I read somewhere that OLN has less than one-tenth the $$ value of major-sports contracts compared to ESPN & other major sports broadcastors.
And no one would mistake the incoming corporate owner of OLN, Versus Broadcasting, with Fox Sports in the early '90s and the way it bought its way in with $$billions in securing the NFL rights.
Since the OLN made its name and built the network around the Tour de France platform, the following article from the NYT may give you some pause.
Their evening TDF recap serves as the lead-in for their prime-time lineup. A 47% drop in ratings of the TDF coverage compared to years past does not bode well for steering casual, non-pool players to watch KT's productions.
I am more sad for the state of cycling in general with its huge doping scandal and no obvious dominant rider as Lance had been in the last seven years.
Without Lance Armstrong there are no coattails for the rest of the OLN sports lineup to ride on.
Here is the article in today's NYT:
July 7, 2006
Sports Media and Business
OLN Sizing Up Impact of the Post-Lance Era
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
When OLN acquired the rights to the Tour de France in 2001, Lance Armstrong had already won two in a row. As he won each of the next five, OLN built its coverage increasingly around him. He was the "cyclysm," the star of "The Lance Chronicles," the face of a channel emerging from its hunting and fishing roots, the star of a network without any others.
• Because of cycling's low profile in the United States, he dominated his sport more than Michael Jordan did pro basketball and Tiger Woods does golf. For casual viewers, there was no other face of cycling than Lance.
Now that Armstrong is in retirement, his impact on OLN is even clearer now that the network must rely on possible American successors whose first names don't resonate like Lance: Levi, George and Floyd.
Through the first four stages, viewership of OLN's live Tour coverage has tumbled 49 percent to 207,544 people. Combined viewership of the live show and its daily repeats has plunged by 47 percent to 749,472. At the same time, online traffic at olntv.com has spiked with the addition of more video.
A further look at past trends shows that viewership for the first four days swelled by 135 percent, from 171,975 in 2002 to 403,802 last year.
If the downward pattern continues through the Tour's end, Armstrong's impact will exceed what happened to the N.B.A. finals after Jordan's first two retirements. In 1994, viewership of the Knicks-Houston series tumbled 37 percent to 17.3 million. In 1999, the Knicks-Spurs finals slumped by 45 percent to 16 million. The league has not approached the Jordan peaks, leading to the obvious conclusion that the Airness Era was a great statistical aberration as, almost certainly, the Armstrong years were
Gavin Harvey, the president of OLN, said the Tour's decline in viewership through Stage 4 "is within the range of where we thought it would be."
"We've talked about this for two years, both the Lance effect and the post-Lance era," he said.
Armstrong's absence is compounded by the Spanish investigation into a drug ring that forced the withdrawals from the Tour of several competitors, including the cyclists who finished second (Ivan Basso), third (Jan Ullrich), fourth (Francisco Mancebo) and fifth (Alexander Vinokourov) to Armstrong last year. Vinokourov was not implicated in the investigation, but the ouster of five of his teammates left him with too small a team to continue.
"As a business executive, we all have to deal with doping in sports," Harvey said. "You can't wish for clean competition and push for clean athletes, then all be dramatically disappointed when certain athletes are pushed out of these races. We have to move on and focus on what we have."
Watching the Tour now is a peculiar experience, with no Lance in the pack. Even if he was not leading, he was the center of attention with the OLN crew. Where was he? How would he do in the mountains? How fast would he be in the sprints? Yet, at the same time, there is normalcy, the leveling of a field that had been skewed so long that it obscured the larger Tour universe.
Bob Roll, an OLN commentator, agreed that having Armstrong win every Tour since the seventh year of the Clinton administration was a wonderful albatross for a network that reaches just under 70 million homes. "It was a windfall, like winning the lottery," he said by phone from Vitré, France, where today's Stage 6 will end. "There's no way to overcalculate his impact on the American audience. Without Lance, we wouldn't be where we are."
But, he added: "From a competitive, tactical standpoint, it will perhaps be more exciting without him, because you can't identify an unequivocal favorite. Rather than chase one story, there are 5 to 10 stories to tell."
OLN took heat from hard-core fans, said Harvey, for morphing into the Only Lance Network. (Soon it will change, simply, into Versus.)
In its first post-Lance Tour, OLN appears to have improved and balanced its coverage. By being less focused on Armstrong, it has moved beyond its yellow jersey fixation to enhanced interest in the green one (for best sprinter), the white (best young rider) and polka dot (best mountain climber).
The graphics have also improved to keep better track of the riders' standings and to provide enhanced readings of several cyclists' heartbeats, power output and stress caused by the race.
• Armstrong has not disappeared from OLN. He is still there in reruns of "The Lance Chronicles" and in segments from a recent interview that will be inserted into each day's coverage. And Armstrong is a major part of a sweepstakes created by the Discovery Channel, which sponsors the team he raced for and partly owns, which will culminate in a contestant joining the Discovery team for the U.S. Pro Championship in September.
Meanwhile, the absent Lance did not keep CBS Sports away from the Tour; its Sunday coverage will return, with Bob Neumeier as the host.
"The race keeps rolling," Roll said, "and Lance would be the first to say that time waits for no one."
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