ACC’s CW Deal Underlines RSNs’ Diminishing Importance
Last week, the ACC and CW announced a new deal to air 50 games across football, men’s and women’s basketball this upcoming season.
While the financials of the arrangement weren’t announced, the development is a major upgrade for all parties. For the CW, the network adds valuable sports inventory to grow its footprint there. For the ACC, this represents a major development that’s potentially more valuable than the extra revenue from the games themselves.
For years, most of the league’s football and basketball inventory has existed on the ESPN family of networks (including ABC). But plenty of the “lesser” games instead received regional pick-up via Raycom distribution arrangements with Diamond Sports’ Bally Sports RSNs — until news broke in June that the arrangement was officially dead.
Many ACC fans though the weekly question of “what channel is the game on?” would end when the conference launched the ACC Network with ESPN in 2019, under the assumption that all games would either be on the linear cable channel or WatchESPN. But the Raycom deal persisted anyway. And sometimes, having one of the RSNs wasn’t even a guarantee audiences would be able to watch the games in question.
So by moving those contests (still controlled by Raycom) to the CW, the ACC is now getting around that issue entirely. Instead of dealing with increasingly obscure — or not carried — RSNs, those games will now all appear on the CW broadcast network. Virtually every fan gets the CW, and that means more eyeballs on the ACC’s teams by default… which should ultimately mean more dollars for the conference.
Data from iSpot shows that in the first half of 2023, the CW was No. 22 by share of household TV ad impressions, and Inscape reveals the CW was No. 21 by watch-time. That’s more than the respective watch-times for ESPN2, Fox Sports 1 and various other cable sports networks in the timeframe. It all adds up to a great secondary deal for the ACC that’s also indicative of where sports rights appear to be headed in 2023 (and beyond).
Diamond Sports’ ongoing bankruptcy issues have opened the floodgates for teams and leagues/conferences to explore alternatives for local distribution, and many already have.
Last October, the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers launched ClipperVision while also opting to air games on local broadcast network KTLA (a CW network). This offseason, the Utah Jazz moved back to local broadcast games, and — after Diamond dropped its objection — the Phoenix Suns are doing the same.
In baseball, the San Diego Padres and MLB took over broadcasts in late May after Diamond’s Bally Sports missed a payment. Those games are appearing on a mix of MLB streaming options and local broadcast. The Arizona Diamondbacks are making the same move, effective today, and Diamond Sports has nearly missed numerous other payments to baseball clubs this year (and still might before the season is over).
There are still plenty of non-Diamond Sports RSNs in relatively good health — like SNY, YES and MSG in New York, NESN in the New England area, among others. But the writing seems to be on the wall that the era of RSNs is waning. And a mix of direct-to-consumer streaming and local broadcast is the obvious way forward.
We’ve already discussed what that future looks like in this space. Still, it’s interesting to see those dynamics start materializing so quickly.
While the RSN model will largely remain in place at least as long as Diamond Sports exists, it seems there’s a near future where many MLB and NBA teams (and perhaps NHL clubs and college conferences, too) are finding local broadcast reach — particularly through CW affiliates — to be the liferaft they’ve been looking for.
