CBS dived back into the sports broadcast end zone late Monday night, yanking the National Football League away from NBC by reaching agreement on a $4 billion, eight-year deal to televise the American Football Conference package of telecasts long held by the Peacock web.
The NFL is expected to make a formal announcement today confirming CBS's deal to pay the NFL $500 million annually in a pact beginning next season. The Eye web thus wins back a piece of the pro pigskin derby that it had lost when Fox outbid CBS for the National Football Conference package after the 1993 season.
Fox retained its NFC rights earlier Monday by settling on an eight-year, $4.4 billion pact -- a 26% increase over what it paid the NFL four years before. Its association with pro football is widely credited with turning the News Corp.-owned web into a legitimate challenger to the domain of NBC, ABC and CBS.
NBC, meanwhile, is said to have passed on renewing its AFC contract, concentrating efforts instead on its hope of snaring the "Monday Night Football" franchise away from ABC, which has held those rights since the inception of Monday games. The fate of that package is yet to be decided.
Likewise in limbo is a Sunday night NFL package that has been split by ESPN and TNT in recent years. It's expected that the arrangement with those cablenets will continue.
Even moreso than CBS and Fox, the biggest winner Monday night was the NFL itself, which used its position as an American sports institution to send its rights fees skyrocketing. CBS's $500 million-per-season pact is more than double the $217 million paid out by NBC in the last long-term arrangement.
Indeed, as part of both the CBS and Fox deals, the NFL holds the option to reopen the contracts after five years to negotiate potentially higher payments prior to the 2003 season. Translated, the NFL can't help but reap an increased windfall three years before the deals expire.
Fox has lost money on its NFL investment, though it more than made up for the financial hit in increased cache and promotional advantages for its primetime sked; CBS is unlikely to come out in the black, either.
But the earlier loss of football did incalculable damage to CBS's image and stature, helping lead to the loss of key affiliates and knocking it from its perch as a leader in sports broadcasting.
By putting itself back in the pro football picture, CBS is in position to recapture many of the young adult viewers it all but froze out when it was outbid by the younger, hungrier Fox. In addition, CBS Corp. owns seven TV stations in AFC markets, making that package all the more attractive and necessary for the network.
As part of its agreement with the NFL, Fox will also show three Super Bowls, including two in its first five years of its deal, starting with the Jan. 31, 1999 contest in Miami.
In an increasingly fragmented TV market, the NFL remains one of the few dependable ways to deliver males in the all-important 18-49 demo. So key is that draw that the NFL is able to extract the huge fee increases despite steady drops in its ratings in recent years.
John Dempsey and Rich Katz in New York contributed to this report.
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