The NFL's "Monday Night Football," a hallmark of television sports programming since the days of Howard Cosell, is leaving ABC after 35 years for ESPN starting with the 2006 season.
Let's see: $8 billion (Fox) + $8 billion (CBS) + $1.1 billion (ESPN) + $0.6 billion (NBC) = $17.7 billion, at least.
There's some Thursday and Saturday broadcasts that are still up for grabs.
The NFL pie keeps getting bigger, but the number of owners remains small, and greedy, er, good businessmen focused on maximizing their profits.
I think that this move to cable is the first step in turning the NFL into exclusively premium content; soon all viewers will have to pay to see the best games, one way or another.
With talk of flexible scheduling -- which would be a real innovation -- here's how it might work: as the season progresses, the League will start moving all of the important games to ESPN or the NFL Network; in time, they'll start to charge a pay-per-view fee to viewers outside of the local areas; and for local viewers, instead the current practice of blacking-out non-sellouts, which gives locals who can't afford high ticket prices few choices for seeing their team, the League will offer local pay-per-view.
This would allow the NFL to keep more of the broadcast revenues, as well as capture local revenue they're not getting at the stadium, since their product is so expensive now, with little chance of ticket prices falling.
And they'll get away with this because they know that if given the choice between $90/ticket, plus parking and concessions, most people will pay $3-5/game to watch at home.
Stay tuned.