Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on everything that happens off the field and away from the court. I know the political world—and broader civilization, really—is focused on this week’s Republican National Convention and Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate. But it’s MLB All-Star week here at The Varsity! Happy Home Run Derby Day to all who celebrate.

I’m coming to you live from Arlington, Texas, the home of tonight’s festivities and tomorrow’s midsummer classic. Thus far, every conversation around here has coalesced around the slow but irreversible demise of the regional sports network business. Club executives are finally coming to the realization that the local media revenue they’ve long counted on is, with the exception of a few large markets, deeply imperiled. They need to find new ways to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile, a lot of the kibitzing at various sponsor parties yesterday pertained to the NBA board of governors meeting tomorrow, in Las Vegas, where the league is set to approve media deals with Amazon, Disney, and NBCUniversal. I’ll have more down below on David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery’s strategy for deploying the company’s matching rights.

One more reminder to stop forwarding these emails to your deep-pocketed friends and colleagues, who can certainly afford to subscribe to Puck. The next person caught red-handed will be forced to participate in a clinical trial for Marchand’s new semaglutide alternative.

1. Charter-Disney deal, redux: When Charter closed its contentious deal with Disney, last September, the distributor received a ton of praise for convincing the executives in Burbank to allow their ad-supported apps—Disney+ in Spectrum TV Select, and ESPN+ in Spectrum TV Select Plus—on to the company’s systems. But several sources have told me that the Disney streaming products have performed poorly so far for Charter, with take rate for both apps way down in the single digits. Sure, it’s early days, and the very notion of cable operators offering streaming apps is likely still unfamiliar to subscribers. And yes, Charter hasn’t really marketed them to consumers, though I expect those efforts to ramp up when it adds more services, like Paramount+ (later this year) and ESPN Flagship (next year). But it’s also possible that streaming is just simply not a good substitute for the cable bundle, especially among older subscribers. If these numbers stay low, they have the potential to swing negotiating leverage in carriage battles with distributors back to the programmers.
2. Roku’s MLB Season: This morning, I caught up with two Roku executives to talk about their package of Sunday morning MLB games—part of the three-year, $30 million deal that the company signed in May—and what that means for future dealflow. Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

   John Ourand: How should other leagues view this MLB deal?

   Joe Franzetta, head of sports for Roku Media: There are always going to be selective opportunities that make sense for us to consider. Live packages make sense either because we think there’s higher viewer demand, or because the opportunity can drive new viewers to our platform. We’re an ad-supported platform, so we have sponsor and advertiser demand and we can create unique packages.

   David Eilenberg, head of content Roku Media: This is the oldest lesson in the history of TV, but dayparting [the practice of breaking the schedule into segments, and tailoring programming to each segment] is really important. The Sunday morning window has been a real virtue of the MLB package as well.

   How did the deal come about?

   Franzetta: We were talking initially about building an MLB Zone. We already had NFL Zone and NBA Zone launched, and it was a natural conversation to have with MLB. They introduced the concept of the package of games, which was a natural fit. So the partnership went from inception to execution in a relatively short period of time. Kudos to those guys for seeing the vision of this overall comprehensive one-stop shop.

   People tend to focus on the games. But from our perspective, it’s important to think about it in the context of our MLB Zone, which is part of our sports zone. MLB Zone has every game integrated into it. We have clips and highlights from every single game. We have other V.O.D. content that MLB provides.

   What’s been the most memorable game so far?

   Franzetta: When you get a rabid fan base, you see things really pop. We had a Phillies-Diamondback game, and the Phillies fans showed up in strong numbers. And so that was kind of an aha moment in terms of the way it brings new fans to Roku.

3. The Copa disaster: One of the major storylines emerging from yesterday’s drama-filled Copa America finals, where kickoff was delayed by more than an hour after thousands of ticketless fans tried to sneak into the stadium, was whether the North American nations can manage the World Cup in two years. I contacted a couple of sports business executives, and they placed blame squarely on the shoulders of the tournament’s organizer, CONMEBOL, particularly with regard to the security breach at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.

   One executive was especially surprised that CONMEBOL didn’t set up a security perimeter to keep ticketless fans away from the stadium. “FIFA will set up those perimeters,” this person told me. “That Miami stadium hosts Super Bowls; it knows how to handle big events.” There were also problems with the telecast. The World Feed—the subject of constant complaints throughout the tournament—actually went down during the game, forcing Fox to rely on a secondary feed. Plus, my social channels were filled with complaints about the broadcast’s sound quality…

4. What to do with the MLB Draft: Sure, MLB should be congratulated for turning its annual draft into a thing—albeit a much, much smaller thing than the NFL and the NBA’s own amateur selection events. On Sunday night, the league hosted 2,000 fans in the 117-year-old Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth. ESPN and MLB Network provided live national coverage, which should draw around 700,000 viewers combined, if previous years are any indication. The league also ensured that it didn’t create any internal competition for the draft in the form of live games or exhibitions.

   Even still, the draft faded into the woodwork—one more event during a packed All-Star Game weekend. Some are now suggesting that the league should implement even more changes to put the event on a steeper growth trajectory. The proposal that makes the most sense to me is moving the draft to Omaha, and holding the draft in conjunction with the College World Series. After all, college baseball fans will be more likely to follow the draft than All-Star week attendees. (Tellingly, only six draftees attended on Sunday.) For now, MLB is not considering this move, but it should.

5. The sports doc trend continues: I had a meeting with a streaming executive in Dallas, and we laughed about how often the executive gets pitched on all-access Drive to Survive-style documentaries. I keep waiting for the doc market to crash, and yet this genre appears to be as popular as ever. To wit: Receiver, the NFL Films/Omaha Productions unofficial spinoff of Quarterback, has been the top Netflix show in the U.S. for four consecutive days. America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader doc series, has been in Netflix’s top 10 for four consecutive weeks. Sprint, the pre-Olympics track and field series, was number six on Netflix in the U.S. last week. There’s also Hard Knocks Offseason, which is currently the third-most-watched series on Max. ESPN+ renewed Full Court Press, the Caitlin Clark narrative doc, for another year.

   Streamers have long preferred sports docs because they capture the popularity and enthusiasm of sports fandoms at a fraction of the cost of broadcast rights. Given the exorbitant and growing cost of league rights, this genre should only continue to proliferate.

The NBA rights deal, which was negotiated interminably, will finally kick into gear tomorrow when the league’s board of governors approves Disney’s $2.6 billion “A” package, the NBC deal, and Amazon’s $1.8 billion “C” package. This ratification will start the clock on WBD’s five-day window to make a counteroffer via those matching rights. Which, of course, isn’t a straightforward affair since WBD can’t actually match NBC’s two primetime broadcast windows per week (Zaz and TNT Sports C.E.O. Luis Silberwasser never reached out to any executives from CBS or Fox, according to multiple sources, to explore a joint venture) or the global streaming reach of Amazon’s Prime product. (And, some would argue, the debt-strapped company shouldn’t be paying around $2 billion per year for anything.)

One other fascinating road not traveled: Back in the spring, shortly after WBD’s exclusive negotiating window ended, executives with Google’s YouTube approached WBD to try to fashion a joint bid. YouTube, after all, had been in the mix to pick up the package that eventually went to Amazon, and its executives wanted a way back into the deal. Talks never got particularly serious, but they didn’t die down, either. (Of note, Zaslav and YouTube C.E.O. Neal Mohan met at Sun Valley last week. Presumably the NBA auction came up.) WBD appears certain to use its matching rights on Amazon’s bid, but sources said it’s expected to go it alone.

The crux of WBD’s pitch is that its own Max streaming service, combined with its linear TV channels, should be enough to match Amazon’s streaming ambitions. Max has around 100 million worldwide subscribers. Prime Video, of course, has double that amount, and it’s unlikely that the NBA will make it easy for WBD to use its matching rights. NBA executives have been sitting on these deals for several weeks (“They’re with the lawyers,” has been a common refrain since the spring) and essentially have moved on from TNT, its partner since the 1980s, whose deal expires after next season.

As it waited out the NBA auction process, WBD cut several rights deals—the Big East, French Open, College Football Playoff, etcetera—and made moves to turn TruTV into even more of a sports channel. WBD executives insist that they would have made those deals even if they’d won the NBA rights. But many in the industry suspect that Zaslav and Silberwasser are simply trying to save face and show that they are open for business.

[Ed note: While it’s true that soccer doesn’t have the same ad breaks as baseball, basketball, or football, networks still can charge healthy rates for ads around pregame, halftime, and postgame shows. Soccer’s younger audience, of course, is particularly appealing to advertisers.]

On the ESPYs schedule: “Why did the ESPYs air last Thursday instead of its usual slot the night after the MLB All-Star Game?” —A Varsity subscriber

[Ed note: The Republican National Convention is this week, and ABC has obligations.]

On the Hemingway shout-out for The Varsity’s headline writers: “For Whom Shell Tolls? The English major may think it’s Hemingway. The music people cite Metallica!” —An entertainment executive

[Ed note: And here I was trying to enlighten our industry… defenestrate, leitmotif, sangfroid… and yet, all I hear about is the grin-fucking!]