Jon Wilner of the Mercury News, one of the definitive voices covering the Pac-12 Network, has written a long column about the network and its future.
One of the topics Wilner discusses in his column is the cratering subscriber count for the Pac-12 Network’s national feed. Wilner reports the number at 14.8 million, paling in comparison to its SEC and Big Ten counterparts.
The Pac-12 Network (the national network) now has just 14.8 million subscribers, according to Dec. ’20 estimates provided to the Hotline by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
That figure represents a drop of 17 percent over the past two years, based on S&P data: In Feb. ’19, the national network had 17.9 million subscribers. (At its peak five years ago, it had more than 19 million.)
In comparison, the Big Ten and SEC networks are believed to have more than 50 million subscribers.
For context: the last widely reported batch of carriage numbers we got came two years ago in April of 2019. Of the major networks listed in that report, only four had under 40 million subscribers: BeIN’s Spanish and English networks, ESPN Deportes, and Fox Deportes. The declines across all networks have increased since, but the Pac-12 Network wasn’t exactly decreasing from a place of strength.
(Also putting this out there without comment: a month ago, ESPN+ reported 12.1 million subscribers)
As for the Pac-12 Network’s subscription fee, per Wilner, it checks in at just 13 cents per subscriber. Believe it or not, that’s an increase over three years ago, when the Pac-12 Network was pulling just 11 cents per subscriber.
Additionally, the Pac-12 Network’s “local model,” with region-specific networks existing in all of the conference’s markets, has seemingly been more of a bust than expected. The local networks have a combined subscription base of just 8.5 million people, and while the carriage fees for those regional networks are higher than the national network (ranging from between 52 cents for Oregon’s network to 98 cents for Washington’s network), their viability is blunted by the lack of carriage.
Payouts for the networks have also failed to live up to expectations. In 2018, schools received an estimated $2,666,667 apiece from the Pac-12 Networks, which was then the highest payout since the launch nearly a decade ago. Those payouts increased by roughly 100 grand in 2019, up to $2,789,583, while 2020 payouts are still unavailable. At the 2012 launch, Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott estimated the low end of payouts at between $3 and $5 million, a bar that still hasn’t been reached after all these years.
The conference has plenty of issues to deal with going forward, and nearly all of them circle around their media operations. Only time will tell if the Pac-12 can get something done that helps in the short term as well as the long term, or if they’ll have to dangle in the wind until their TV contracts with ESPN and Fox expire in the summer of 2024.
