The Medium
Monday AM Briefing: Scarcity, RSNs & Local Advertisers
In Q1 2023, PARQOR will be focusing on four trends. This essay focuses on "Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file. What happens next?” and "The definition of scarcity is continuously evolving away from linear. What happens next?"
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If you want to understand the evolving business logic of “scarcity” and how it is moving away from the historical moats of the linear model, the future of Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) reveals more valuable insights than, say, the likelihood of NBCUniversal or Paramount shutting down channels. I wrote last Wednesday: “The leagues must adopt a new culture of customer relations while maintaining the old model in a smaller form and chasing scarcity in a new form. This culture change has not been a core focus of the leagues, in large part because the Diamond Sports bankruptcy has so much uncertainty around it.”
I had two follow-up thoughts after writing this:
- Scarcity may be assembled in real-time in digital advertising, but audiences for live sports events cannot; and therefore,
- The shift to direct-to-consumer (DTC) does not seem inevitable in the RSN story.
Key Takeaway
If the escalating costs of sports rights reflect an assumption of inelastic demand, and the leagues are planning for elastic demand at the local level across a portfolio of platforms, both cannot be true.
Total words: 1,100
Total time reading: 5 minutes
Real-time scarcity
Scarcity is the linear distribution model’s historical moat — the linear model enabled multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to aggregate millions of households locally, regionally and later nationally. It has similar business logic to the circulation model of ...