer tournament, reportedly paying $400 million and $600 million, respectively, for the ability to distribute the games in 2018 and 2022, as well as the women’s counterpart in 2015 and 2019. The total figure - $1 billion - is believed to be more than double what ESPN ($425 million) and Univision ($325 million) paid for rights to the 2010 and 2014 showcases. Telemundo announced in June that it had met a goal of selling $225 million in advertising for its World Cup broadcasts and raised its ad-sales target to $250 million. Fox has also indicated its ad inventory around the games was largely sold out.

Audiences for some of the recent games have been significant, particularly when digital viewing is captured. Telemundo, for example, wooed an average of 5.2 million viewers to last Wednesday’s game between Mexico and Sweden via Telemundo, NBC Sports apps and other extensions. Airing the World Cup games helped Telemundo win more viewers between 18 and 49 on average than Univision for the week ended June 24, according to Nielsen. Croatia’s win over Denmark Sunday won 6.16 million viewers via Fox broadcast and streaming services, and Russia’s win over Spain on the same day drew nearly 5.38 million via the same sources.

Both companies have been hindered by conditions beyond their control. Russia’s hosting of the World Cup means the games can air in early morning, rather than in primetime. The American team failed to qualify, leaving US audiences without a home team for which to root. And both companies are World Cup newcomers, which means audiences haven’t considered them a natural place to turn to watch the extravaganza.

TV executives will say isolating linear-TV viewership of sports events is unfair, given their growing digital audience. But it’s the TV viewing that generates the biggest audience in any moment and the venue that commands the highest rates from advertisers. NBCU earlier this year revealed that it guaranteed advertisers a “total” viewership across broadcast, cable and digital. Bloomberg reported in June that Fox had reduced its World Cup ratings guarantees to advertisers.

As the announcement of the 2018 Emmy Award nominations loom next week, the Television Academy is finalizing an eight-year deal with the Big Four networks for rights to the annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony.

The big hurdle that remains is not financial but the insistence by ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox that they gain more flexibility with the three-hour telecast, and that likely means shifting some of lower-profile awards out of the live ceremony. This is always a touchy subject for any major awards telecast because the various constituencies of the creative community have traditionally balked at moves that would appear to diminish the contributions of writers, directors and others in such categories as limited series, made-for-TV movies, variety-talk and variety-comedy.

Executives with the TV Academy, networks and others are just starting the outreach to discuss options for the telecast with representatives from the DGA, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA. The guilds have some sway over the process because they traditionally grant residual waivers for clips shown during the ceremony. Without those waivers, the cost of producing the Emmy telecast would grow dramatically.

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Netflix has ordered a drama set in the world of Mexican billionaires titled “Monarca.”

The series, which was originally in development at ABC back in 2015, is described as a high stakes, multi-generational family saga about a tequila-born Mexican business empire, and the battle that ensues when a member of the family decides to fight the dirty system her family helped create. The series will go into production this fall and is slated to debut in 2019.

Starring Irene Azuela and Juan Manuel Bernal, “Monarca” is being produced by Salma Hayek’s Ventanarosa, Lemon Studios, and Michael McDonald from Stearns Castle. The series was created by Diego Gutierrez who will also serve as showrunner, and is written by Fernando Rovzar, Julia Denis, Ana Sofia Clerici, and Sandra Garcia Velten.

“I’m extremely excited to partner with Netflix, and to be working with amazing Mexican talent in front of and behind the camera,” Hayek said. “We are proud to show Mexico as a vibrant, sophisticated and culturally rich nation, fighting to control its own destiny.”