Free Nascar Content On TV May Soon Be A Thing Of The Past

The 2022 version of NASCAR’s annual Awards and Champion Celebration at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee aired Saturday night. Except it wasn’t live. The event actually happened Thursday, and Saturday it was shown on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock. So, unless a fan pays $4.99 a month ($49.99 a year) for Peacock Premium, they didn’t see the ceremony happen, live or otherwise.

In the weeks, and days leading up to the event fans took to social media to voice their displeasure at being forced to pay in order to see their favorite drivers celebrated.

It wasn’t the first time this season that NASCAR content wasn’t available on broadcast (which includes cable) television. On several occasions practice and qualifying sessions, which returned this season after the pandemic forced the sport to compress their weekend schedules, were only available on Peacock, or the NBC Sports app.

Not being able to see a practice or qualifying session on broadcast TV was something unheard just a few years ago. The live airing of practice and qualifying on broadcast TV marked an evolution for NASCAR. There was a time that many older fans never saw anything other than the race itself, and even then, not all races aired live. For many years the Daytona 500 was only shown on a tape delay on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and then only the start and finish of the race.

As cable TV grew so did NASCAR. By the late 1990s and early into this century, when NASCAR racecars were on a track, fans could watch on such cable channels as ESPN.

This season however, NASCAR seemed to take a step back. NBC shut down its NBC Sports channel at the end of 2021. They shifted the NASCAR coverage once seen on that channel to the USA Network, and Peacock.

In some ways the move sent NASCAR programming back to the dark ages. This season for some of the practice or qualifying sessions fans had to pay, setup a streaming service, or watch on a computer. For many of the older demographic this became a challenge.

NASCAR has been working hard to attract a younger audience, and for many of that younger demo, streaming and watching on a computer is as natural to them as getting the newspaper off the porch in the morning was for older fans.

Many of the digital innovations that NASCAR has embraced this decade have been a welcome addition. In-car cameras, live telemetry and scanner audio during a race have enhanced the fan experience. And most of those are free. However, despite the innovations, it a fan wanted to, they could simply turn on the TV and watch a race.

Those times, however, appear to be changing, and NASCAR’s annual Awards and Champion Celebration is a perfect example of that.

And it could be a harbinger of things to come.

NASCAR will finalize its TV contracts in 2023. The rights deals, last negotiated in 2013 and signed in 2015 with NBC and Fox, are a significant source of income for NASCAR, and its teams. Gone are the days when fans buying tickets to sit in the stands paid a lot of NASCAR bills; though race attendance has seen significant increase in the last few years, it will never reach the heights the sport once enjoyed. That means the biggest piece of the revenue pie comes from the TV networks, seemingly allowing them to call all the shots.

While NASCAR won’t say publicly how the TV money is split, when the 2015 agreements were signed the split was reportedly 65 percent to the tracks, 25 percent to the teams through the prize purses and 10 percent to NASCAR.

There’s nothing wrong with this off course. During the pandemic shutdown, when fans couldn’t attend races in person, TV saved the day as NASCAR found a way to race, networks had live sports to air, and TV money kept everything in the black.

The last TV deal struck with Fox and NBC was worth a reported $8.2 billion combined and runs through the end of 2024. Though the rights negotiations have undoubtedly already started, they will become more intense as the new year dawns.

And when that new rights deal is finalized, it could be a new dawn for fans as well as the possibility that some races could be exclusive to streaming is very real.

NASCAR and the networks have already sowed the seeds for the possibility of streaming playing a bigger role in the new TV deal.

Last year the IndyCar series and NBC announced a new TV deal. As part of that deal two races were to be exclusive to Peacock, though when the 2022 IndyCar schedule was announced this past January, only one race was streaming exclusively on Peacock.

Last year when discussing the new IndyCar TV deal, Jon Miller NBC Sports Group Executive didn’t hesitate when asked if having a race stream exclusively on Peacock meant fans would have to pay up.

“That’s exactly right,” Miller said. “We find that over time, we’ve been paying very close attention to the cable ecosystem, as it were, and more and more people are cutting their cord or not signing up for cable distribution, and more people are streaming sports, and we have found it to be the way of the future here, and IndyCar is not going to be any different than any of the other major sports, like the PremierPINC
League, like The Open Championship, like the U.S. Open, where you can get, you know, exclusive content on Peacock.”

And late last year Brian Herbst, senior vice president for media and productions for NASCAR said that when the last TV deals were done, direct to consumer platforms (known in the industry as Over the Top or OTT) weren’t prevalent.

“I think, what is it going to be important for us when our rights come up in 2023-2024 is to understand the penetration levels by platform and how those are evolving,” Herbst told me last October.

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“If free TV is at 120 to 125 million, that’s NBC, for instance, this weekend is on broadcast TV is in 120 to 125 million homes. Cable today is in about 75 million homes with FS1 and NBCSN. But that number is going down on a year-to-year basis. OTT platforms like a Peacock for instance were zero last year at this time. And (now) it’s about 15 million or so premium subs on Peacock; we don’t know exactly the number, somewhere between 10 and 20 million.

“I think what you’ll see us do when that time comes up is ultimately, we’ll want to understand A, the penetration levels by platform and B the trajectory of those platforms: Free TV, broadcast cable, and direct to consumer streaming.”

Herbst said as the new rights are negotiated it will have to be a balancing act.

“Now, it gets more complex in 2023, because you have to understand the viewership, economic trade-offs between not just broadcast and cable, but now a third bucket is OTT,” he said.

However, Herbst pointed out that the current sponsorship model might not work for every race to be on a commercial free streaming platform.

“We couldn’t do an agreement, at least in 2021, that is primarily over the top or direct to consumer simply because of one, our fan base isn’t there today and two the team sponsorship model is so dependent on sponsors of revenue,” he said. “Those spots sell off TV eyeballs, and if you’re not selling off the TV eyeballs, then it compromises the economic model of our entire industry.”

That seems to indicate however, that one, two, or maybe more races exclusively on a streaming platform aren’t out of the question.

After a season that saw NASCAR viewership rise 4% the sport seems to be in a prime position to demand more from the networks. Just last month Herbst told Front Office Sports that ad revenue for both networks is up.

“Fox had their third consecutive year of ad revenue increases in 2022,” he said. “NBC had their second consecutive year of ad revenue increases in 2022. So it’s working for them — both from a viewership and an ad revenue perspective.”

The NFL’s TV deal is over $100 billion and includes AmazonAMZN
which will stream games through 2033. The NBA is seeking a long-term rights deal reportedly worth between $50 billion and $75 billion and will include an exclusive streaming package.

All of this seems to put NASCAR in a position to demand, and get, a great deal more than the $8.4 billion it got less than 10 years ago, even more if an exclusive streaming package is used to sweeten the deal.

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What this means is that exclusive streaming of NASCAR content, like Saturday’s annual Awards and Champion Celebration, is coming. No longer is it a matter of if, but when. And it may not be too long before fans will have to subscribe to a streaming service, like Peacock, in order to watch a race.

This past week, Speed Sport and Obsession media announced a partnership to launch Speed Sport 1, a motorsports channel reminiscent of SPEED Channel, a Fox Sports channel seen on cable from 1995 to 2013.

Roger Werner is an advisor and investor to Obsession Media, and the former CEO of ESPN and Outdoor Channel Holdings. Werner founded Speedvision Network in 1995 before selling it to FOX in 2001, where it became SPEED Channel.

SPEED Channel was popular among fans in its heyday with not only NASCAR programming but a plethora of other motorsports as well. The channel migrated to become Fox Sports 1, but thanks to carriage deals, much of the programming once seen on SPEED was gone.

With the new Speed Sport 1 much of the type of programming seen on Speed will once again be available. It will debut in spring 2023 across FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television) and traditional linear platforms.

Here’s to hoping the new Speed Sport 1 channel is successful. It could eventually become the last bastion of free motorsports viewing, or if not, it could become a subscription service that goes the way all sports are going; a model requiring payment in order to watch.

Older fans can no longer pick up the newspaper from the front porch in the morning, and soon, watching a NASCAR race for free might be a thing of the past

Whether this new model will be sustainable remains to be seen. One thing is for certain, paying to watch NASCAR content will soon become reality, and everyone may just need to get used to it.