Robert A. Iger
Analyst · Nomura
Well, we look at each package as available individually with an eye toward literally what kind of value we think it's going to drive, whether its going to support the brand, what kind of volume are we talking about in terms of number of hours, what will the ratings be, can we convert to advertising and how can we better serve our customers, which are both the multichannel distributors, and ultimately, end-users, the viewers. The NFL is a good example. There's no question that was an expensive deal. And as I was saying, using the word discipline, I was thinking about the cost of -- to us of extending that deal. But what we saw when we did that was, first of all, long-term deal that takes us to 2021. That's tremendous certainty. We know we have certainty in terms of quality of the product and the games and the interest in those from our viewers and our distributors and advertisers, by the way. And we have the ability to program more than 500 more hours of NFL programming kind of annualized. So when we added all of that up and we looked at the growth trajectory of those rights fess, we concluded that if there's anything that creates value for ESPN, it's the NFL. And so we apply similar logic, the college football and college basketball package that we bought represent quality programming, huge local interest in those. You know if you've gone to a college that has a decent sports team how loyal you tend to be as a viewer, to that team, those teams, again, long-term deals. And the other thing that we've got gained in a lot of these deals is multi-platform capabilities. So it grows our customer engagement, and that's a big deal. The growth of ESPN.com, which I cited in my earnings comments, the use of smart mobile devices, in some cases, international rights, these are all very, very valuable. Those that we -- those sports that we did not get interestingly enough, the World Cup and the Olympics, while there's no question, they're high-quality. They don't occur every year. They occur for a short period of time. And we didn't believe that we could justify the kind of rights that ultimately others pay for it because it didn't really meet the standards based on the cost those rights were going to amount to, to us that we've adhered to for these other packages.