THE SCORE HAS SEEN its share of challenges.
Launched in 1997 as Headline Sports as part of the 17-channel tier III, it struggled from the outset. It had no background, so it had to knock extra-hard on the doors of leagues and teams to get them to listen.
Then, since it had no live event programming of its own, TSN, for one, wouldn’t give the sports news channel any highlights from sports properties it owned, like the Canadian Football League. Clips like that are normally traded and the sports channel newcomer had nothing to trade with, said TSN at the time.
Before long, Headline Sports went back to the CRTC and was given a license amendment allowing it to use 15% of its schedule for live games. Not long after getting approval, it signed a multi-million-dollar deal with Major League Baseball for a package of games – none of which included the Toronto Blue Jays however. Ratings were poor.
The channel lost a bundle on the deal, eventually paying over $10 million to get out of the agreement.
In order to compete with the big boys, however, The Score – as it re-branded itself – went back to the Commission saying at license renewal time that it needed a big increase in its regulated wholesale cable rate from 10 cents per subscriber to 40 cents if it was to compete on more even footing with TSN and Rogers Sportsnet. It got four cents more.
All of these hiccups (among others) – insists The Score’s senior vice-president and general manager David Errington – have pointed the specialty channel down the right path. It re-focused on sports news and information and live events it could afford and has become profitable in the process – and popular among the 18-34 sports freak set.
To discuss where The Score has been and where it’s going (it’s already multi-platform on wireless and satellite radio and HD is coming in February), www.cartt.ca’s editor and publisher Greg O’Brien recently sat down with Errington. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Compared to where you’ve been, what have been the most important changes from your standpoint at The Score?
David Errington: Our programming focus on being a leader in sports news and information. We’ve identified we want to serve the hard-core sports fan with sports news and information and were going to get that information to them on all the platforms we see fit.
GOB: What does the hard-core sports fan look like?
DE: He’s a young, 18-34 year old male who’s active in sports, has a busy lifestyle and expects you to get the information to him. He’s not going to come to you to get it. So you have to get it to him be it on satellite radio, or wireless or internet or TV – but you have to push it to him. He wants to see that information on his time, not yours.
GOB: And not necessarily on television. Tell me about the other platforms that you’ve gone to.
DE: The first launched about a month ago – Score Mobile. It’s basically our ticker on your mobile phone. You can get it on the Bell and Rogers platform right now and we’re hoping that Telus will bring it on soon… If you’re out for dinner with your wife and want to know the score of the Leafs game but don’t want to get in trouble, you pull your cell phone out of your pocket when she goes to the washroom and you get your update.
We’re going to do a second phase of score mobile sometime in the spring and it will have a more robust ticker, moreso that just scores and stats to go with the news and notes, it will be ‘personalizable’ and we will consider putting video and audio on it, but we’re just working that out right now.
Our second endeavor into another platform is Hardcore Sports radio, (available on Sirius) in Canada and the United States on channel 186. And it really is The Score on radio, where we’re taking our news and information content that we’re pulling for our television network and repurposing it and pushing it back out on the radio network.
GOB: But what are you doing to make it more radio-friendly?
DE: Two things. We take packs that are more relevant to radio. We don’t take all the TV packs and we’re (looking at) radio-only packs in the future. We’re also looking to adding some radio-specific programming and live events to it. But the television audio works quite well on radio.
If I’m a hard core sports guy and I want an update, the updates I’m getting from over the air broadcasts are “the Leafs won last night 4-0 over Atlanta.” Well, now you’re going to get the whole story, pre- and post-game reports, interviews, everything you need to know about that game from Sirius satellite radio.
GOB: The company does have some radio background.
DE: When we first launched we were in the sports updates business for a brief time and then we had the rights for the Blue Jays for three seasons (for radio). But we’re in the content business, the sports news and information business, be it TV or satellite or wireless, that’s our plan.
The final platform is the web. We have a site that’s okay, but we’re going to re-launch it in the spring so that our web site will be everything a hard core sports fan needs to know – if he’s a fantasy sports team owner or a pro line player or just a guy who likes stats.
There will be current stats, archival stats. Stats will be updated immediately. There will be a way to personalize what stats you want.
GOB: Now, how will you make it different from tsn.ca, or espn.com or Sports Illustrated’s web site or Sportsnet?
DE: It’s tough because they’re big competitors. But, ESPN and TSN are more focused on stories and reporting. We’re going to focus on the hard core sport guy’s need for immediate access to information that you can personalize and customize for his needs… he can pre-set his stats to who he wants to follow and we’ll push that out to him on a daily basis.
GOB: When are we going to be seeing more changes on air at the Score? You’re launching high definition in the new year?
DE: Yes. But, we’ve already had changes on air at the Score. We launched a whole new graphics package two weeks ago. It ties into our new hardcore theme and branding All of our boards and transitions and all of that stuff have the same hardcore look and feel about it and it matches our external marketing.
We launched our virtual set, which has our hardcore brand in that.
GOB: What does the new set let you do?
DE: Our studio here in our current facility is small. Cameras are up close. The virtual set allows us to look bigger and allows us to have many different looks rather than just one. Going forward, it allows us to incorporate sponsorship into our set – which we can change on the fly – and it buys us time until we launch our HD studio.
GOB: When will that be?
DE: I’ll tell you I’m launching HD in February… And, our HD is going to be different than most people’s approach to it. When I watch HD, I’m disappointed because I’m getting this (from full to letter-box, etc) all the time and the lack of hours of HD programming is a problem.
So, we are going to take an approach that’s been taken by PBS out of Seattle and pass through native HD so all of the NBA that we cover and our NCAA and any live event that we produce ourselves, such as our OUA programming from this point on, will be in HD.
Step two is anything that is not HD, we’re going to up-convert and stretch. So, we’re going to be 16:9 all the time and we’re going to have an up-converted signal using what’s called Teranex technology, from the post-production world. It’s a very very expensive upconversion model and the perception to the end consumer is that we’re 24/7 HD because the signal quality on the up-converted signal is dramatic.
GOB: Does it look weird at all, because sometime those stretched images…
DE: No. It’s crisp and clean. And because we have our ticker, we already (stretch) our signal because our ticker doesn’t overlay the screen, the screen sits on top of it. So, it means we’re able to (stretch) it to fit the 16:9 setting.
So, the impression will be that it’s wide screen all the time, that it’s HD all the time, because that’s what the consumer wants, HD, widescreen programming… I think we’ve nailed that one.
GOB: When it comes to the SD customers?
DE: We’ll be running two feeds.
GOB: But, what about when it comes to clips, which come in all formats from all over? How will you roll that together?
DE: That’s where it gets complicated. Eventually, what we’re going to do is pull in the clips, down-convert the HD ones to standard def and then up-convert them back to HD because that’s how we’re set up here. All of our equipment is standard def equipment. Eventually what we want to do is to upgrade our entire facility to HD and then all of our highlight packs would be edited and produced in HD.
That’s a long way out. We’re on step one right now.
Our HD plan is to launch our HD offering in February and sometime during the 18 months post-that, launch an HD studio so our studio shows will be shot in HD as well as all of our live events. Then the third step would be to convert our edit suite to HD and that’s a ways out. That’s a big cost and we’ll have to see where the HD world is going with respect to clips.
GOB: And, I suppose you’re operating on something of a deadline given that the U.S. Congress has set April 2009 as the deadline for (when they reclaim the analog spectrum from American over-the-air broadcasters). So, by then, most of the stuff you get from the States will be in HD which makes it your de facto deadline.
DE: Which is good, because if all my live event is in HD and all my post-game is supplied to me in HD, my percentage of HD programming at the Score will grow as fast as any channel – maybe not as much as movies.
GOB: Will you be doing any additional branding or calling it a separate Score HD channel like the others?
DE: Yes. We will do something along the lines of like TSN has, where they’re: “the leader in HD programming” – and they’re not by the way, it’s actually Rogers (Sportsnet).
Yeah, we’ll do a Score HD branding campaign. It’s important because a) my competition is doing this already and b) I think if I can do HD programming where the perception is 24 hours a day, I’ll get more viewers because I have HD at home and the first thing I do when I get home is turn to my HD channels to see what I want to watch.
It’s important to be in the game and you want to tell people that.
GOB: And, if you’re in sports, all the big names are HD. Can you talk a little about the overall branding of The Score, because you’ve come a long way from the Headline Sports days.
DE: When we changed our license and got our 15% allowance to do live event programming, the mistake may have been that now we can get into the live event game, let’s compete with the TSNs and Sportsnets of the world. But, the way rights fees go with big name properties, advertising dollars alone can not support them. You need a large subscriber fee to offset some of that cost – and our regulated rate is 14 cents while Sportsnet is 78 cents and TSN is $1.07. So TSN has $110 million in the bank before they even make a sale.
At 14 cents, we can’t compete on big name live event properties. And, I don’t want to because I don’t think there’s space for three sports networks on live event in Canada.
GOB: And you certainly learned a hard lesson with Major League Baseball.
DE: We learned a hard lesson financially. But our deal with Major League Baseball brought a ton of new eyeballs to the network, brought a lot of exposure to the network and kind of got us on the map – and allowed us to go public – so there were some benefits, but financially, it was a difficult decision.
So, once we kind of went to the Commission and took another whack at saying “give me 40 cents so I can compete with TSN and Sportsnet,” and got four cents – it made us at that point in time say “we really have to think about what we want to be.”
So, we hired an agency called Leo Burnett and we really took a lot of time looking at our brand and the perceptions people in the market had of our brand (with focus groups) and what we could stand for, win, and compete at… People said we provide something that the others don’t: Instant access to sports news and information. We’re like hydro.
GOB: Does that make you rethink as to how much live event you show? Will you pare it back?
DE: We did. We branded ourselves a sports news and information service but 15% of live event is still important. Live event brings big audiences but the way we do live event with the ticker on the bottom and cutting in every 15 minutes shows a sample of the hard core. We will only do live event if we see fits with our core demos of 18 to 34 and NBA does that. NCAA does that.
And, we will only do live event that we can support with advertising revenue. I will not do deals that lose money, ask any league in Canada.
