“Last week, NASCAR said goodbye to ESPN and entered into a new lucrative 10-year agreement with the up-and-coming NBC Sports Network,” Benjamin Chance writes at Breitbart Sports:
According to the Sports Business Daily, the “landmark” deal, which gives NBC the exclusive broadcasting rights to 20 Sprint Cup Series races–ESPN’s entire portfolio plus three from Turner Sports, cost $4.4 billion.
While ESPN and Turner Sports had an “exclusive negotiating window” with NASCAR, it closed before the parties were able to “finalize extensions.” Sources told the Sports Business Daily that despite ESPN and Turner having expressed an interest in retaining NASCAR, both were “unwilling to match” NBC’s offer. ESPN and Turner Sports have one year remaining on their current contracts, and therefore NBC’s NASCAR programming will not begin until the 2015 season. ESPN and Turner reportedly felt $4 billion was too high a price to pay for NASCAR’s rights.
As a result of this new deal, after 2014 NASCAR fans will be dividing their viewership exclusively between two networks, NBC and FOX. Both networks plan to harness NASCAR’s popularity to promote their emerging sports channels.
At the start of the year, Al Gore declared “Mission Accomplished” to radical environmentalism by cashing out to Big Oil. Similarly, if NBC is spending plenty of fossil fuel and electricity to cover NASCAR, which itself uses plenty of fossil fuel and electricity, their networks won’t be running any more enviro-doomsday lectures and they’ll stop hectoring the rest of us to turn our power off…right?
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