PGA Tour’s New TV Deal Indicates Value of Sports Rights Continues to Grow

While media executives continue to have a nearly insatiable appetite for live sports, television, cable, the internet and digital media are changing so fast that the PGA Tour did not want to take a chance on how things would look in 2022, Anderson said.

“This marketplace, consumption habits and platforms, is changing so rapidly that you can’t really make any assumptions about pace of change,” he added.

One of the bigger unknowns in sports broadcasting is CBS’s strategy, and its future. CBS recently merged with Viacom and replaced its chief executive. Its stock has been tumbling since a poor earnings report two weeks ago, and the new ViacomCBS is much smaller than its competitors like NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, and ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company.

It has also lost one of its most profitable sports rights properties.

In December, CBS said it pulled out of rights negotiations for the Southeastern Conference’s game of the week in football, which will go to Disney beginning in 2023. But in a surprise, CBS has won the rights to show Champions League games starting next year, despite having almost no history showing soccer.

Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, said in an interview that golf was a “foundational sport” for CBS, and the company’s most important property from April to September — from the end of the college basketball season to the beginning of the football season.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/sports/golf/pga-tour-tv-deal.html