Sometimes more than a good thing may not be great.
With only days before the start of the NCAA annual basketball tournament – and popular and lucrative – March Madness, the senior managers of Paramount CBS Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT SPORTS seemed to be skeptical about the potential to extend the field to make more teams participate in future editions.
“No one wants to do anything that will have a negative impact on the tournament, and that’s where the accent is located,” said David Berson, president and chief executive officer of CBS Sports, in comment on Tuesday.
And yet, he recognized that there had been conversations between media societies and NCAA as to whether such movements would be in the best interest of fans, sport and games. CBS and TNT, TBS and TRUTV shared custody NCAA March Madness Tournament since 2011. Companies Continue to share property rights until 2032 in an agreement worth $ 8.8. billions that was set in 2016.
In an interview with CBS Sports at the end of FebruaryDan Gavitt, main vice-president of NCAA basketball, warned that, while the committees studied the prospect of expanding the event: “It is certainly not a fact. The recommendation of not The expansion of tournaments is absolutely a potential result here in the short term. »»
And yet, if there was a time when expansion could make sense, it would now be. Sports are considered to be one of the few properties that can continue to win the broad public simultaneous that advertisers and distributors continue to seek in the streaming era. While more unique viewers are converting to the use of streaming services, they are watching programs more and more at times of their own choice, making a big crowd more difficult to spray – and the media business economy more difficult to maintain.
However, it is to be feared that a longer tournament can not generate the engagement that leaders would like. The addition of more teams could mean starting the madness of March earlier than what has become the norm. This would require additional changes in programming hours, production teams and sports teams on the air – and a kind of guarantee that advertisers thought that previous game cycles deserve to be supported.
“If this is something that makes sense for fans and the tournament,” said Luis Silberwasser, CEO of TNT Sports, “we will support each other.”