4. Get rid of Golf Channel, and rebrand it NBCSN2
There are a few reasons why this wouldn’t work, and a few why it totally would, so let’s work this out together before I get whacked by a thousand wedges.
Having a dedicated, sport-specific channel can be a lucrative asset. NFL Network and MLB Network have flourished with a single-sport model, but both of those networks are owned and operated by the leagues they cover. Tennis Channel is independently owned and has an odd existence as of late, going from sharing coverage windows of majors to securing primary rights to the French Open to eliminating all live coverage from the U.S. Open because of costs.
Single-sport stations are a mixed bag, to say the least.
While NBC surely has a cozy rights and access partnership with the PGA Tour, they’re cramming all their other sports—especially on the weekends—on NBCSN to feature wall-to-wall golf coverage on a network rarely able to show meaningful weekend golf.
That said, Golf Channel is doing just fine, relatively speaking, boasting the highest ratings the network has ever had in July — take that, struggling Tiger Woods — with more than 112,000 viewers per minute, per an NBC release. That same release also explained the real, and certainly viable, reason for Golf Channel to exist.
Additionally, Golf Channel retained its status in July as No. 1 most-affluent network in all of television with the highest median household income for total day viewership (No. 2 VH1 Classic, No. 3 CNBC round out the top three networks for this metric). Golf Channel also was the No. 1 most-affluent network in all of television in primetime (No. 2 VH1 Classic, No. 3 E! Entertainment).
Rich people like golf, so if 100,000 people are watching Golf Channel, that audience is more valuable to certain we-sell-stuff-to-rich-people sponsors than twice that audience watching cartoons or reruns of Big Bang Theory on another network.
Just to be clear, specifically to those rich people who like golf, I’m not trying to take any of the golf away from you. Live events are imperative for networks to survive these days, but instead of just tee-to-green golf coverage, and more golf studio programming than anyone could possibly care to watch, NBC could benefit from packaging golf with other, more opulent sports to create a robust multi-sport offering without alienating the core golf audience.
On Sunday, August 16, the top-rated sports program on cable TV was the NASCAR Sprint Cup race on NBCSN that, per SportsTVRatings, average more than 4.25 million viewers for the race and more than 2.5 million for pre-and-post race coverage. The next highest-rated show on NBCSN was the premier of Mobsteel—a Detroit-based car restoration original program that benefited from the day’s NASCAR lead-in to nearly one million viewers.
The Chelsea-Manchester City EPL match on NBCSN captured 818,000 viewers that morning, with two Premier League studio shows averaging 450,000 in the same coverage block.
The top-rated show on Golf Channel that day was Live from the PGA Championship, which began immediately after Jason Day won the PGA, and had 310,000 viewers. The preview show that morning had 168,000 viewers, both better numbers than the average audience for Golf Channel, but nowhere near what NASCAR or the EPL pull in on NBCSN.
Which of those three sports should have a dedicated network again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viR0Hle16yA
The right answer is none of them. NASCAR has been doing well on NBCSN, even when juxtaposed with foreign soccer matches that are surely not the same target demographic for the network. The EPL is huge business for NBC, even if the ratings rarely crack one million viewers for most matches.
NBC has been gobbling up rights to second-tier sports for some time to put on NBCSN, but with the Olympics coming next year, there will be a sharp uptick in interest for the sports most Americans only care about every four years. There’s already been a ton of Olympic-style programming NBC this summer, but having one cable network dedicated to golf and another dedicated to everything else — even with the buoyed ratings of NBC and the ability to use Universal Sports for others — seems like a wasted opportunity.
If I were in charge for a day, I would reach out to smaller niche groups like, say, the Tennis Channel — despite a three-year battle with Comcast on coverage tiers — to pitch a combined lifestyles of the rich and sportsy home for fans of golf, tennis, yachting, if that’s actually a thing, equestrian and horse racing, especially in the lead up to the Triple Crown, and other sports of that ilk and turn the moderately successful and sustainable Golf Channel into something more robust for NBC.
Truth be told, I wouldn’t put any less golf on the network. I would simply buoy existing golf coverage with more of the sports NBC seems to be cramming on NBCSN.
Now, having said that, NBCSN barely has enough daily programming during the week to survive the from one weekend to the next. Thursday’s offerings include three hunting shows, a fishing program and something called Fisher’s ATV Adventures. Adding another “general sports” network could be on the level of Fox Sports 2, and nobody at NBC wants that. And yet, would first-round coverage of The Barclays do any worse if instead of being on the Golf Channel it was on a network called NBCSN2?
What if we turned the 2 into a $ instead and used the tag: Where Rich People Play? Thank me later, NBC.
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