Premier League Coverage Pays Off for NBC

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/sports/soccer/premier-league-coverage-pays-off-for-nbc.html

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STAMFORD, Conn. — It was teatime here in NBC’s Studio 3 as Liverpool began playing Southampton in England’s Premier League on Sept. 21.

“How stereotypical,” said Rebecca Lowe, the host of “Premier League Live,” referring to drinking tea as she held a full Royal Wentworth cup.

 Lowe is part of the pervasive British flavor of the NBC Sports Group’s coverage of Premier League soccer, which began last month under a three-year contract. Her tea-drinking co-analysts that day, Robbie Earle and Robbie Mustoe, former players, are also British. All the games are produced in England by Sky Sports, BT Sport or the league, and are called by British announcers. Only the analyst Kyle Martino, a former Major League Soccer player who joins Lowe, Earle and Mustoe in the studio, is American.

In addition to the analysts’ expertise, NBC might be banking on the authenticity and familiarity that British voices and productions bring to the Premier League as the soundtrack for its coverage. But the network has taken an American approach to promoting the group, with billboards in Times Square and a humorous video starring the actor Jason Sudeikis as an American coach in England who does not know the rules of the game. The video promotion has been viewed online by more than 5.7 million visitors.

Lowe was tickled that she has delivered Premier League reports Sundays on NBC’s “Football Night in America” pregame show, bringing Wayne Rooney to an audience far more familiar with Dan Rooney.

“I’ve never been with a company that has invested so much on marketing,” said Lowe, who previously worked for ESPN U.K. and the BBC.

So far, the formula is working. NBCSN’s 22 telecasts have been seen by an average of 391,000 viewers, 70 percent better than the average game last season on Fox Soccer, which carried most of the games, and ESPN and ESPN2, which broadcast about one game a week in a licensing deal. NBCSN, however, has about twice as many subscribers as Fox Soccer. More important, at least to NBC, is that NBCSN’s daily viewership from Aug. 17 to Sept. 22 swelled 67 percent, to 77,000 viewers.

That is still a fraction of ESPN’s 1.2 million in that period and fewer than the month-old Fox Sports 1’s 121,000. But the highs are getting higher. Last Sunday afternoon, 852,000 viewers watched Manchester City trounce Manchester United, 4-1, in one of the Premier League’s marquee early-season matches. That was the biggest audience so far on NBCSN.

John Guppy, a veteran soccer executive who founded Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing, said, “What they’ve done — and it’s not that Fox didn’t do it, but maybe it comes across more directly to consumers — is they’ve made the Premier League feel special and important.”

NBCSN has become the NBC Sports Group’s Premier League centerpiece, filling as many as 40 hours a week on the cable network. Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said the kickoff times of Premier League games, as early as 7:45 a.m. on Saturdays on the East Coast, had helped. Even the day’s latest matches start before American football games begin to dominate the channel lineup.

“They’re largely in windows without live sports,” Lazarus said. “It’s not totally unencumbered, with college football Saturday afternoon and the N.F.L. on Sunday. But the beauty of this league is that it goes from August to May.”

The Premier League’s success has helped Major League Soccer, which also has games on NBCSN. Viewership of the eight M.L.S. games on the network since coverage of the Premier League began on NBCSN has jumped 60 percent, and the number of unique visitors to M.L.S. games streamed by NBC has soared 322 percent. All of that should help M.L.S. in talks to extend its contract beyond next season.

For the NBC suite of networks, the Premier League was a property to covet. NBC wanted to capitalize on the league’s popularity and to breathe oxygen into NBCSN, which will show 154 of the 196 games that the NBC family of networks is televising; NBC is showing 21 games this season, with others on CNBC, USA, Telemundo and Mun2.

Another 184 games, which are not being televised, are available free at Premier League Extra Time, a service available to cable, satellite and telephone subscribers. The entire season of 380 games is being streamed on NBC Sports Live Extra.

Lazarus is politic enough not to declare that NBCSN’s identity has quickly become tied inextricably to the Premier League. That would irk other leagues it carries or longtime properties, like the Tour de France. NBCSN also carries the Olympics every two years.

Still, during an interview here at NBC Sports international broadcast center, Lazarus said: “It’s part of our definition, but you have to put it up with the N.H.L. This adds another pillar product to go with the N.H.L., and I think Nascar will be the third.”

NBC is paying the Premier League $250 million over three years, still triple what Fox Soccer was paying annually. NBC’s winning bid defeated one made jointly by Fox Soccer and ESPN. Fox Soccer folded and became FXX, an entertainment channel, but plans were in place during the bidding process to show Premier League games on Fox Sports 1.

Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s chief executive, said in an interview last week that some American club owners were nervous about shifting the United States rights to NBC.

“But now they’re saying it’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” he said.  

Still, John Henry, the owner of Liverpool, one of the Premier League’s cornerstone clubs, said he had no skittishness about selling the league’s rights to NBC. “I thought Fox and ESPN did a great job,” he said in an e-mail message, “but I knew NBC was serious about their commitment, and they have done everything right thus far.”

 For any network that shows soccer, one large financial oddity exists: there are no commercial breaks during the games — except for advertisers’ names and logos that poke out of the corner score boxes during play.

That is why NBCSN is awash in Premier League programming: pregame, halftime, postgame studio shows; game replays,  previews, reviews and news shows; and the weekly “Manchester Mondays.” Some of it is seen in the wee hours, especially before games on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.

Seth Winter, the executive vice president of sales for NBC Sports, said improved viewership and the Premier League’s increasing appeal to young, affluent viewers 18 to 49 has helped advertisement sales.

 The network’s expenses are relatively modest: it does not produce the games it televises — paying only satellite access fees — and sends announcers to only two of the six games it shows each week.

Mark Noonan, a former executive at the United States Soccer Federation and Major League Soccer, said that NBC stepped into the Premier League at an appropriate moment, with a young, multicultural audience enamored with world sport.

“I don’t even think it’s reached  a tipping point,” he said. “NBC’s timing couldn’t be better.”