Marquee College Sporting Events Move To Cable.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/23/business/la-fi-ct-turner-20100423

CBS cuts in Turner on NCAA basketball tournament

Under the new $10.8-billion deal, every tournament game will be on TV and production costs will be shared between the two broadcasters.

The great programming migration to cable continues.

Turner Broadcasting, just one week after signing former NBC late-night host Conan O'Brien, has teamed up with CBS in a 14-year, $10.8-billion deal for television and Internet rights to the immensely popular NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament.

The move comes as broadcast television struggles with rising programming costs and greater competition for viewers and advertisers. Although the NCAA tournament is a strong performer for CBS, the costs of covering the games were starting to outweigh the benefits for the network. By sharing the load with Turner, CBS can hold on to a big chunk of a marquee event with fewer financial risks.

With many of its big postseason games now headed to cable, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. joins Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Assn. in going where the money is. Next year, most of the major bowl games and college football championship will be on ESPN, formerly mainstays of the networks.

Both ESPN and Fox Broadcasting made a run at the NCAA tournament, but CBS and Turner were always the front-runners. The two broadcasters had initially discussed teaming up on a bid for the event last fall and are already partners on PGA golf.

Although CBS' previous $6-billion deal ran through 2014, the NCAA had the option after this year's tournament to void it. CBS wasn't opposed to the NCAA exercising that option because, under the terms of the current contract, its rights fees were set to shoot up dramatically in future years.

The new deal "puts CBS on solid financial footing for lasting profitability," said CBS Sports President Sean McManus. If a new pact had not been struck it would have been "very challenging" for the network, he said.

Under the deal, Turner will pay the NCAA the $10.8 billion over the term of the deal and CBS will pay Turner its share. CBS also acquires some protection against potential losses. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Turner parent Time Warner Inc., any losses greater than $670 million suffered by CBS will be covered by Turner.

For the first five years of the deal, TBS will carry first- and second-round games of the tournament, then in 2016 TBS will start to alternate coverage of the Final Four weekend and championship game with CBS. Overall, Turner will have about 65% of the tournament's games on its cable channels TBS, TNT and TruTV over the life of the contract.

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Sorry if this has been posted before or if it's old news, but this is very interesting and I'm posing some rather relevant questions:

And it sounds like if you want to watch sports in this decade, you're gonna have to get cable. What does all this mean for network television, where big ticket sporting events like the the BCS Bowl(now exclusively an ESPN event) and The Final Four(after 2016 swapping it every other year with CBS) move exclusively to cable? The only good thing about the TBS deal is that every game will be on television now instead of CBS cutting into East/West coast feeds for each other's games. All one has to do to find their school that they are rooting for in the playoffs is to look at the programming schedule instead of hoping/praying that CBS won't annoy the piss out of you by cutting into you're already-in-progress game to cover the last minute of some Ivy League school's playoff game.

It also makes me wonder whether The Super Bowl(which drew in an audience bigger than the M*A*S*H finale in February) and the NBA Finals are gonna make a move to cable this decade as well? Sporting events are huge draws for network television. Without them, the ratings across the board suck more often than not. CBS didn't fully recover from losing NFL Football until Les Moonves came in. And NBC, although they have Sunday Night Football and the Super Bowl back,(IIRC) went for one year without the NBA and the NFL. Couple that with terrible program development, and NBC's been in the toilet ever since.

I wonder if this was part of TBS' plan in wooing Conan O'Brien all along? Hoping that male sports auds will find him appealing after the playoff games air on their network as a lead-in to his show?

Will this lead to the ultimate death kneel for network, over-the-air, free television?