What’s next for WBD and Paramount Skydance in sports? How QB injuries are likely to affect NFL media partners; and Orioles owner David Rubenstein talks about his new book

0:00Coming up on the pod, the latest on Paramount Skydance and WBD, a prime start for Thursday Night Football, and Orioles owner David Rubenstein joins the pod.

0:18Welcome into the SBJ Sports Media Podcast. I'm SBJ media reporter Austin Karp. I'm SBJ golf reporter and media reporter Josh Carpenter. This week, I am in Chicago, well, outside Chicago, really, at Medina Country Club, home of the President's Cup. It's the year-end, you know, kind of capper for the PGA Tour, a big event here outside Chicago. You know, Josh, I kind of want you to wear both the golf and the media hat for this question. Like, is this going to actually draw? Is this going to be a draw for NBC? We've seen so many sports, so many events over the last number of years. Try to move away from this football calendar, whether it's going up against the NFL or going up against college.

0:52President's Cup's going to do both. can it get any sort of audience with so much going on? Yeah, that's always a big question around the President's Cup. This is an event that began, you know, over 25 years ago. And again, this is an event where you have Team USA playing against the rest of the world outside Europe. So the Ryder Cup, you've got Team USA against Europe. This event is a PGA Tour operated event against the international team, which is the rest of the world outside Europe. And the U.S. team has won every edition of this except for one. The big question every year is like, okay, can the international team finally win again?

1:24Can they kind of save this event? When you've got a dominant run like that, it's so one-sided, it's hard to draw a television. And again, as you mentioned, it's going up against the NFL. So it's going up against college football on Saturday. You've got baseball, the wild card. I tend to think, Austin, if you look in the last President's Cup in 2024, that was an international President's Cup that was played in Montreal. So we're still in that kind of Eastern time zone, about 1.4 million viewers on NBC, at least for Sunday. I have a hard time believing that this President's Cup will not outdraw that.

1:56I think it probably will. How far above that does it go? If you go back four years ago, around 1.9 million viewers for the event that was in Charlotte in our hometown. Not bad. That's not bad. Which isn't bad. I tend to think it'll draw closer to 2 million viewers, maybe a little above that. If you look at the way the PGA Tour was trending toward the end of this year, some really strong numbers to close out this year. Really from, I would say, July on, like after the Open Championship on, you really saw some pretty strong numbers for both NBC and CBS. Golf is still kind of going through this cultural movement.

2:30A lot of interest in the game off the course along with the PGA Tour. And so I tend to think it will kind of outdraw those last two additions. Is it going to draw 4 million viewers? No, I don't think it is. because I think people are in football mode at this point. But can it break$2 million? I think it can. Despite the kind of one-sidedness of this event, it's a moneymaker for the PGA Tour. They have a lot of commercial success around it. I think Brian Roloff coming in, that media kind of expert as the new CDO, I think he'll be watching those numbers pretty closely to see how they do it. Josh, you know what I'm most excited about with the President's Cup?

3:03And that's Medina dropping on Golf Plus. I get to virtually play it. That is the biggest win for me. Well, you love Golf Plus because, Austin, you can't lose four sleeves of golf balls of actually playing golf. But I mean, having been first time at Medina this week, it is a big ballpark. It's a big track. I think it'll be a fun event. 35 ,000, 40 ,000 people on the course each day during competition. It's going to have a very Chicago feel to it. Joey Chitwood, we all know, ran Daytona International Speedway for years, ran Indianapolis Motor Speedway for years. He's no stranger to big events. It's going to have a Chicago feel to it.

3:37You know, they got organ music on the first tee. They're going to have the PA announcers from the Bulls and Blackhawks and Bears there on the first tee. I think it'll be a fun event. So excited to see how it goes. Austin, let's quickly transition over to the straight media. There has been a settlement in the kind of case around Paramount and Skydance's plans to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. What's the latest around that and kind of what does it mean for sports going forward now? Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to keep us tied to sports here and what's important. And I don't think we need to get into the politics of this and the California Attorney General this and that or all the legalese or even the movie studio stuff, which is a huge component of this.

4:15That's important to remember in what Skydance and Paramount are trying to acquire there with Warner Brothers Discovery. But let's think about the sports angle here. We talked about it a little bit, what that combined portfolio of assets within CBS Sports and now TNT Sports would bring together. and you're talking about what is likely to be the second biggest suite of assets in sports behind only ESPN. I'm talking about this is big time stuff, and I'm just to name a couple. You got the Big Ten. You have a college football playoff sub license that they get from ESPN. The French Open, Roland Garros, Major League Baseball, and I think that's an important one to watch as rights come up after 2028.

4:51Is TNT Sports and now Paramount Skydance going to continue to be involved with baseball? And you got NASCAR, March Madness on the men's side. NFL, of course, NHL, NWSL, the PGA Championship in your world, Josh, as well as the PGA Tour and the Masters. You wait for Champions League. They struck that big deal for UFC, unrivaled, WNBA. I mean, I can keep going. This is just such an incredible suite of assets. And outside of that, outside of what portfolio they may or may not have, what rights they may or may not keep, is who's going to run all this? On the TNT sports side, you had Luis Silberwasser brought in.

5:28He's came in, the NBA was out the door. So his job was to really rebuild, add stuff to this portfolio. What can they add? Stuff like the French Open, bring on NASCAR races. They also have a pretty big portfolio in Europe that's going to be part of this. But you also have David Burson, a seasoned executive at CBS Sports. I'm thinking David Burson is likely to be at the head of this. Yeah. I mean, we've seen David Burson kind of rise through the ranks through the years. Obviously, he's been running CBS Sports now for about two years. And so, yeah, it seems like the natural person in line to take over them.

6:00It also means they can go out and maybe be aggressive again, like TNT Sports in particular, and probably CBS too, and except we're kind of hamstrung a little bit. Maybe they can renew some deals, especially on the TNT side, but I don't think that they were really able to be super active out there in the market. Once this gets finally approved, likely next month in October sometime, maybe you might see CBS get a little more aggressive. Maybe we see some resolution to what's going on with the NFL. You had that change of ownership provision, back when Paramount and Skydance came together, is CBS now going to be the first to do any sort of revised NFL deal?

6:34I don't think that that happens in 2026. I think that's more in 2027 if it happens, but CBS likely to be first there given those legal provisions. So if this is settled in Austin in the next month or so, when do we first start seeing kind of the trickle down effect of this? Is it in 2027 sometime or is it 2028? There's a lot of internal stuff they have to figure out first, redundancies. They're taking on also a lot of debt. Paramount Skydance is going to have, I don't know, something like$8 billion in that. And what is that going to affect? It's going to affect what rights they decide to keep and what they decide to go after.

7:07By acquiring the TNT Sports Division and WBD, you're also bringing on equity stakes that you have in organizations like AEW. They're an investor in Unrivaled. Are they going to continue to pump money into some of these things? And what are they going to renew and what are they going to keep? They have to do a lot of that calculus. I think it's going to be a slow roll here as we get into 2027. Josh, last Thursday, we got the start of the Thursday Night Football Package for the season on Amazon Prime Video. Solid game there with the opening of the new Highmark Stadium, Lions and Bills. What did you think about the broadcast?

7:39Yeah, I thought the broadcast was good. Obviously, let's dig into the numbers first. We saw 18.6 million viewers, the best for Prime Video. I think the third best overall Thursday night game. Best opener, yeah. Easily the best opener they've had. Yeah, easily the best opener. So Prime Video obviously has to be happy with that. I don't know if that's a, maybe you could speak more to this. Like, are the Bills becoming, a number of factors could have gone into this. You got the new opening of the stadium. That's one thing. There's some intrigue there. You got the Lions, which has been a trendy team over the past couple of years, past three years, I would say.

8:08And then you've got the Bills, who in my mind are becoming kind of the new chiefs in terms of a TV draw. The Bills fans have come out of the woodwork in the last five years. They're everywhere. and it's seeming like, at least from where I sit, Austin, they seem like the most popular TZ draw in the NFL. And that seems to bear out with these leadership figures around Thursday night. Yeah, Bills are proving to be popular. Chiefs incredibly popular still. Is something going to top this Lions-Bills game? I don't know. Considering it's the third best regular season game that they've had, the only thing I'm really seeing on the schedule that might top it is that Chiefs-Rams game in Week 13, that could be incredibly popular.

8:44You also have the Black Friday game. They don't have a Christmas night game or anything like that this year, but Chiefs-Ramps could be incredibly popular. That's the only one I see potentially topping that 18.6 million viewers that they were able to draw in week two. For sure. And you have to look at the stadium, Highmark Stadium being one of the reasons, again, for that kind of intrigue. Had Roger Goodell there. It was a whole big thing. Anytime there's a new stadium that opens, let alone for a team with such a rich history like the Bills. And the Panthers played there in the preseason, so I'd already watched one game there.

9:11It has a very European soccer feel to me in terms of soccer venue. I don't know if that's because there's actually grass on the field there compared to most NFL stadiums, which are Turk now. But it had that kind of feel. Felt a little bit weird for me seeing the Bills not playing at the old Ralph Wilson Stadium. That's my first memories of the Bills or watching them, you know, at that old venue. So kind of strange to see that. But I have to think the new stadium, the intrigue around the seating and the obstructed views. I think that probably had to play into a little bit of people want to see a new venue.

9:40And that's why the NFL, why they chose this game as the opener on Prime Video. They fought hard. We've talked about it. They fought really hard to get this game. Austin, let's stick with the NFL. Let's talk about specifically quarterback injuries and how those might affect TV product. You have this every year. There are a lot of big injuries to big-name players in the NFL. But already, I mean, we're two weeks ahead. And you've got Jaden Daniels out for a significant amount of time. You've got Caleb Williams, the taste of the NFL, really, in the first. In week one, I mean, 59 points. You never see that in week one.

10:11Going down, hopefully Caleb isn't out for too long. But then, you know, Monday Night Football, Jackson Dark goes down, and he may be out for the season now for your Giants. The NFL typically can get past these injuries to star players, but it seems like early this year there's just been a few more than normal. There was already a lot of talk heading into the season about bearishness, I would say, on NFL viewership, and is it going to be just up, you know, as we all expect year after year. Is that something they can get past with these injuries to star players? I think this is the exact reason why a lot of these networks first wanted flex scheduling to begin with, especially these primetime TV partners.

10:46I mean, if you're looking at somebody like, you know, Monday Night Football, they have a lot of those teams that we just mentioned coming up. You lost Jackson Dart in the first series of that Rams-Giants game. This week, they've got Eagles and Bears, so no Kayla Williams. They got a Commanders-49ers game coming up in Week 6, Bears-Seahawks in Week 8, Week 11, Bengals and Commanders again. And then you got Giants-Lions in Week 16. That's a lot of potential missing star quarterbacks there, maybe late in the season, especially if the Lions continue to reel, if the Giants are reeling. Could they maybe flex out Giants-Lions from a Monday Night Football matchup?

11:21These definitely aren't the injuries that you wanted to see for this ESPN Monday Night Football slate as ESPN is trying to ramp up for the Super Bowl. They wanted marquee matchups, but then you have quarterbacks going down for some big NFC East teams as well as the Bears. But they're not alone. You got a couple of games on Sunday night football, on Thursday night football. So, yeah, you might see these networks try to take advantage of flex wherever they can if they're going to continue to see injuries to these quarterbacks. And it's not just the primetime TV partners. OK, if you're Fox, the traditional home of what you're calling the NFC, the Bears.

11:53Yeah, you would have wanted to see those teams in national windows. The Giants look pretty good against the Cowboys in week one. So NBC benefited there. But now, I mean, I watched Jameis Winston on Monday night, and that is not the look of a guy that you want to show in any sort of national window. Yeah, I'll say, though, I mean, the NFL has always been a little bit tough on when it comes to viewership. Like, let's be real, like, their numbers are still going to be strong. And then you added the fantasy football impact of this. Like, just personally, my level, Jay Daniels, my starting quarterback.

12:19I have a lot of interest now in what the Houston Texans are going to do with C.J. Stroud as my backup. I also have an interest in Monday Night Football now that Caleb Williams is out, and potentially Tyson Bajan is also out, and you might have Case Keenum throwing the ball against the Eagles, who are my fantasy defense this week. So, like, I think there are still a lot of touch points. The NFL's still going to draw big, big numbers around these games. Certainly a big loss early in the season. The strained hamstring for Caleb Williams, Fox executives were throwing up a prayer when that came down.

12:48Thankfully that it wasn't a more, you know, when he went down, it looked like maybe an Achilles injury or something much more serious than him seemingly being out for only a few weeks now. So maybe for Fox's sake, they can get Caleb Williams and the Bears back to the high scoring offense in a few weeks here. Jackson Dart's injury in particular, I think, is a killer because the Giants were starting to look a little better. Maybe we can put them back in some more national windows like a lot of these networks were planning. It's just going to crush that ability right now. Yeah. So we'll see what happens with those NFL injuries down the road.

13:16All right, Austin, enough on the NFL. You know, you have an interview this week on the pod with someone who I'm sure you were really excited to talk to. Who are we talking to this week on the pod? Well, we're talking to Orioles owner David Rubenstein. And why are we having him on the Sports Media Podcast? Well, he's got a new book out where he looks at baseball ownership, not just his process of acquiring the Orioles and what that's been like over these last three seasons. But he also talks to a number, almost a dozen team owners out there about their perspectives on owning in big league sports.

13:45It was a really interesting book. We have a great chat with him. Let's get to that. Well, our guest this week has too many titles to go through, but he's definitely the first guest to have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. David Rubenstein, principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, joins us to chat about some baseball, but more importantly, his new book out this week, Inside the Owner's Box, Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports. David, welcome into the SBJ Sports Media Podcast. Thank you very much for having me on the sports guest. Thank you. Let's get into it. I have to ask you, you host a number of shows and podcasts for Bloomberg TV, but you're also often a guest on shows like this one through your role with Carlisle Group and the Orals and other things.

14:25Do you prefer being a guest or a host when you do these types of shows? I enjoy both. I mean, I do enjoy the intellectual challenge of preparing for an interview and actually talking to people and learning things, which is what I often do in an interview. But I actually, despite the fact that people see me as an interviewer, I'm probably interviewed more than I'm doing the interviewing role. But I enjoy both and generally keeps my brain sharp because to do an interview as a person being interviewed or doing the interview itself, you know, I have to, you know, spar with somebody and you have to listen to what they say and have to have a relatively quick reaction.

15:00As I get older, I see it as my anti-Alzheimer's device to be able to do interviews and keep my brain sharp. Well, let's talk about your new book. It's a combination of your personal perspective, coming into sports ownership, the Orioles, and interviews with a number of your ownership peers. You're not new to being an author. Five books before this, four were New York Times bestsellers. But what made you want to write about sports at this point? Well, I don't claim to be the greatest sports expert in the world. You obviously know infinitely more about sports than I do. It hasn't been my career.

15:32But I felt when I was beginning to get involved with the Orioles that as I read and looked for books on sports ownership, I didn't see as many as I did on Sports Heroes. Now, obviously, the people who are performing on the court or on the field, they're the ones that the fans are paying to see, and they deserve the most of the attention. But increasingly, in recent years, people have been buying sports teams or doing so with a fair degree of, I would say, frequency and with a lot of money. And I just thought, you know, there must be a book somewhere on what it's like to be a sports owner. I didn't find anything I really enjoyed.

16:05So I decided I would write my own story about why I became a sports owner and then interview other sports owners of some prominence. And that's what the book is about. You talk about that first half of the book, you really go into the process of you buying in the Orioles. And that second half you're talking about with those candid interviews, there's kind of a murderer's row there of owners about their own experiences from Jim Crane to Josh Harris, Rick Hendrick, Matt Ishpia, and on down the line. How did you pick this lineup of owners that you wanted to speak to? Well, I wanted people in different sports.

16:34So I tried to cover the major sports in the United States, the major team sports. And I wanted diversity. I didn't want only old white men like me. I wanted people that had different backgrounds. And so I interviewed, for example, a fair number of women who are sports owners now. I interviewed people who are relatively new to the sports world and then people who are relatively old to the sports world, people who've been around for a while. So it's a cross-section, and I designed the interviews to kind of give people a feel for what it's like to be an owner. Getting back to that first half of the book, you were very candid in there about how much of an eye-opening experience it has been as an owner regarding the business of sports and the business of baseball.

17:13But you and your ownership counterparts in baseball, you're kind of sailing into quite the squall, we'll call it, with these upcoming MLB labor negotiations. So are you anticipating like a knockdown, drag-out fight, and is that something your contemporaries have tried to prepare you for? The commissioner of baseball has said to the owners, let the commissioner resolve the issue with the players union. So I'm not going to be able to say too much about it. I'm going to leave it up to the commissioner and his team and is led by very talented people, Dan Hallam principally. But I would say that we hope that there can be some resolution before the next season begins.

17:50And we hope we can avoid some of the problems that have occurred in the past. But time will tell. I'm curious what you think about the way that baseball is shown as a television product to fans. The majority of Orioles games, those continue to be shown on the Masson RSN. And it's kind of a medium that has been killed off for a number of teams. So what do you think the future is in terms of how baseball should be presented to fans, especially locally? Well, I think a real role model has been the NFL. When they came together, the AFL and the NFL, in the early 1960s, they reached an agreement with Congress.

18:22and as a result of that, they have a certain type of antitrust exemptions. And part of that deal was that they would put their TV programs or their sport games on free television for a large part of what they were doing. And that has largely been the case. There's obviously now some discussion about having increasingly more and more games that are not for free and that you have to subscribe to a service. In baseball, there are different ways of doing things, but we don't have the kind of same agreement that the NFL has or even the NBA, which is to say that most teams have their own regional sports networks.

18:58Some of them have been rolled up into a thing now called MLB.com in effect. But I would say that baseball is probably going to go towards the kind of situation that other leagues have. We hope that at some point we can have a nationwide TV contract that would cover everything. And then there'll be some local games, of course. But I think the role model of the NFL is one that we would like to pursue if we can. You know, in the book and in other interviews, you've talked about this control ownership succession plan that you have with Mike Arrighetti, who's already a significant minority investor in the team.

19:32So what should those in the sports business and baseball fans and Orioles fans know about Mike? Mike Arrighetti is an incredibly talented person. He grew up in New York, played baseball in high school, went to Yale, did not play baseball at Yale and later got into the financial service world. And he took a company where he was already employed and became the CEO a number of years ago. It had a market value of$1.8 billion at the time he took over as a CEO. It has had a market value as high as$70 billion. It's lower than that now. But he's increased the market value by 20 or 30 times. So it's a staggering success.

20:11The company's called Aries, and it's probably the leading private credit firm in the world. And he's had other activities as well. He's built a couple golf courses. He's very involved in other activities, charitable and philanthropic. He's younger than me. And so when we did this deal, I wanted to have a partner who knew baseball, who really loved baseball as he does, who had the financial means to be my partner and in time could succeed me. So I am older than new owners usually are, And therefore, while I have a fair amount of good health so far, you never know when you reach your 70s what's going to happen.

20:49And so I'm now in my mid-70s, and you never know how my health will turn out. But assuming I have a good, normal lifespan, at some point I'd like Mike to take over as the control partner. That can't be agreed to in advance under league rules, but that's our plan. Just a couple more for you here, David. What do you think the toughest part of being a pro sports team owner is? The toughest part is that the fans think that you can wave a wand and all of a sudden you're going to have great performance in the field. Money spending isn't everything. But also one of the toughest things is you get criticized an awful lot.

21:23In the private equity world in which I've been for the last 40 years, we've bought thousands of companies at Carlisle. I rarely get criticized for them. Maybe I should be criticized, but I rarely get criticized for bad performance. Sometimes investors are not happy. but you don't see the enormous amount of public attention that you get. So in other words, Carlisle might be a company that has two or three or four billion dollars of revenue. Nobody really pays much attention to it. Baseball teams have a few hundred million dollars of revenue. Everybody's obsessed with every day, a performance, every out and so forth.

21:55So if you can't stand the heat, don't get in the kitchen is the old expression. And if you don't like to be criticized, don't buy a sports team because no sports owner, no sports owner is going to be free of some criticism by somebody. Get you out of here on this, David. Do you see yourself writing any more books down the line? You've covered sports now. You've done presidential history and other things. And if so, what other subject matter might you want to get into? I am writing some other books. I have another one coming out not too long from now about something I've done. For the last 15 years, I've interviewed great historians in front of members of Congress at a dinner that I host at the Capitol, at the Library of Congress, I should say, for members who are House members or Senate members.

22:38I've taken the best of those interviews and put them in a book to give people a sense of American history. I am working on another book about something we're doing right now, how to interview people, how to interview people, and how to be interviewed. As you know, today, everybody has a podcast. I think there should be a bumper sticker that says, honk if you don't have your own podcast, because everybody's got a podcast these days. and obviously people like to listen to the podcast, but some people are better at interviewing people than other people. And some people are really good at being interviewed and some people are not.

23:08So I'm kind of putting a book together about how to do that. That's one of my next projects. Well, the book is Inside the Owner's Box, Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports. David Rubenstein, majority owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Thank you so much for your time and insights. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Well, it's a great interview with David Rubenstein, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Let's stick with baseball. You put a bow on MLB's regular season. What'd you find out? Well, I think the biggest thing was NBC's return. You had around 14 NBC-only broadcast TV primetime games there.

23:40They took over the Sunday Night Baseball package. That was really additive. Most of those games, that package was ESPN last year. We're going over to broadcast TV, more reach, bigger numbers that help baseball's overall numbers. But it wasn't just the new partner there in NBC. Netflix only had three games, so it doesn't really move the needle a whole lot. They need to obviously improve on, you know, especially the numbers around the home run derby, but regular season Fox up FS1 up TBS, a non-exclusive package, but they were able to see games MLB network also up. So I think it was a strong season nationally for baseball.

24:13Out of three season situation, assuming we even have a 2027 season, let's say if they can, uh, you know, settle that in the labor side. But I talked to MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred. I talked to Rick Cordell, the head of NBC Sports, and even Roz Durant, the head of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. Everybody kind of seemed happy with how this first season played out. Yeah, ESPN didn't have that 30-game Sunday night baseball package or whatever it was, but they still had the same number of games, really spread out. You even saw things like Yankees Red Sox pop up on a Saturday on ABC. They liked the flexibility that they were able to do in the back half of the season and really spotlight games here and there, and they really liked what they were able to add to the app.

24:53which was the MLB out-of-market package. And also they have the in-market rights for, you know, I think around 14 teams next season, maybe a little more. But that was the first year as part of that new deal. ESPN likes what they're really getting digitally from baseball. These rights, this deal, all of the companies run through 2028. So 2029 season, I think you're going to see a very different landscape for Major League Baseball. But NBC showed what it can bring to the sport. Yeah, it's been a great year to have NBC back on or have Major League Baseball back on NBC. Yeah, Jason Benetti was great on play-by-play.

25:28I like them using a mix of local announcers, you know, bringing those in or guest announcers, I guess, who would remain to those teams. It was a really good first year for NBC Sports. Yep. Well, Josh, that does it for this week's SBJ Sports Media Podcast. Thanks again to our guest, Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein. And as always, thank you to our production team, Chris Mason, Reginald Walker, and A.C. Wyatt. Finally, thank you for listening. Please make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to your pods. For Josh Carpenter, I'm Austin Carp, and we will talk to you all again next week.