The Rose Bowl falls in line with CFP expansion, Fox’s World Cup ratings are up and Call of Duty’s new season is set to begin without a streaming partner.
The Rose Bowl falls in line with CFP expansion, Fox’s World Cup ratings are up and Call of Duty’s new season is set to begin without a streaming partner.
Greetings from New York City where Sports Business Journals. Media Innovators Conference continues today. Wednesday was highlighted by Jimmy Pitaro, who hit on a wide range of topics during his appearance. The ESPN chair told the audience to expect ESPN to push for more direct to consumer and digital components in its upcoming rights. Talks with the NBA during his q and a. Pataro also hit on the importance of sports for aggregating live audiences. The possibility of adding NASCAR to ESPN's portfolio, balancing the delivery of linear versus streaming content, the return of Bob Iger as CEO Sports book licensing, and stepping away from Big 10 media rights. If you're not here with us, make sure to check out the highlights on sports business journal.com. Good morning. It's Thursday, December 1st, and this is your SJ Morning buzz cast. I'm David Albright filling in for a Mad Corps. The last remaining obstacle to expanding the college football playoff to 12 teams in the 2024 and 2025 seasons has been cleared.
A source told ESPN on Wednesday night that the Rose Bowl has agreed to terms that will pave the way for the college football playoff to expand in the final two seasons of the current contract. Any more steps toward an expanded playoff are considered to be a formality. As the announcement of the CFP expansion beginning in 2024 is expected to be imminent. After months of haggling getting the Rose Bowl on board loomed as the final step, it needed to amend its contract as the other five so-called contract bowls needed to do in order to accommodate the new system. Ultimately, the Rose Bowl's cooperation loomed as the final barrier and the Pasadena Base Bowl was essentially given an ultimatum this week to agree to terms or risk being shut out of the next television contract, which begins in 2026. The Rose Bowl is one of six bowls that currently rotate as hosts of the CFP semifinals every three years.
The five other Bowls, Fiesta Sugar, peach Cotton, and Orange, and hosts cities for the championship game scheduled to be held after the 2024 and 25 seasons had already agreed to accommodate a new CFP format. The US Iran match at the World Cup averaged to combine 15.5 million viewers across Fox and Telemundo on Tuesday afternoon with Fox delivering just over 12 million in English and Telemundo drawing 3.5 million in Spanish Fox's. 12 million is below the 15.4 million for US England last Friday, but above the 8.3 million for the US Wales Group stage opener, the US Iran match peaked on Fox at 15.6 million. Viewers from 3 45 to 4:00 PM Eastern and DC led all markets for Fox's telecasts with an 8.4 local rating for three US men's national team matches. Fox averaged 11.7 million viewers marking the best English language figure yet for the US in the World Cup Group stage, that's up 10% compared to three US matches on ESPN in 2014, Fox and FS one are averaging 3.1 million viewers for the first 31 matches of the group stage.
That's up 44% from Russia four years ago where you remember the US didn't qualify for the tournament points. BET will be the first US sports book to integrate the PGA Tour's. Full menu of inplay bets into its app next year as part of an expansion of its deal with the tour data distributor IMG Arena, creating a product expected to offer about 35,000 betting opportunities per tournament with betters able to place bets on all shots by every player using real time data delivered through IMG Arena's Golf event center points. BET will offer a range of bets including score on the next hole, number of puts on the next hole distance of the longest drive and closest to the pin. The app will also allow users to follow each shot through a live animation and provide live video from two holes at each tour. Event users also get access to historic shot by shot data and stats for each player points.
BET was one of a handful of operators that offered a small sampling of live PGA tour betting last year. It's the only one that so far has taken the plunge to offer the full menu. The sports book said it saw a golf handle increase 23% and live golf handle increase 25% last year. The Call of Duty league is set to head into its new season on Friday without a streaming platform for its matches after a deal with YouTube expired. Following last season reports our Kevin hit Activision Blizzard, which operates the cdl along with the Overwatch League, signed a three year, 160 million media rights pack that has since run its course and now the leagues are without a streaming home for competition. CDL is the first of the Activision Leagues to begin a new season following the expiration of the deal and league officials have yet to announce where this weekend's matches can be viewed.
When signed in early 2020, the deal moved. The ACT Vision leagues away from Amazon owned Twitch and over to Google owned YouTube. The deal saw the average annual value of media rights jump from a reported 45 million annually to just over 53 million. But sources say that both YouTube and Twitch are unwilling to put up the amount of money they have in previous years. We'll close on a programming note as there's just one week left to register for the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Athletics Forum presented by Learfield. The form will be held December 7th and eighth at the Bellagio Resort in Casino in Las Vegas. The event will include 13 conference commissioners on the current and future state of their leagues, and four student athletes who will discuss the challenges and opportunities of being an elite athlete in college athletics. Join us and learn more@intercollegiateathleticsforum.com, and that's your SJ morning buzz cast for Thursday. I hope everyone has a great day and we'll see you back here tomorrow morning.