The company, Bob Iger.
Afternoon, all of you. Thank you. It's my little highlight reel. Here I am in the world of highlights. Got to bring your own reel. By the way, Lowell, my choices are just a little bit better than yours. Yankees won a double header yesterday, two shutouts. Green Bay, not too bad. Los Angeles Clippers, 57 games, most in their history. I'm not going to comment about the Knicks. It's good to see all of you. Welcome to ESPN. Certainly nice that we could all gather here and talk about one of our most important businesses. We certainly appreciate the opportunity to show off what is one of the company's most valuable assets too, and to present a deep dive, as we're calling it, about a lot of the issues and the elements that are relevant to and top of mind to ESPN.
This is clearly an unprecedented opportunity for us, and I hope you all get a lot out of it. We certainly want you to gain insight into what is such an important part of The Walt Disney Company. While we don't specifically break out, as you know, ESPN's results, you can see from this chart that our cable network business contributed about one-third of our revenue in fiscal 2013, and more than 50% of our total operating income. This includes ESPN and our global Disney channels, where we've done a fair amount of investing, ABC Family, and of course, our ownership stake in the A&E television networks, A&E, History, Lifetime. We've grown these businesses nicely over the last number of years. Actually 8% compounded growth since 2008.
Clearly, given the size of this business, this contributed mightily to our strong company EPS growth and to our total shareholder return over that period of time. As you know, The Walt Disney Company owns an incredibly strong, valuable, and an unrivaled portfolio of brands, as I think that tape that we just ran demonstrated. In fact, the pillar of my strategy during my tenure as CEO has been to strengthen our brands or to acquire and invest in other brands, notably, of course, Pixar and Marvel and Lucasfilm. This is a great time, I think, to consider the value of that brand strategy to the company, given the immense success of Frozen, which has continued to set global box office records as the highest grossing animated film of all time. I checked, and as of last night, Frozen's global box office was over $1.1 billion.
Captain America already hit $500 million in total global box office, we're just getting started on production for Star Wars VII, clearly, we have been very brand focused as a company. We also believe that increased competition in today's world and increased choice for the consumer actually heightens the value of brands. We think the value of brands actually has risen, we're certainly experiencing that as a company in today's marketplace. Beneath all these brands are a number of sub-brands, or we call them franchises, we've created and nurtured many of those as well, including some pretty obvious ones in Mickey Mouse and the Disney core characters, Toy Story, Cars, Marvel's Avengers, Disney Princess, and the most recent one, of course, Star Wars. Like brands, we also believe that in today's world, there's great value to franchises as well.
ESPN has certainly created its own set of valuable franchises too. Many of them you'll hear about today, including SportsCenter, College GameDay, X Games, Baseball Tonight, Pardon the Interruption, Mike & Mike, many others. We believe franchises drive long-term value for the company thus deserve more investment and more of our support. In fact, later today, you'll see our new SportsCenter studio, which I think is a great example of us investing in the value of a franchise, investing not only to continue to protect it, but to continue to grow its value. I take great pride in ESPN's success. ESPN's actually reported to me since 1994 when I was COO and president of Capital Cities ABC. I'm also a big sports fan.
I spent 13 years of my now 40 years at the company, it's hard for me to believe, except when I look in a mirror, I spent 13 of those 40 years working for ABC Sports. Sports television is definitely in my blood. I can assure you that we're going to continue to invest in ESPN, in its people, in its programming, in its technology in order to perpetuate its significant competitive advantage. You're going to hear a lot about that, too, today. Today, we want to give you more insight into the breadth of ESPN's rights portfolio, the value of its original content, the nature of its competitive position, the strength of its team, the story today is actually going to be told by them, why we are so confident in ESPN's future.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce the real host of today's event, that's John Skipper. I've known John actually for almost 20 years when he was working at Disney Publishing and then in his earliest days at ESPN. I've watched John grow tremendously over that period of time. For those of you who don't know John, he brings a wide array of talent and experience to this position. He's got many interests as well, he blends a strong creative sense with, I think, really solid business skills, which is what I like to look for in a senior executive of the company. On top of that, he just loves sports. If you know him well, he also loves music and literature and technology and a whole lot of other things. It is my pleasure to introduce John.
Working with John certainly has been a pleasure for me. I can't think of anybody I'd rather be running ESPN than John Skipper. Before John comes up, please enjoy another highlight reel from the company that makes better highlight reels than anybody, ESPN. Thanks.
There's always going to be some canyon in the way. There's always going to be a river I cannot cross. Somewhere along this path that's chosen me. I know I'm going to fall down, feel lost, feel weak. Wherever it leads. No one said this would ever be easy, my love. I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well-worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Some will write you off before you ever-
Thank you, Bob, for those kind words. Good afternoon, sports fans. Welcome to Bristol, Connecticut. ESPN launched on September 7, 1979, not more than a football field or two from where you sit. On January 1, 2012, I had the great privilege of becoming ESPN's seventh president. I worked for the sixth president, George Bodenheimer, for all 13 years of his tenure. During the last six years, I was head of content. You folks are certainly aware of the results of George's leadership, a remarkable 13 years of expansion, innovation, and strong financial performance. I am fortunate to have retained the entire executive team that worked with George to produce those results. The continuity has been seamless and productive as ESPN has continued to contribute meaningfully to the growth of The Walt Disney Company in 2012 and 2013.
I'd like to give you some sense of what that executive team has prioritized over the past two years to achieve that strong performance. First, you're going to hear a lot about this today, our rights portfolio, which we've broadened and strengthened in the past two-plus years. We signed an expanded NFL deal that includes eight more years of Monday Night Football. We signed an expanded MLB deal. We extended our Big 12, our ACC, SEC rights, and added a comprehensive Pac-12 agreement. We renewed the Masters and bought all of the US Open tennis. We acquired rights to all the NCAA championships other than men's basketball, and importantly, acquired the rights to the new national College Football Playoff for the next 12 years. The acquisition of these long-term rights ensures that no significant shift from our current preeminent position in rights can occur in this decade.
No competitor can approach our portfolio. I'll give a little bit more detail on this in just a bit. Second, in the midst of a lot of public hue and cry among programmers and distributors, we have quietly extended our deals with eight of the 10 largest distributors, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cablevision, and Dish. These deals assure that the annual market-leading monthly subscription fees we have will also extend to the next decade. Third, we have moved aggressively to ensure that our resources and our capital are aligned with growth initiatives. We exited unprofitable television businesses in Europe, divested our stake in our Asia joint venture, and we've shifted those resources to high-growth businesses in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.
Domestically, we have shifted jobs from low-growth areas to new mobile and digital efforts, you're going to hear a lot later, in fact, immediately following me from Artie Bulgrin, about the resulting growth in our position there. Finally, we've continued ESPN's longstanding strategy, quite consistent with The Walt Disney Company strategy under Bob, of embracing new platforms and technologies. We relentlessly introduce new products and services. In the past two years, we put ESPN networks on Roku, PlayStation, Xbox. We created the first media partnership with Twitter. We embedded the first video player on a Facebook page. These initiatives have allowed us to continue growing the usage and viewership of ESPN. These moves have strengthened our position with our key constituents. I like these numbers. With fans, with advertisers and distributors, we're number one, number one, and number one.
We're the favorite network among sports fans for 20 years running, that is among all networks, cable and broadcast. For the past 14 years, cable operators have ranked us number one in perceived value. Just to prove they understand the Roman numeral system, they've ranked ESPN2 as having the second highest value for the past nine years. For 10 consecutive years, they have ranked ESPN as the most important network in their system. Among advertisers, ESPN is at the top in multiple categories. You're going to hear a lot of number ones here. Nothing more important than the fact that we're the number one network, again, among cable and broadcast on which they intend to increase spending.
We're number one in terms of the most valuable programming, appealing demographics, use of social media, strategies to retain audience, creating marketing opportunities, the number one environment in which to advertise, and the number one in innovative multi-platform opportunities. It's John Wooden, Bill Russell, Iowa wrestling, and "Ben-Hur" all rolled into one. We believe we're in a stronger position than two years ago, this strong position will allow us to encounter ongoing challenges. We have new competitors. Consumers have more video choices. There are potential challenges to the pay television market. There's a movement of ad dollars to new digital and social platforms, sports rights cost more money. However, we have an experienced and stable management team used to dealing with these issues and with a demonstrated track record of growth. We have an unprecedented aggregation of sports rights.
Sports will continue to be ascendant in culture, and it will become more valuable in media because they are unique, they're exclusive, and they're the only content that must be watched live. Our largest revenue stream benefits from significant long-term affiliate deals. We have that demonstrated track record of financial discipline as to cost, just as we have demonstrated a longstanding practice of nimbleness in the face of technological change and disruption. Pay television is going to remain a large business, though it will exist in a more complicated and dynamic atmosphere, which will require some evolution of our current business model. In our recent deal with Dish Network, we authorized an over-the-top service targeted to broadband-only homes. You can expect to see us continue to experiment with new models.
This quick summary is, in a nutshell, what you're going to hear a lot about throughout the day from the ESPN team. That is our strong position, our ability to continue to grow and thrive. You're going to be quite impressed, I think, by what you see today, I certainly appreciate the opportunity for me and my team to present that story to you. Again, thank you, and welcome to Bristol. John.
Thank you, John. You guys will all hear more from John shortly. I'd say over the last year, the question that we've been asked about most frequently across our entire business has to do with the competitive environment in sports. We thought the best way for us to start the presentation part of the day would be to talk a little bit about why we feel so great about how well we're positioned. I think for that, the best person to talk about it is Artie Bulgrin. Artie is ESPN's Senior Vice President of Global Research and Analytics. I think you're going to find this presentation very informative. There's a lot of data here, get ready. With that, let me welcome up Artie Bulgrin.
Thank you, Lowell, and welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Artie Bulgrin, and I run research and analytics for ESPN. I'm celebrating my 25th year with Disney. I've been with ESPN the last 18 years. Prior to that, I spent seven years at ABC, I started my career in research at Nielsen, where I spent nine years. I'm a New Yorker, a graduate of C.W. Post College on Long Island, the home of the mighty Post Pioneers. Actually, nothing mighty about them. Not a powerhouse by any stretch of the imagination, but they're pretty good in lacrosse. Actually, the girls are pretty good in lacrosse. This is where things get tough. I'm also a fan of the Knicks, Jets, and Mets. A trifecta of futility, for sure. What can I say?
We all make bad life choices, but it stopped with my sports. It begs the question, why am I a sports fan at all? To that, all I can say is wait until next year. Meanwhile, I'll continue to watch Carlos Beltrán hit great home runs for the Yankees. My job today will be to provide you with some insight that will demonstrate that ESPN is absolutely playing at the top of its game with a lot to look forward to. I'll give you our view of the multi-channel landscape and tell you a few things about sports fans that you might not have known. I'll focus on our strongest asset, which is the ESPN brand, how well we're doing in our business, in our core business, which is television, and how we're expanding our audience through digital media.
You'll learn why ESPN has become America's quintessential cross-platform media company, why ESPN has a competitive edge to grow our advertising business going forward. Let's begin where ESPN started with our view on the state of multi-channel. With so much talk about cord cutting today, we forget that multi-channel subs actually grew steadily through the recession, since 2010 have remained above 100 million subs. In fact, subs continued to grow right through 2012 to a historic high until the first net loss at the end of 2013, a loss that was estimated anywhere between 0.1%, according to LRG, the Leichtman Research Group, or 0.2% according to Kagan, which is the data that you see here.
We acknowledge that cord cutting is real, but based on our cord cutting research, cord cutting levels remain fractional and almost always driven by tough economic decisions, not by a preference to watch television content on alternate means. Sentiment to cut the cord has not increased in the past year, we can expect levels to remain fractional. Cord deferring or cord nevers is another phenomenon which involves mainly younger households who are mostly renters and are simply putting off multi-channel subscriptions to save money temporarily. As a result, multi-channel subs have lagged household formations of late. Ultimately, as these consumers start families and/or improve financially, many of them will subscribe.
Among those who are considered best candidates to cut the cord or to be cord nevers, millennials, multi-channel penetration remains high, around 75%, according to Nielsen. Millennial subscribers kept pace with the overall rate of growth in multi-channel from 2007 to 2013. Presence of family is clearly a driver of multi-channel subscriptions, similarly, interest in watching sports is an attribute that also strengthens the cord. To that point, almost all current multi-channel homes tune into sports over the course of a quarter, sports viewers are three times less likely to even ever consider cutting the cord. Let's talk more about these sports fans. The U.S. is clearly a sports nation. We're passionate about sports, we'll go to great lengths to follow our teams, even suffer years, even decades of misery.
It's a pastime for most Americans and a key driver of media usage and social activity. Yeah, that's me with my buddy, Mr. Met. It's amazing how he keeps that smile. Yes, no matter how grim the outlook, I will be watching, listening, and checking stats, and getting my alerts from espn.com with every change in score, at least through September. Okay, maybe through the All-Star break. Since 1994, we've monitored the size, avidity, and composition of the sports fan population with the ESPN Sports Poll. From it, we know that in 2013, nearly 9 in 10 Americans were sports fans. That's just over 231 million sports fans, which is an all-time high since we've been measuring. The poll measures the level of sports fan avidity based on a simple zero through 10-point scale.
Now, avid fans on top in the red there are those who rate themselves eight, nine, or 10 and represent nearly one-third of the total population. Casual fans are four to seven on that scale. They represent 42%, and occasional fans, one to three on the scale at 15% of the population. Avids account for the heaviest consumption of all things sports and are most representative of ESPN's core audience on a daily basis. For example, the sports interviewer. They're younger, male-skewing, more affluent than the general population, and more diverse in terms of race and culture. For example, the average sports interviewer is 32% more likely to be a bicultural Hispanic male than the general population. ESPN can serve a narrow, selected, and valuable audience such as avid fans, but we also have the ability to achieve significant reach with our events.
In fact, quite often, the live drama and social aspect of sports forces the audience to actually transcend the fan base for a sport. For example, the total fan base for college football in 2013 was 163 million people age 12 plus. During the 2013 season, nearly 180 million people tuned into college football programming across all ESPN networks. That's 70% of the population reached by just one sport and just on ESPN. Extraordinary. Extraordinary numbers, and numbers that exemplify ESPN's strong position in college sports, and John's going to elaborate on that a little bit later. ESPN benefits from a very large and passionate nation of fans to serve, but the single biggest driver of ESPN's success is the brand and what we mean to fans.
Since we started in 1979, ESPN has evolved from being a highly unique and niche brand, essentially a narrowcaster, to one that is a household name, a leading consumer brand. We still maintain an important relationship and relevance to the core avid sports fan. In simple terms, they see ESPN as being absolutely synonymous with sports. It's all we do, and we do it with authority and personality. Here are just a few brand highlights for you. Now this chart shows that nearly 90% of Americans are familiar with ESPN, which means that they know something about us. Higher than any other sports brand, including the Olympics, Nike, or the NFL. In fact, it's almost impossible to get to higher levels. Today, ESPN is more than just the leading sports brand.
It's an elite consumer brand based on trusted industry data from BAV Consulting, a division of Young & Rubicam. As you see on that chart, in terms of key pillars of brand strength and brand stature, the horizontal and vertical axis here, ESPN is a leadership brand on par with consumer brands such as The Walt Disney Company, Coca-Cola, Apple, and Google up there in that neighborhood in the right-hand quadrant, upper right-hand quadrant. We're the only sports media brand with that kind of brand equity. Fact is, ESPN is number one in the repertoire of choice when it comes to sports media, and for some fans, the number one choice in media overall, so that when a fan thinks about sports or just even turning on the television, they think about ESPN first. That's the power of our brand. We didn't get to this point by accident.
We've worked really hard to cultivate a brand that resonates with our fans. Here are two spots which highlight the essence of our brand, as well as a spot for the upcoming World Cup.
Checking in. Name, please. Michael Jordan. Checking in. Name, please. Michael Jordan. Oh. Michael Jordan, eight o'clock. Oh. That's me. Oh. Oh, man. How you doing?
Really? Let's go.
Roll Tide.
Roll Tide.
Roll Tide. Roll Tide.
Roll Tide. Roll Tide. Roll Tide, y'all. Roll Tide, my friend.
Roll Tide.
Roll Tide. Good sauce. Roll Tide.
Roll Tide.
It's such an honor. Roll Tide.
We're good?
Yep.
To fans, a connection that started in television years ago. To that point, ESPN since 1998 has consistently received the most mentions as the favorite television network among men in an annual national probability survey conducted by research firm SRBI. These are the latest results from September. ESPN typically ranks as the favorite cable network among adults. When we narrow the competitive category down to just sports television, ESPN's preference in the repertoire of choice grows dramatically. For example, when thinking about watching sports news, sports fans are nine times more likely to name ESPN over number 2, Fox Sports, as their favorite. It's not even close.
The combination of brand preference, along with the most live hours of high-quality event and studio content on television, plus compelling original content like "30 for 30" and the X Games has resulted in ESPN being the most-watched sports network in 2013 by a very wide margin in a year where we've probably faced the most competition in our history. In this next chart, you see a summary of total day average minute household audiences for nationally measured sports networks for 2013. ESPN alone delivers an audience that is more than 50% larger than all other national sports networks combined. This next chart, we include the other ESPN networks for the comparison. Note that ESPN2 has the second largest audience, which is 70% larger than its nearest competitor, the NFL Network.
When you add up the ESPN networks, in combination, they deliver more than twice the audience of all other sports networks combined. Now there's good reason for ESPN's significant audience advantage. With SportsCenter and other popular live studio shows as consistent assets throughout the week, regardless of the sport event or match-up each day, ESPN has become a destination network for millions of sports fans, meaning our viewers tune in for more days more frequently than they do other networks. For example, in fourth quarter 2013, both ESPN and ESPN2 had more days viewed than any other national sports network. Even when we are compared to the highest-rated cable networks, ESPN still leads in number of days viewed. Let's talk about growth.
While the flagship ESPN has increased its audience through the years, as you see here in the red bars, our other networks have grown almost exclusively incrementally to ESPN. In the last 5 years, the other ESPN networks have increased the overall ESPN TV network audience by 46%. Between 1994 and 2013, ESPN's total television audience has grown 127%. A significant point of difference for ESPN is that we air the most live content in television. In 2013, ESPN aired nearly 23,000 hours of live event or studio programming across our networks. That's about 2.5 hours of live content for every hour in the year. On the ESPN flagship network alone, 71% of the telecast hours are live. As a result, ESPN remains one of the least time-shifted networks in television. In 2013, 96% of viewing to ESPN was done live.
While sports is still viewed live, more and more scripted content is being time-shifted, particularly in prime time. In fact, live viewing to broadcast prime content has declined 24% in the past 5 years to just 58% in the current TV season to date. That's through February. In that time, the share of live viewing going to sports has actually increased. Sports fans simply need to watch sports and even sports news live, a behavior that's not likely to change much in the future. The time shifting of non-live television programming actually creates a greater opportunity for sports to be seen as other programming is temporarily put on the shelf. It takes a priority. That's an overview of our very strong position in television. I'd like to spend a little time on ESPN Digital Media. In 2013, ESPN Digital Media had a terrific year.
Including all PC and mobile platforms, ESPN Digital Media led the sports category with an average 31% share of the digital sports audience, according to Comscore's multi-platform data. That's larger than our next 3 competitors combined. It's larger than Yahoo Sports, Bleacher Report, and NFL.com combined. ESPN's big point of difference is engagement. If you look at the 2nd column here in minutes per user, with the average user spending nearly 100 minutes with ESPN Digital Media platforms each month, that's more than twice the amount of time they spend with any other competitor. ESPN Digital Media is the undeniable leader in engagement but has also been setting new records in reach. From September 2013 through January 2014, ESPN set a sports category record in unique visitors by reaching more than 60 million users over 5 consecutive months.
In September, ESPN set an all-time record in the sports category for reach with 73 million unique visitors. As you see here, this record reach is due in large part to our growth in mobile platforms. 36% of ESPN's users relied solely on ESPN mobile platforms, and another 29% accessed ESPN content on both online and mobile during the month. The audience scale that ESPN Digital Media achieves today, I mean just web app and app content on PCs or mobile devices, actually significantly out-delivers the audience of our rival television sports networks. Since the launch of Fox Sports 1 last year through the end of 2013, ESPN Digital Media's total day average minute audience, essentially a rating, was 38% higher than Fox Sports 1 and 54% higher than NBC Sports Network. One of our fastest-growing and innovative digital platforms is WatchESPN.
You're going to hear a lot more about WatchESPN throughout the day. It's now available in 70 million homes, and it's a service that truly embodies ESPN's mission. We've seen very high engagement levels for WatchESPN on Apple TV and Roku devices, which launched just late last year. For example, WatchESPN on Roku averaged almost 850 minutes per user. That's about twice the rate of viewing we see for our television networks on traditional multi-channel platforms. Perhaps an indication of how a more interactive environment will increase viewer engagement in the future. We're also seeing solid growth in ad starts. That's up 91% year-over-year. The WatchESPN audience is exceptionally valuable as well. It's a hard-to-reach target.
Mostly male with a median age of 29, 18 years younger than the typical TV viewer, and a median income of $74,000, which is 54% higher than the typical TV viewer. ESPN's audience has been expanding beyond TV across multiple platforms, but it's no accident. Since establishing our mission statement to serve sports fans anytime and anywhere, we have grown our audience on each new platform and more than doubled the number of ESPN multi-platform users. This is our future. In order to monetize this value, we need valid, reliable, and timely measurement that's accepted industry-wide. The industry is moving too slow. We decided not to wait, and instead, we chose to lead the industry in developing a cross-platform measurement service with scale for the entire industry.
In September 2012, we announced a collaboration between Comscore and Arbitron to create the first five-platform measurement system for the industry. It's a project we call Project Blueprint. Project Blueprint was designed to measure ongoing usage of content across TV, radio, PC, smartphones, and tablets. For the first time ever, measure net reach and time spent across all of those platforms. Upon sharing this data with the industry beginning less than a year later, the reaction, as you can see here from these clippings, has been overwhelmingly positive. Let me share with you what Project Blueprint is telling us about ESPN's multi-platform audiences. The most important fundamental measure that Blueprint provides that has never existed before in our industry is counting net unduplicated reach of audiences across these different platforms.
For the first time, we know that in the average month, ESPN content on TV, radio, PC, smartphone, or tablets delivers unduplicated reach of over 190 million adults or 79% of the population in the average month, and 101 million men or 86% of that population in the average month. Extraordinary. To give you an idea of the significance of this reach, consider that in the average month during the same period, there were 196 million adult internet users in the U.S. across PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Essentially, ESPN's multi-platform reach is as big as everyone on the internet. Just as impressive, in just one day, ESPN Media can reach 64 million adults. That's more than one in four adults, and 36 million men or nearly one-third of all men.
The exclusive reach of ESPN Radio and Digital Media actually increases the reach of ESPN TV by about 50%. Important information to advertisers who need to get their message seen, let's say today, to get seats in a movie theater for tomorrow's premiere. Project Blueprint has also given us a lot of insight. For example, it's exploded the misconception that digital media would cannibalize television. The fact is that as more ESPN media platforms are used, more time is spent with each and every platform, including television. In this chart, we compare the time spent with ESPN in the average month among those who only watch ESPN on television, watch us on TV and use one other platform, either a digital or radio platform, and watch ESPN on TV and use two additional platforms, digital and radio. Two things happen in this case.
The overall time spent with ESPN Media more than triples from five hours to 17 hours for the multi-platform user on the right-hand side. At the same time, TV viewing goes up. It's a rising tide that floats all boats. Increasing audiences across platforms is great, but what's even better is the positive impact that it has for our advertising. It's a game changer. This simple chart shows the results of three real ad campaigns that ran across four ESPN platforms, TV, radio, digital, and ESPN The Magazine. Our tracking research for advertisers, which we do on a continuous basis, tracks the audience that use one, two, three, or all four of these platforms. What is clear is that ad campaigns running across platforms amplifies the marketing message. In this case, simple ad awareness can improve by as much as 20 points for a campaign.
This is our future, and it's why advertisers are expecting to increase their investment in multi-platform campaigns from 20%-50% in the next three years, according to the Association of National Advertisers. Here are the five things I want to leave with you today. First, multi-channel subs remain near historic highs. Cord cutting is fractional, driven by economic circumstances, and multi-channel penetration remains remarkably high among millennials. The ESPN brand has never been stronger. ESPN is number one in the repertoire of choice among sports fans. Three, ESPN is the clear leader in sports television, and we're facing our greatest competition, and we're leading them by a wide margin, delivering more than twice the combined audience of all competing sports networks combined.
Four, ESPN is growing across media platforms, with multi-platform users spending more time with each and every ESPN platform, and it's fueled in large part by the growth of ESPN Digital and Media, which led the sports category in every single metric. Finally, ESPN is a premium advertising environment that is poised to grow from increased cross-platform investment and the assurance of a live audience. If you think we do this only for the money, I'm greatly offended. The truth is, we do it for the kids. The more than 30 whose parents named their children after the number one brand in media, and by the way, the millions more who have even considered it. Let's face it, ain't nobody's naming their kids Fox Sports 1. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Artie. Thanks, Artie. That's great. Look, I hope that gives you some sense of why we are so confident about our position in the marketplace. Admittedly, that was a rather detail-dense presentation, so we thought it'd be fun to have a moment of levity. What says levity more than bloopers?
Just as I'm giving up. My heart is palpitating. Here comes another one. That's so intoxicating. Being where I've been. I know that in the end. I'll do it all again. I'm young. I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying. Well, love will find me, there ain't no denying. You can't blame a girl for trying. Oh. Oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Mm. Oh. I wouldn't want to be anybody else. Hey. You made me insecure. Told me I wasn't good enough. Who are you to judge? You know as diamond in the-
I think the takeaway from that video is if you need to see Dick Vitale without pants, you should be thankful it's an old grainy video and not HD. Look, another driver of our strong competitive position is our vast portfolio of sports rights. John Skipper, in his current role as president and in his previous role as head of content, has been intimately involved in negotiating all of ESPN's rights deals. I don't think there's a better person to come up and talk to you about this portfolio and our competitive position than ESPN's president and my fellow co-suffering Jets fan, John Skipper.
Thank you, Lowell. I'm back. It feels like I never left. It feels that way to all the people that work at ESPN, too. You'll notice there were no bloopers from the last two and a half years, as I've had an initiative to eliminate mistakes. Okay. I want to be clear about one thing. In Artie's presentation, he suggested that we do it for the kids, we do it for the kids, we also do it for the money. I don't take any offense, I wouldn't think I would take any offense from this audience for doing it for the money. I've had a long history at The Walt Disney Company. I actually joined Disney Consumer Products in 1990 out in Burbank, California, as Bob referenced before.
I moved to New York City to start ESPN Magazine in 1997, managed our digital businesses in Seattle, Washington in 2003 through 2005, moved back to New York City in 2003 to manage our ad sales businesses through 2005. I think I got some of those dates wrong, but you get the picture, I think. I then ran our content group for six years here in Bristol, Connecticut from 2006 to 2011. Like Artie and Lowell, I'm afflicted with the New York Jets. Tottenham, if you're not familiar, actually is the New York Mets of the English Premier League, so it's kind of the same thing. I'm fortunate to follow one significant winning team, and that's the North Carolina Tar Heels. I'm at opposition here with Lowell, who's a Duke graduate, of course. Of course, I'm Tar Heel born and bred, which explains this accent as well.
I've tried very hard. I don't appear to be able to do anything about it. I'm going to take a few minutes next to talk to you about our programming strategy at the company. Central to that strategy is live rights, and I'm going to get out of the way here because this impressive slide is hard to read because there's no way to display the number of premier properties we have locked up long term without this eye chart. We'll bear down on it so you can see it a little bit. We have the broadest and deepest set of rights in the industry, and the lengths of these deals assures that the position is unassailable. Among the three most important professional leagues, we have the NFL and Major League Baseball through 2021. We have MLB.
We have the NBA through 2016, and this represents an extraordinary amount of content. It's Monday Night Football, it's baseball games on Sunday night, Wednesday night, and Monday night, NBA games on Sunday afternoon, Monday, and Wednesday. We have playoff games starting Saturday all the way through the finals, which we hold through 2016. In the golf and tennis, we have emphasized the majors, and most notable here is we hold all the rights to Wimbledon, and beginning in 2015, we'll hold all of the rights to US Open Tennis. The only place you'll be able to see those two events is on ESPN. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a spectacular event we're going to have this summer, which is the World Cup in Brazil.
I believe we will win, but I will assure you that our results do not depend upon it. Our longest deals are with college conferences, including all the NCAA championships other than men's basketball through 2024, Pac-12 through 2024, Big 12 through 2025, the Rose Bowl, and the College Football Playoff through 2026, ACC through 2027, and this one won't even fit on the chart. This says through 2034, we hold the SEC rights. Despite being an ACC fan, I'm very happy to have those SEC rights. It's the most rabid fan base in the country, and you're going to hear more about that in a little bit. Now, if you look at these and you want to understand who among our competitors can challenge our position, you will need, among other things, an actuarial table. All right. I was told it was a tough crowd.
Here is a more aesthetically pleasing way to look at the rights we hold. We have rights agreements with all 21 of these major entities. We have more games and more hours of quality national rights than all of our competitors combined. Obviously, the competition does put pressure on rights fees, and some have asked, perhaps some in this room, about our ability to sustain growth as the fees increase. Well, it's quite simple and very analogous to what you do. We manage a portfolio, and like many of you, we manage that portfolio for profits. We have long demonstrated clear prioritization about what we buy and financial discipline relative to our overall spend. Within those parameters, we have still assembled a portfolio that will allow us to maintain our competitive advantage with our rights portfolio for quite some time.
Because we have acquired all those rights, there is not a lot of rights available over the near term, and this bleak desert environment is meant to suggest that there are only two deals to be done in the rest of this decade, first with the NBA and then with Big Ten. Obviously, I cannot provide you any guidance as to the likelihood of our renewing these deals, but you will see that we have a clear, successful track record in renewing those things which we prioritize. It's also important, and you heard Artie talk about multi-platform and how we use our rights. We acquire rights in a dramatically different way than others, and we've been doing this since 2006, 2007, which is unlike the traditional network model, we do not acquire three-hour game windows. We acquire rights broadly to use across all platforms.
We have games we can show on all platforms. We get extensive highlight rights to fuel SportsCenter and other news and information programming. We get data for digital platforms, radio rights. We get unique access and content that allows us to continually launch new products and services. In that regard, as the inestimable Professor Bulgrin showed you, we have long rejected the notion that new media cannibalizes existing usage. As the chart above illustrates, we hold cross-platform rights to the five most popular sports in this country. That is a position that no other entity holds. We have those rights across almost everything. There is one carve-out, which is you can watch Monday Night Football on every device but your cellphone. You can watch it on your iPad and on your desktop computer.
In many of our deals, we acquire international rights that help fuel local businesses, particularly, as I mentioned before, in Latin America. Russell Wolff is going to be up here a little later to talk to you about those businesses. Of course, again, you heard a little of this from Artie, there is no platform more important than our signature news and information program, SportsCenter. SportsCenter is the center of the sports fan's universe. If you walk across any college campus and peer into dorm rooms, you will see ESPN on. If you're in the college union, you will undoubtedly see ESPN on. Walk through any airport, and ESPN is the ubiquitous background of the terminal. Walk through any town, peer through the windows of a bar, and ESPN is guaranteed to be on.
If you go into the bar, you can get a better view and an adult beverage. It is a tough crowd. I guess finance is not funny. It's serious business. SportsCenter was the first program on our air, September 7th, 1979. It is now available 24 hours a day, 8,760 hours per year. Yet, as you're going to see later today in our studio, hear later from some of our executives, we're in the process of the most dramatic improvements ever to our signature program. We complement SportsCenter with an array of studio shows that covers every major sport, and in almost every case is the signature programming in that sports. You see here, PTI, which is the highest-rated daytime studio show in the history of sports television. Mike & Mike has been the sports morning show of record for nearly 15 years.
College GameDay is required viewing for fans on Sunday morning. This past year, for the first time, we went head-to-head with Fox Sports 1's new college football show. We beat them 28 to 1. That means we had 2 million viewers on average Saturday, they had 73,000. I'll try again. If you put this in the perspective of this room, assume we have 100 folks here, 97 of you will tune in to College GameDay on Saturday, and three will tune in to Fox Sports 1. I'm going to try again. We're in the process of identifying those three people. You will be removed from the room at the next break. There we go. At ESPN, we have a long culture of risk-taking. Our goal is to do something that many companies consider to be contradictory.
We want to be the clear leader in share, but remain the clear leader in innovation. This is a remarkable slide and shows a selection of the 80 new shows and content offerings we've launched just since January of 2013. That's in the last 15 months. We have launched 80 new content offerings. That is five a month. That is more than one a week. It includes ESPN FC, a new daily soccer show, Nine for IX, our documentary series commemorating the 40th anniversary of Title IX, FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's new data journalism site, "The Paul Finebaum Radio Show," as well as Colin Cowherd's new Sunday morning football show. This relentless innovation creates surprise, delight, and engagement among our fans. We hope dazes and confuses our competitors. This coming December, we will introduce a spectacular new innovation, the new College Football Playoff.
No U.S. sport is more tribal nor inspires more passion than college football. This is truly the last great national championship as a championship within the sport, which is now clearly the second most popular sport in the United States.
You can't blame a girl for trying. Oh. Oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Mm. Oh. Come on. Come on. Mm. She's a girl with the best intentions. He's a man of his own invention. She looked out the window, he walked out the door. She followed him and he said, "What you looking for?" She said, "I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see. Something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see," yeah. He's been living in a pure illusion. She's gotta come to her own conclusion. Right when you think-
I think it's clear that players can dance and coaches cannot dance. As you saw before, we have long-term agreements with the five major conferences. Only ESPN is in business with all of them. These five conferences create a national footprint. The ACC in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, the Big Ten in the Midwest, the Big 12 in the Southwest, the Pac-12 on the West Coast, and of course, the SEC in the Southeast. Again, the most fervent audience for college football in the country. You're going to hear later from Justin Connolly and Stephanie Druley about a new network dedicated to the SEC, which I think has a lot of potential for us. These conference agreements provide us with a very significant position in college football. Last year, we produced and aired 400 college football games, starting with 30 games on Labor Day weekend alone.
Our competitors do about four games per week. Of course, unless you are NBC, which apparently does a half a game a week since the season is 14 weeks long. My math skills were on display there. This leadership position makes us the natural partner for the new College Football Playoff in the college football postseason. ESPN, in a finely calibrated and well-executed strategy, holds the rights to 33 of the 35 bowl games. Allows us to start the season with Labor Day and those 30 games, run through the season with College GameDay to those 33 bowl games at the end, and this wonderful new College Football Playoff at the end. The guys who run the prompter is completely confused because that was not on there. As you can see on this slide, I want to point out one thing just for the sake of accuracy.
These are the sponsors from last year's bowls. We found out in the course of doing this presentation, there is no way to get a logo that doesn't have the sponsor embedded on it. Tostitos will not allow there to be a Fiesta Bowl without that. We're in the process of renewing some of these and replacing some of these. There will be three games on New Year's Eve, three games on New Year's Day. It's clear these six games are going to dominate that national holiday of bringing in the new year, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, followed a week later by the new National Championship Game. All of this is going to be on ESPN. This National Championship Game is clearly destined to be the second most important day in the sports calendar after the Super Bowl. It's all on ESPN.
That is a little bit of what our program strategy is. It is first and foremost about live events, our preeminent news and information program, SportsCenter, that full array of studio shows you saw across all sports, the multi-platform approach to distributing all this content, our commitment to continuous adoption of new technologies and relentless innovation. It leaves out only one crucial ingredient that our guys are great at and that you see every day on ESPN, and that is storytelling. Superior storytelling suffused with passion and humanity. I want to leave you with a little taste of this with an excerpt from a 22-minute Emmy Award-nominated SportsCenter segment about a lovely former ESPN producer named Lisa Fenn and a remarkable relationship that she formed with two athletes with disabilities in Cleveland, Ohio, one nearly blind and one who lost his legs in a train accident.
These two athletes and Lisa form a bond and rebuild their lives together through sports. A remarkable story of perseverance, profoundly moving, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the redemptive power of sports. Thank you.
In our job, we're always on the lookout for stories that are inspiring in nature. For people who have overcome something. Just looking at the two of them, you knew they overcame something.
I just asked, "Why?" That's all I did the whole time I was in the hospital, was ask, "Why? Why?
How would you describe your ability to see?
From where I'm sitting, I can just barely make out your facial features.
How far away am I from you?
Four or five feet, something like that.
You can't go into environments like this and earn the trust of two boys like this who have needs like this and then just walk away. I don't think anyone would do that, really. I'm not going to be next on that list of people to break their trust.
Yeah. I work out with him.
Yep. Keep moving. Don't stop moving. Yes, sir. Turn it. Turn it. Yeah.
One more. Okay. Stick to the plan.
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Woo.
Hey, Lisa. I'm going to London.
Let's go. Let's go. Get one back. Come on. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah.
I did it, Lisa.
I'm so proud of you. You were amazing. Absolutely amazing.
This is Dartanyon, the dude that I met in high school and wrestled with. She just created the family, like she was the missing piece to the family.
I have to tell you, the full 22-minute piece is amazing, I'm guessing some folks in the room haven't seen it. When you come back from the tour, we're going to put a copy on everyone's seats so you can watch it on your way home tonight or at your leisure. It's really powerful and quite emotional. It's incredibly well-produced. Senior Vice President of SportsCenter and News. I don't know this for sure, but when I was preparing, I looked at his slide. I'm sensing he's from D.C. It's just a guess. John Kosner has been with ESPN for 17 years. He's our Executive Vice President of ESPN Digital and Print Media. In this role, John, among other things, is responsible for ESPN3 and WatchESPN. With that, let me welcome John, Rob, and John to the stage.
Thanks, Lowell. Thank you, Lowell, again, welcome to ESPN, everyone. As Lowell said, my career with the company began 33 years ago after I graduated from Syracuse University, to this day, I'm still in pain over the Orange's late-season basketball collapse and early defections to the NBA. When I started here, one small building housed all our production and business facilities, that building was supplemented by numerous trailers that served as an office for other departments. It's been a privilege and an honor to witness the growth of ESPN firsthand. The one common thread through those 33 years is the word passion. Our passion for sports drove us 33 years ago, it drives us today.
My name is Rob King. Yeah, I am from D.C. I'd rather have the 6 seed and play Toronto than the 5 seed and play Chicago, but that's just how it turned out. I'm a graduate of Division 3 Wesleyan University in nearby Middletown, Connecticut, where in 1982, I became only the second Wesleyan Cardinal in school history to dunk in a game. If you went to Williams, I dunked on you, too. If you went to Amherst, you dunked on me. Shortly, Hannah Storm's going to come up here, and she's going to walk you through the power of SportsCenter and give you an inside look at the next generation of SportsCenter.
Hi, I'm John Kosner. I'm a New Yorker, and I've been with ESPN for 17 years. I'm a Stanford graduate and was a sports columnist at The Stanford Daily when John Elway was our quarterback. In my 17 years at ESPN, I've learned something important: Never underestimate the level of passion and interest of sports fans, especially when you can deliver exactly and everything that they want. After you hear from Hannah, Mike Tirico will tell you more about the digital revolution at ESPN and give you a unique tutorial on all of our digital platforms.
Back in the day when I started at ESPN, any live event was considered a big event for us. In 1980, we never dreamed ESPN would be home to the major events that we carry today. We love big events and cover them on a scale and scope that is unique in this industry. To give you an inside look on how we cover a major event, it's my pleasure to introduce the voice of Thursday Night College Football and College Basketball GameDay, Rece Davis.
John, thank you very much. A lot of handshakes to go around for all the executives there. Sports is my job, and I feel as if I never go to work a day in my life because I have great passion for the games we cover. When you do what I do for a living, sometimes you have to divorce yourself from the subjectivity of being a fan. Therefore, I don't want to put my favorite teams up on the screen because money is my passion.
Thought it'd be helpful for all of you now to see all of my favorite Wall Street firms up on the screen rather than my favorite sports teams, conspicuous by its absence, my very good friends at JP Morgan, who I did want to include, but there is that matter of the credit balance on my recently expired corporate credit card that is yet to arrive at my house. Once you get there, then maybe we can make some adjustments on the top three. Earlier during the program, John Skipper walked you through our vast portfolio of rights, now we want to show you how we take those rights along with our original content and program our linear networks, our digital and mobile platforms, and all of the other places that you can find ESPN.
College basketball season just wrapped up, it turns out there are close to 9 million Duke fans and more than 6 million North Carolina fans in this country. You might have figured out by now, we have two of the most rabid of each of those fan bases, each of those constituencies here in the crowd. John Skipper, North Carolina Tar Heel. Lowell Singer, Duke Blue Devil. Since John's the boss, go Heels, John.
Go Heels.
Go Heels. There you go. Last month, ESPN aired our 48th Duke-North Carolina game, which many of you know is the fiercest rivalry in college basketball, and some would say the most fierce rivalry in all of sports. As you've heard many times already, we at ESPN thrive on the big event. It's not just the event itself, though, it's the build-up, it's the SportsCenter hype, it's the radio talk, the second screen experience, the digital, the mobile, and all of the post-game coverage. Nobody is better at making an event feel big than ESPN. To show you just how we roll with big events, here are Wendi Nix and Sal Paolantonio.
It's Friday morning. It's all quiet right now. In about 24 hours, it's going to be crazy. You know why? Because the battle for Tobacco Road, it's not just a game, it's a way of life.
The importance of this game can be felt far past Durham. You can feel it on the hashtags, the handles, and of course, the radio waves.
Tomorrow night on ESPN, we got Carolina at Duke. Joining us now is our friend Roy Williams.
Carolina is not very talented.
Oh, I disagree.
You like them. You like Carolina.
Coverage is underway in Bristol. Sal, what's going on down there?
Hey, the production meeting is going on. Rece Davis, Jalen Rose, and the guys are inside.
Biggest question around the bracket, you guys can go anywhere you want there.
What are some of the ways that you serve the ESPN viewer?
We do probably five or six segments today that go to ESPN for SportsCenter, ESPNews, Longhorn Network, ESPN.com.
Crews are shutting it down for the night. Tomorrow will be an early and long day.
Welcome to Duke USC.
What's your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge is dealing with Digger Phelps all day.
Oh, really?
College GameDay will be on for two straight hours beginning at 10:00 A.M. on ESPNU, then at 11:00 A.M. on ESPN. Before the show starts, Jay Bilas will hit the airwaves all morning long, providing segments for SportsCenter.
Marcus Paige has had a player of the year caliber season in ACC play.
We want to know what you think. Tweet us your pick using the hashtag UNC or Duke.
We asked you on Twitter, 58% of the voters think that UNC's going to win tonight.
I don't think they agree with that at Duke. Have fun at GameDay.
Ready eight. All right, start movie eight, take eight. Music. Rece in mic. Go.
There's my man, Rece Davis.
Mr. Paolantonio, here's your coffee, sir.
Oh, thank you.
If I get your [Clark lea] , can I then go to the game tonight?
It's not up to me, it's up to my frat committee. What do you guys think?
Come on, guys. D-U-K-E. Go Duke.
Hey, if there's one person who defines this rivalry, it's Dick Vitale.
I've done every Duke Carolina game that's ever been on ESPN.
Wendi, how are the final preparations coming in Bristol?
Next up is the 11:00 SportsCenter staff meeting. That's where they go over the game plan for the SportsCenter that directly follows the game.
We also have Dan with social media. Tell us a bit more what we have today.
We have Tim Dwyer at the game. He's got a pair of glasses that have a camera embedded in them. We're getting some pretty cool footage so far that could probably work well leading into the highlight.
One we're working.
Yeah, do it. Open mics.
Welcome to Cameron, Dan Shulman, Dick Vitale, Jay Bilas. This is simple. This is about Duke and Carolina.
Underway here to Cameron. Can't stop this. It's a total mismatch. It's another level.
You can watch tonight's game anywhere, anyhow, no excuses.
WatchESPN is available on Roku, Apple TV, watchespn.com, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, Android tablets. On Xbox One and Xbox 360, you can watch ESPN video highlights. You can watch the live linear ESPN networks.
What a big time move. Are you serious? Jabari Parker, will this be his last game at Cameron?
We've showed you so many different ways to watch the game tonight, but just in case you can't, not to worry, we'll
Go.
Welcome to this most live edition of SportsCenter. Let's get to the highlight really quick.
Roll 25, take two.
In Durham, Coach K greeting Roy Williams pre-game. Within three just before the half. 93-81, your final score. Duke wins. Let's head back to Durham.
126 is out.
Jenny, they were absolutely sensational offensively.
They did a really good job of driving the ball. They isolated Parker at the elbow. It was a freshman who stole the show. Back to the studio.
Camera five, James is out. You're clear.
The battle for Tobacco Road between North Carolina and Duke is over, and so is nearly 40 hours of wall-to-wall coverage and analysis of one of the greatest rivalries in sports. Hey, everybody, that's a wrap. What time does the frat party start?
Toga, toga, toga, toga, toga, toga, toga, toga.
Lowell, seriously? I did not know that you were an early pioneer of the Google glasses. There was a distinct going under. I will say this, Lowell met his lovely wife while a student at Duke, correct? She said, "Lowell," if I can quote you, "Yeah, you're the kind of guy at Duke I wouldn't have dated." I'm delighted it worked out for you very well. By the way, if we haven't picked on Lowell enough, you might have heard Mr. Vitale during that tape piece saying, "Will this be Jabari Parker's last game at Duke?" Yes, Jabari Parker is entering the NBA draft, so more condolences to you, my good friend. Do you know that three of the top five most viewed regular season men's college basketball games in ESPN history belong to Carolina Duke, including the most viewed regular season men's college basketball game?
One of the beauties and one of the great things about ESPN is once that gigantic, huge event is over, we just flip the page to the next. Now for a little broader view of the sheer volume of content on ESPN. Here are the host of ESPN2's hit show, Numbers Never Lie, Jemele Hill and Michael Smith.
I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying. Well, you can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No. Someday. I'm gonna catch a shooting star falling out of the blue to what I do. Just as I'm giving up, my heart is palpitating. Here comes another one, it's so intoxicating. Being where I've been, I know that in the end, I'll do it all again. Because I'm young and I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying. Well, love will find me, there ain't no denying. You can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Mm. Oh, oh.
One, two. One, two, three, four. Give me more loving than I've ever had. Make it all better when I'm feeling sad. Tell me that I'm special even when I know I'm not. Make us feel good-
Remarkable, mind-blowing numbers. As John Skipper alluded to earlier, we broadcast more than 400 college football games, which totaled about 1,400 hours of live college football this past fall. That doesn't include the three hours of College GameDay each Saturday morning. The backbone of GameDay for more than 25 years has been Lee Corso. Coach Corso's showmanship and credibility is a huge part of why it is so popular, and there is no one in the sport who has done more to increase the popularity of college football than Coach Corso. Who also happens to be responsible for one of those truly, "No, I'm not making you another pancake right now. Stop hitting your brother. Turn up the volume. Hand me the remote. I got to see what Coach Corso is going to do," one of the must-see moments every fall Saturday morning.
That I'm so glad I found you. I love being around you. You make it easy. It's easy as one, two, one, three, four. There's only one thing to do, three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words, and that's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. I love you. You make it easy. It's easy as one, two, one, three, four. There's only one thing to do, three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words, and that's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. I love you. One, two, three, four. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Sunshine Scooter, the eternal optimist. Never thought I'd see the day where Corso invades Wall Street. That is probably a scary thought to some of you. I know that we have a lot of college football fans in this room, or at least we should. Anybody in this room have any idea which school's mascot head we just used for that piece?
Business. You can't predict the plot or time the laughs or script the finish.
Oh, oh. Sent it in, Jerome.
While the seasons may end, the stories never do. Want heroes? Check.
Can you believe it? They're almost in.
Need villains? Got them. Want to be moved or stunned or thrilled?
Unbelievable point.
Exasperated or exhilarated? Overcome or overjoyed? Got all that too. It's all part of our business, where the office is the arena, and the meetings are in stadiums, and the customers have plenty at stake. Sports deliver more than we can imagine, more often. Have a magical day? Oh, we are. We'll deliver our wonders to you, the next day, the next month, the next year. When the game clock hits zero, don't worry, SportsCenter is next.
It's SportsCenter Live.
Sweet home freedom underneath the tires. Kicked back, sitting by a crackle fire. Strumming them guitar strings. Like an old song on the radio. That you grew up to and everybody knows. Crushing of the water when the river rolls. Running wild and free. Baby, you sound good to me. Baby, you sound so good to me. Mm, mm, like a melody. Baby, you sound good to me. Baby, you sound good to me. Baby, you sound so good to me. Mm, mm, like a melody. Baby, you sound good to me. I wouldn't want to be anybody else. Yeah. Made me insecure. Told me I wasn't good enough. Who are you?
Nope. Never going to work, Ron. Never going to happen. Although if I were Ron Burgundy, I might look to lay low for a while, safe house or relative perhaps, while he recovers with his image. I hope there are no portfolio managers in here who are following the Ron Burgundy stock pick, and as you well know, Ron turned out to be very, very wrong. Back in 1979, a lot of people said that, and they've been wrong from that time forward. SportsCenter's become the flagship program of ESPN, and from Ron Burgundy, who once said of himself, "I'm kind of a big deal," to someone who really is a very big deal, the one and only Hannah Storm. Hannah?
Gee, Rece. That's a nice intro. Thanks for the intro. I can't believe what he did to my Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Hi, everybody. Great to have you in Bristol, and great to be with you today in Digital Center 2, which next month becomes the new home of SportsCenter, and we are very excited about it. Shortly, you're going to finally get to get up out of your seats. You're going to walk over and tour the new SportsCenter studio, and it's absolutely incredible. We'll show you more about that in just a sec. As we begin this very exciting new chapter in our continuing mission to provide coverage with both authority and personality, SportsCenter really enjoys a special place in the hearts and the minds of our fans. You've heard some of the numbers already, but here we go.
In a recent survey of more than 1,900 sports fans, 84% of them indicated that they watch SportsCenter every single week. 88% said they consider SportsCenter a trusted authority for covering sports. In recent years, we have moved the SportsCenter brand across digital platforms, and, well, we're happy to say that our fans have followed. 53 million users have come to enjoy our customizable mix of video, news, information, scores, and of course, statistics. You can see from the chart that SportsCenter reaches a young, affluent, male, multicultural audience, which, as you know, advertisers absolutely love. The median age of the SportsCenter audience is 35. That's compared to 47 for the average U.S. TV audience. Men 18 to 34 represent 32%, almost a third of SportsCenter's audience. That's compared to just 8% of the average U.S. television audience.
The median income of the SportsCenter audiences is $63,300 a year, 30% higher than the average U.S. TV audience. Yep. Pretty impressive. Pretty incredible. Later today, you're going to learn about the importance of these demographics when Ed Erhardt, always a highlight, speaks with you about advertising strategy. Now, the power of SportsCenter is tangible. This is my favorite. If SportsCenter were a cable network, it would be the fifth most watched network, just SportsCenter, among men 18 to 34, and it would trail not only the aforementioned ESPN, also Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, and TBS. That's pretty remarkable when you think about it. While much has been written about league-specific networks, SportsCenter is still the show of record and the most important news and information program for all sports. ESPN's total day rating is a 0.9. SportsCenter alone generates a 0.48 rating.
The aggregate rating of the six top non-ESPN sports networks is meaningfully lower than SportsCenter's ratings all alone. Their numbers include live games as well as news and information, so it's not just studio. Fans overwhelmingly prefer our multi-platform sports offerings and SportsCenter. This is what we found really interesting. I'm going to give you a couple examples over the course of the last year, that even when an event airs on another network, fans tune into SportsCenter afterwards. They want to see our post-game coverage. Okay. After Fox's October 30th broadcast of the final game of the World Series, viewers chose ESPN over Fox Sports 1. ESPN's live post-game SportsCenter had nine times the viewership of Fox Sports 1 in the exact same time slot.
Following Fox's broadcast of the Super Bowl, fans once again tuned to ESPN for post-game coverage, even though, of course, all during the Super Bowl, they had been promoting Fox Sports 1. ESPN's viewership was almost eight times larger than Fox Sports Live's viewership in this time period. No one else has the equity with fans that SportsCenter enjoys. Regardless of where or when an event happens, fans, they make their way to SportsCenter for the most entertaining, the most authoritative sports news anywhere. 15 million people watch SportsCenter every day. That is more people than tune in to The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, Morning Joe, and Fox & Friends combined on any given day. Men 18 to 34 viewed 62 billion minutes of SportsCenter in 2013.
Just to try to break down these numbers again, because 62 billion is virtually incomprehensible unless you calculate what it means, it's like each one of you, every investor in this room, watching SportsCenter for the next 1,180 years continuously. Well, I hope that demonstrates the power of SportsCenter. We are not resting on our laurels. As I mentioned, next month, we're going to move SportsCenter into a new studio, and that's going to really allow us to take SportsCenter into a new era. Really, it's revolutionary in terms of sports studio television. Here you go. This is what you're going to see in a few minutes, but a sneak peek at what that studio is going to do for us.
Every single song is about you. Every second that we spent. Like some mess stuck up in my head. Got me so distracted and confused. Baby, I think I've lost my mind. Feels like you crashed into my life. I keep on losing track of time. I'm so messed up, yeah. I'm so messed up. I can't remember what I did tonight. Or even yesterday. Like, dude, where's my car? Excuse me, what's my name? Someone gave me this rose. I can't remember who. My mind is totally blank. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you.
Oh, man, it's green on it. I didn't know what you were talking about.
Found my keys.
What? Wait.
Think that it's coming back. Something about the time we had. Wish that we would've been recording. Right, super tight. Can't recall a thing last night. Woke up with a smile in the morning. Baby, I think I've lost my mind. Feels like you crashed into my life. I keep on losing track of time. I'm so messed up, yeah. I'm so messed up. I can't remember what I did tonight. Or even yesterday. Like, dude, where's my car? Excuse me, what's my name? Someone gave me this rose. I can't remember who. My mind is totally blank. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. I just can't forget about you, you. Forget about you.
Okay, it's very cool. You guys are going to go in there, you're not going to believe how big it is. There's a monitor on the floor. There's a huge track up above for a jib camera, and I know none of this probably is exciting in your world, but in our world, it's absolutely incredible. We're going to have so much fun with it. Our viewers have never seen anything like it, and the possibilities are absolutely endless, and we start rehearsals in there next week. Everybody is very fired up. I understand also that earlier today, a couple of you guys tested your knowledge with an ESPN sports quiz. I have the results, they've been tallied. The two most knowledgeable fans who will get a chance to go off and tape a SportsCenter segment are Paul Ravinsky and John Marion. Paul and John, stand up, please.
Where are you, Paul and John? There you go. Well done. Very good. Okay. Guys, listen, it's a piece of cake. It's so easy. You won't have any problems at all. Just sit in our chairs and talk off the top of your head. See what it's like to anchor a SportsCenter segment. It's a lot of fun. I want to see the tape afterwards. All right, I promise you all, you're going to have a great time when you break for the tour. Meet us in the back of the room. Here to tell you more now before you go about the digital revolution at ESPN, here is my very tech-savvy, peripatetic colleague. He's everywhere, and he's got his devices with him at all times, Mike Tirico.
Thank you, Hannah, very much. Appreciate it. Good to see you. Hello, everyone. Phil and John, congratulations. Look forward to seeing you guys do SportsCenter. The job trading thing probably works better for you doing our job than for us doing your job, but we'll see how that goes later on this afternoon. As you saw in that video, one of the really cool advanced aspects of that new SportsCenter studio that you'll tour in a little bit, the ability to integrate SportsCenter and the SportsCenter app and social media. My role is calling Monday Night Football games, doing play-by-play, NBA basketball, anchoring events like the Masters or the US Open. It's vitally important that I get up-to-date sports information and stay up to date during those games.
At any moment, I could be on a number of devices, iPhone, iPad, et cetera, just like all of us are seemingly every moment of the day. Fortunately or unfortunately, a camera caught me in the act yesterday on my journey here to Bristol. Let's take a look.
When the road gets tough. We will travel this life well worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Carry on.
Some will write you off before you ever start. Somewhere between right here and the other side, there will be fear and doubt in the deep of night, but we will survive. Yeah. No one said this would ever be easy, my love, but I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well-worn, no matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on. And carry on. We may fall behind, lose miles along this road. We will be all right. I will never let you go. No one said this would ever be easy, my love, but I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well-worn, no matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. And carry on.
That concludes my acting career, so I will not be changing jobs. I don't know if you know, but that was actually in my house. You could see because there was a fire detector, a smoke detector that was not properly working. It was hanging from the ceiling. My wife will be telling me about that when I get home. Tech-savvy, yes. Handy, no. Since its inception as the first sports website in 1995, ESPN really blazed a trail in the digital content and technology department, enabling fans to get their sports information anytime, anywhere on their favorite screen. What it's become really is America's current sports page. For fans, ESPN's the primary digital setting, as such that our biggest traffic days are the first two days of the NCAA Tournament and NFL Sundays, events for which we don't actually have live rights.
Over the last half decade, we've committed ourselves to a singular product vision, focusing on serving sports fans wherever they are and making mobile really our winning advantage. At work, espn.com is the TV set for millions of sports fans, offering them instant updates, breaking news, and highlight clips while they're at the office. At home, there's WatchESPN on the iPad. It's essentially a second TV or a handy second screen while the game is on. Say you're going for coffee at Starbucks. The SportsCenter app, it's perfect. Lightning-fast way to get scores, read a quick article, or share an interesting post as we were doing there when I stopped for coffee. On the go, ESPN comes to you through alerts. Among media companies, ESPN has unprecedented scale in notifications. Let's say you're in your car.
espnradio.com is going to bring you all of ESPN's linear programs, best ofs, and the largest selection of sports podcasts on the planet, such as Bill Simmons' B.S. Report. If you're the Tigers' Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer, you happen to be at a friend's wedding reception, the game's right there with WatchESPN on your phone. Some of you may have done that at a wedding. I would suggest doing it with a friend. Makes the car ride home a bit easier. Audience data bears out our remarkable growth over the past five years. Check out these numbers. Number of monthly visitors has tripled. Number of total visits up five times. Total monthly minutes increasing sixfold. We're rapidly extending that lead. Let's talk about monthly unique visitors for a minute. Five years ago, we were second to Yahoo. Today, we're number one. Back to monthly total visits.
We have added eight share points and again, have overtaken Yahoo. In total monthly minutes, we are up 13 share points to once again take the number one position, like all those number ones. A significant shift has occurred because for the first time, ESPN's mobile usage now exceeds that of desktop usage. It's a result of not only ESPN creating experiences for fans everywhere, but really a testament to having those great products like WatchESPN, SportsCenter, and Fantasy Football or Baseball available on all screens. It's good news for us because it enables marketers to reach young men all day long, wherever they are, whatever they're doing. Let's go back to 2008 for a second here. We were behind Yahoo in average minute audience. By 2009, we surpassed them to become number one.
We've extended our lead to the point that by January 2014, our average minute audience exceeded that of the number two, three, and four players combined. If there were ever a day where you needed all these apps and second-screen experiences, I've got one for you. It's Thursday, June 12th, just a couple of months away. All in one day, I'll be in Rio with the rest of our team getting set for the opening day of the World Cup soccer tournament. We'll also be airing the first day of the US Open Golf Championship at Pinehurst in North Carolina, and on ABC, they'll be airing game four of the NBA Finals, likely in Miami. On that day, like every other day around this place, SportsCenter will act as the hub in and around all of these huge events, keeping everyone connected.
You've seen a lot about how we produce our content, how we distribute to a multitude of platforms, you can imagine, to make this happen, you need cutting-edge, transformative technology. I'd love to tell you all about it, but as you've seen, I can't act. While I use these devices, I don't know how to make them work. For that, let me introduce Aaron LaBerge. He is our Senior Vice President of Technology and Product Development, he will help us out with this.
Thanks for that intro, Mike.
Aaron, I'm sorry, it's the tech-savvy way to say hi. I'm not hip and young like you are.
Thank you.
Great to have you with us.
Good. As you can see on the screen behind me, I am a proud South Carolina Gamecock. I've been with ESPN since 1997, and I helped to launch and build the first version of espn.com.
We owe a thank you to you. We just showed what a day in the life of content looks like here at ESPN. We all do know that making great content is just not possible without the technology. Aaron, maybe you can shed some light. Tell us a little bit about technology's role here at ESPN.
Sure. It's pretty simple. ESPN lives at the intersection of content and technology. They are inextricably woven into everything that we do. We have been at the forefront of innovation since 1979.
Let's dive in a little bit deeper and talk about innovation, and something that's near and dear to my heart, and for most of you who are football fans, near and dear to your heart as well, that yellow line, the first and ten line, we like to call it.
Sure. We debuted during an NFL telecast between the Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens in 1998. Today, it is still a perfect example of how we combine content and technology to enhance the fans' experience.
It's a must-have. Now it's hard to imagine watching any football game without seeing that yellow line that we debuted back in 1998. Let's talk for a second about another game-changing technological innovation, really, and that's ESPN HD.
Sure. In 2003, high-definition television was in its infancy. Yet anticipating its importance, we made the decision to design our first digital center as one of the world's first HD production facilities.
It's beautiful, and it's turned out that ESPN has been really credited with being the driving force behind the widespread adoption of HD, and the consumer electronics industry has stated several times, different places, that ESPN made the move to HD. When that happened, it was a real tipping point for the whole technology of HD that we now almost take for granted as a standard. Sports Logical capabilities allow us to process information at a speed and volume unmatched in the industry. As an example, let's take something we've all done recently, filling out our NCAA bracket.
ESPN's Tournament Challenge generated over 11 million brackets, and at our peak, we were processing over 200 brackets per second.
Wow.
Pretty fast. Unfortunately, only 1.9% of them had Mercer beating Duke. The Tournament Challenge is an example of how we consider technology to be product at ESPN. More Duke mentions while we continue to go down a certain road here. By the way, thank you for using my bracket because I had Connecticut and Kentucky-
I pulled that especially for you
in the finals, the eighth straight year that I've had the finals picked exactly right. Sure. Now, Digital Center 1 and where we are, Digital Center 2, provide the infrastructure for television and radio, desktop, mobile and print across more than 50 ESPN business entities. DC1 and 2, as we like to refer to them as, really enable our media businesses to collaborate for the benefit of fans in powerful ways that no one else can, not just here, but globally. Can you tell us about some of the other benefits of DC1 and DC2?
Sure. Our digital centers allow us to own live. We record over 95,000 live feeds per year, which translates into over half a million hours of content. The second the live event concludes, we take the fan experience to another level. We published over 30,000 video clips last year. Those clips were watched over two and a half billion times and generated over three billion advertising starts. How's that for a stat?
I'm working on it. Keep going. Go ahead. Well, before you do that, I can give some perspective, at least to these numbers, that you clued me in on, to be candid. If someone in this room were to sit in front of a TV for 57 consecutive years, then you could watch all those live feeds. Pretty impressive, to say the least.
It is.
ESPN has also created this really interesting private fiber network. It connects Bristol to New York, Los Angeles
92 terabits per second
Which I know is the equivalent, and trust me, I have this off the top of my head, moving 60,000 high-definition sporting events simultaneously. It's all incredible stuff. Needless to say, we are in a state-of-the-art building and facility, and Aaron's a big part of it. Aaron, thank you very much.
Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.
It's clear technology is one of the key components of ESPN's leadership, and you will all now have a chance to see firsthand what we're talking about on a tour of DC1 and DC2. I'm now going to ask Lowell back up here to walk you through the logistics of your road trip. Thanks for your time. Enjoy the rest of your time in Bristol.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Aaron. All right. Thanks, Mike and Aaron. I hope that presentation gave everyone a sense of why the content we produce here every day and the technology that powers that is really unrivaled. We're now going to break to tour our current and new digital centers. For those listening on the webcast, we are going to break now. We will reconvene in about an hour, close to 3:30, please rejoin us then. Let me go through some logistics. First, Phil Rav-
If it's your life you live, there's no time to waste, to waste. Let me give your heart a break. Girl, you've been hurt before. I can see it in your eyes. You're trying to find a way, something you can't disguise. Don't want to break your heart, baby, you need the ache, the ache. Let me give your heart a break. Give your heart a break. Let me give your heart a break. Your heart a break. There's just so much you can take. Give your heart a break. Let me give your heart a break. Your heart a break. Oh, yeah. The day I first met you. You told me you never fall in love.
We're doing a sequel. We're back by popular demand. Come on, everybody, strike up the band. We're doing a sequel. That's what we do in Hollywood. Everybody knows that the sequel's never quite as good. A sequel. Another feature attraction. Places, please. We get to do it all again. Do it all again. Until the credits roll, we've got another go to show that we can do it all again. We're doing a sequel. There's no need to disguise. The spirit of the series calls for plenty more good times. We're doing a sequel. How hard can it be? We can't do any worse than The Godfather III. We're doing a sequel. The studio wants more. While they wait for Tom Hanks to make Toy Story 4. I thought it was the end, no, my friends, this is when we get to do it all again.
Do it all again. Until the credits roll, we've got another go to show that we can do it all again. We're doing a sequel. Let's give it a go. With Hollywood stars. More one-liner cameos. We're doing a sequel. I don't mean to be a stickler, this is the seventh sequel to our original motion picture. We're doing a sequel. Let's give it a shot. All we need now is a half-decent plot. Got it. An epic love story between a very handsome, long-nosed purple thing and a beautiful chicken. Gonzo with the Wind. Does anybody have any other ideas? It's about getting The Muppets back together again to stop an evil oil baron from demolishing the old studio. Fozzie, did you even watch our last film? How about Lulu dishes out. Yeah, I'm not so sure about that, Luke.
It's about a frog who marries a beautiful, perfect pig, they have to kiss each other a lot. Oh. I don't think Americans watch subtitled films. How about a movie where you don't make a movie?
We all get to go home early.
Good grief.
It's about a lonely dog, and one night he sees something he should never have seen, and he has to live with a terrible secret.
That sounds a little dark, Rowlf.
Kermit, how about The Muppets go on a world tour?
That's perfect.
I thought it was the end. No, my friends, this is when we get to do it all again. Until the credits roll, we've got another go, a show, and we can do it all again. We're doing a sequel. It's more of the same.
Let's give it a name. How about "The Muppets Again?
It's the Muppets again. It's the Muppets again. It's the Muppets again. It's a kind of magic. It's a kind of magic. A kind of magic. One dream, one soul. One prize, one goal. One golden glance of what should be. It's a kind of magic. One flash of light might show the way. No mortal man can win this day. It's a kind of magic. The bell that rings inside your mind is charging the doors of time. It's a kind of magic. Awaiting to see eternity. A day will dawn of clarity. Is this the kind of magic? It's a kind of magic. There can be only one. This race that lasts a thousand years will soon be done. This flame that burns inside of me, I'm hearing secret harmonies. It's a kind of magic. The bell that rings inside your mind is charging the doors of time.
It's a kind of magic. It's a kind of magic. This race that lasts a thousand years will soon be done. There's a kind of magic. There can be only one. This race that lasts a thousand years will soon be done. Magic. It's a kind of magic. Magic. Magic. Magic. Magic. It's a kind of magic.
Don't want to let you go. I'm staying here by your side. Wish time was standing still. Don't want to close my eyes and let this night pass me by. Won't let it pass me by. I don't want to miss a thing. Your love is so amazing, so amazing. If we could spend forever, be a part never. That's all right with me. I don't want to miss a thing. Your love is so amazing. Don't want to let you go. I'm staying here by your side. Wish time was standing still. Don't want to close my eyes and let this night pass me by. Won't let it pass me by. I don't want to miss a thing. Your love is so amazing, so amazing. If we could spend forever, be a part never. That's all right with me. I don't want to miss a thing.
Your love is so amazing. Here I am again, the same old situation. Why does the guy thing have to be so complicated? I should've played it cool, instead I made a fool. Oh, the things I do. Because I'm young and I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying. You can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, ooh. I should've shut my mouth. I could've kept it quiet. I might have freaked him out, because I was so excited. I just couldn't wait, I took a leap of faith. Oh, the things I say. Because I'm young and I'm dumb.
For trying. Oh, oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, no. Love takes over. I tend to be more worth it to me. Maybe someday, I'm going to catch a shooting star falling out of the blue, doing what I do. Just hasn't given up. My heart is palpitating. Here comes another one. It's so intoxicating. Being where I've been, I know that in the end, I'll do it all again. Because I'm young and I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying, well, love will find me, there ain't no denying. You can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. Mm. Oh.
The window is open, so is that door. I didn't know they did that anymore. Who knew we owned a thousand salad plates? For years, I've roamed these empty halls. Why have a ballroom with no balls? Finally, they're opening up the gate. There'll be actual real live people. It'll be totally strange. Wow, am I so ready for this change. For the first time in forever, there'll be music, there'll be light. For the first time in forever, I'll be dancing through the night. Don't know if I'm elated or gassy, but I'm somewhere in that zone. For the first time in forever, I won't be alone. I can't wait to meet everyone. What if I meet the one? Tonight, imagine me, gown and all, seductively draped against the wall. The picture of sophisticated grace.
Ooh, I suddenly see him standing there, a beautiful stranger, tall and fair. I want to stuff some chocolate in my face. We laugh and talk all evening, which is totally bizarre. Nothing like the life I've led so far. For the first time in forever, there'll be magic, there'll be fun. For the first time in forever, I could be noticed by someone. I know it is totally crazy to dream I'd find romance. For the first time in forever, at least I've got a chance.
Don't let them in. Don't let them see. Be the good girl you always have to be. Deal, don't feel. Put on a show. Make one wrong move and everyone will know. It's only for today.
It's only for today.
It better be today.
It better be today. Tell the guards to open up the gate.
The gate.
For the first time in forever. Yet, I'm dreaming of.
Be the good girl you always have to be.
A chance to change my lonely world.
Deal.
A chance to find true love.
I don't feel, don't let them know.
I know it all ends tomorrow, so it has to be today. For the first time in forever. For the first time in forever. Nothing's in my way. Oh.
Your clothes out on the blacktop. Scattered suits on the street. Frames and broken pictures in the mid-September heat. We'd stay these nights on fire. So hot we'd burn it down. Now all that's left of us is ashes on the ground. I told you back in June, you knew damn well what I would do. 365 days, you've been making me wait. Keep your two-timing game. It's a lot of too late. This summer's over, over. Don't tell lies in Heaven or an angel will get mean. Guns and vodka watches. Watch how fast they will soar. You always said you wanted to give back to the poor. I told you back in June, you knew damn well what I would do. 365 days you've been making me wait. Keep your two-timing games. It's a lot of too late. The summer's over, over. Over, over.
I won't be your debutante. Won't be the fool to your savant. I can't fix your cracked up dreams. Withered leaves for lofty trees. I won't spend the winter nights holding on to what ain't right. You might break your wardrobe back. Mine are made to last. 365 days you've been making me wait. Keep your two-timing games. It's a lot of too late. The summer's over, over. Over, over. 365 days you've been making me wait. Keep your two-timing games. It's a lot of too late. The summer's over, over. Over, over. Over now. Over now. I thought things couldn't get much worse, but guess what? They did. You hit my heart upside with a wrecking ball. That's what I get. I'm not going nowhere. I can live on my prayers. 'Cause I'm done playing nice, I'm done running for life.
If you think that you got me scared. This time it's goodbye trouble. I feel the light at the end of this tunnel. I get stronger with every step. Come hell, come high water. You push on me, I'm gonna push back harder. I got a whole lot more than a little bit left. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Everyone can save their breath. They can spare me the shame. You can point your finger somewhere else if you're looking to blame. I'll give you something to believe. Nothing on me says defeat. I'll never look back, so you better think fast if you think you can cut me deep. This time it's goodbye trouble. I feel the light at the end of this tunnel. I get stronger with every step, yeah. Come hell, come high water.
You push on me, I'm gonna push back harder. I got a whole lot more than a little bit left, hey. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Hey. It's gonna take more, gonna take more, gonna take more to pull me under. Gonna take more, gonna take more, gonna take more than that to pull me under. This time it's goodbye trouble. I feel the light at the end of this tunnel. I get stronger with every step. Come hell, come high water. You push on me, I'm gonna push back harder. I got a whole lot more than a little bit left. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah. Don't put dirt on my pages, yeah.
One, two. One, two, three, four. Make it all better when I'm feeling sad. Tell me that I'm special even when I know I'm not. Make it feel good when I hurt so bad. Barely getting mad. I'm so glad I found you. I love being around you. You make it easy. It's easy as one, two, one, two, three, four. There's only one thing to do. Three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words and that's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. Giving me more loving from the very start. Piece me back together when I fall apart. Tell me things you'd never even tell your closest friends. Make it feel good when I hurt so bad. Best that I've had. I'm so glad I found you. I love being around you.
You make it easy. It's easy as one, two, one, two, three, four. There's only one thing to do. Three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words and that's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. You make it easy. It's easy as one, two, one, two, three, four. There's only one thing to do. Three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words and that's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. One, two, three, four. I love you. I love you. I love you.
There's always gonna be some canyon in the way. There's always gonna be a river I cannot cross. Somewhere along this path that's chosen me. I know I'm gonna fall down, feel lost, feel weak. But wherever it leads. No one said this would ever be easy, my love. But I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Some will write you off before you ever start. Some will say the journey's just too hard. Somewhere between right here and the other side. There will be fear and doubt in the deep dark night. We will survive, yeah. No one said this would ever be easy, my love.
I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Carry on. We may fall behind.
Here I go. No one said this would ever be easy, my love. I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well-worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind. Carry on. Carry on. Think it's love. It's all so good. I just can't take no more. Turn it down, turn it up. I don't know. I don't know. Don't stop. Don't move. Just keep it there. Right there. Keep it right there. Ooh. Keep it right there. Put you on repeat. Play you everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Play you everywhere I go. Put you on repeat. Play you everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Play you everywhere I go. Yeah. Wanna put this song on replay. I could listen to it all day.
I could listen to you all day. You with me. Wanna put this song on replay. We can start all over again, and again, and again. Wanna put this song on replay. Don't stop. Turn it on, turn it up. Make it louder. I don't wanna miss a single thing. I wanna hear every melody. Beat it. Beat it. Beat it. It's so loud you can feel it. Feel it. Feel it. Beat it. Beat it. Beat it. Beating for you. Put you on repeat. Play you everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Play you everywhere I go. Put you on repeat. Play you everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Play you everywhere I go. Wanna put this song on replay. Listen to it all day. Listen to you all day. You with me. Wanna put this song on replay.
We can start all over again, and again, and again. Wanna put this song on replay. Feel it all. Feel it all crashing down. I'm so lost. I'm so lost in your sound. On replay. On replay. Listen to you all day. To you all day. Wanna put this song on replay. I could listen to it all day. I could listen to you all day. You with me. Wanna put this song on replay. We can start all over again, and again, and again. Wanna put this song on replay. Yeah. Yeah
Oh no, here we go. Hear your voice on the radio. Like every single song is about you. Every sec that we spent. Likes to mess up in my head. Got me so distracted and confused. Baby, I think I've lost my mind. Feels like you crashed into my life. I keep on losing track of time. I'm so messed up, yeah. I'm so messed up. I can't remember what I did tonight. Or even yesterday. Like, dude, where's my car? Excuse me, what's my name? Someone gave me these clothes. I can't remember who. My mind's a total blank. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you.
Oh man, it's great out. I should totally find my keys. What? Wait. Think that it's coming back. Something 'bout the time we had. Wish that we would've been recording. Right, super tight. Can't recall a thing last night. Woke up with a smile in the morning. Baby, I think I've lost my mind. Feels like you crashed into my life
What I did tonight or even yesterday. Like Dude, Where's My Car? Excuse me, what's her name? Someone gave me this rose. I can't remember who. My mind is total blank. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. I just can't forget about you. Which way is up? Which way is down? Can't stop this room from spinning around. I'm floating high, high off the ground. Caught in my head, can't get you out. I can't remember what I did tonight or even yesterday. Like Dude, Where's My Car? Excuse me, what's her name? Someone gave me this rose. I can't remember who. My mind is total blank. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
He didn't have much, a pair of hard-working hands. Everything that I needed, I got it from the old man. With a nine-second dream, he drove the red light faded. The grease on his hands was the way he commanded. The life he demanded, it kept us all in a struggle. When he ruled with his fists, it kept us all out of trouble. Even though he would leave, he wore his heart on his sleeve. By the way that he walked, he taught me how to believe. Old man, look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, look at my life. 'Cause I'm a lot like you. Old man, old man, take a look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, old man, take a look at my life. Yeah, 'cause I'm a lot like you.
Growing up at the track, he had a reason for being fast. His heart fell out breaking, he looked right up at the ceiling and, start again. Never breathe a word of his loss. 'Cause it's not about winning, it's the rivers you cross. The pain that you feel could be the fuel that you use. If you need direction, be it the path that you choose. My old man is a legend, he casts a shadow so great. I think of how he is watching with every move that I make. Old man, look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, look at my life. Yeah. 'Cause I'm a lot like you. Old man, old man, take a look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, old man, take a look at my life.
Yeah, 'cause I'm a lot like you. If there's no slowing down, there's only setting the pace. No more dreams to be stolen, just the right ones to chase. You have been through the worst, now you know who to trust. Leave them something behind before the ashes and dust. Old man, look at my life. Old man, look at my life. Old man, old man, take a look at my life. 'Cause I'm a lot like you. Old man, old man, take a look at my life. 'Cause I'm a lot like you. Old man, look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, look at my life. 'Cause I'm a lot like you. Old man, look at my life. Take a look. Take a look. Old man, look at my life. 'Cause I'm a lot like you.
We were never the marrying type. Oh, no. We won't buy dishes or stained glass lights. Oh, no. For a table we'll never sit at. In a house that we won't ever get. I won't wake up and pick out your tie. Oh, no. You won't come home and kiss me at night. Oh, no. We won't die in this kingdom for two. Say goodbye to a steady in my blues. No more white picket fences. No more lace veils or vows. No more you're the only one 'cause that's all done with now. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. Take these roses and this Jameson. Oh, no. Find a subway that I can sit in. Oh, no. Buy a one way out of the city. Everything that I need, got it with me.
No more white picket fences. No more lace veils or vows. No more you're the only one 'cause that's all done with now. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. All these notes and all these words are all that is left of me. Let these pages count my words. One last song to set me free. No more white picket fences. No more lace veils or vows. No more you're the only one 'cause that's all done with now. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. This is the last love song I'll ever write for you. Oh, oh.
Baby, when they look up at the sky, we'll be shooting stars just passing by. You'll be coming home with me tonight. We'll be burning up like neon lights. Be still my heart 'cause it's freaking out. It's freaking out right now. Shining like stars 'cause we're beautiful. We're beautiful right now. You're all I see in all these places. You're all I see in all these faces.
Shooting stars just passing by. You'll be coming home with me tonight. We'll be burning up like neon lights. Baby, when they look up at the sky. We'll be shooting stars just passing by. You'll be coming home with me tonight. We'll be burning up like neon lights. Neon lights. Neon lights. Neon lights. Like neon lights. Lights. Like neon lights. Lights. Beat in my heart 'cause it's freaking out. It's freaking out right now. Shining like stars 'cause we're beautiful. We're beautiful right now. You're all I see in all these places. You're all I see in all these faces. So let's pretend we're running out of time. Of time. Baby, when they look up at the sky. We'll be shooting stars just passing by. You'll be coming home with me tonight. We'll be burning up like neon lights.
Baby, when they look up at the sky. We'll be shooting stars just passing by. You'll be coming home with me tonight. We'll be burning up like neon lights. Neon lights. Neon lights. Neon lights. Like neon lights. Lights. Like neon lights. Lights. Shining like stars 'cause we're beautiful. Beautiful. You're all I see in all these places. You're all I see in all these faces. Let's pretend we're running out of time. Of time. Like neon lights. Lights. Like neon lights. Lights. Beat in my heart 'cause it's freaking out.
Baby, stop right there. Let me clear the air. Baby, look into these eyes. Let me apologize. I know what you're thinking of. You're thinking, where's the love? The love ain't gone. It's here where it belongs. I know what you're waiting for. You don't need to wait no more. I can give you anything you want, give you anything you need. I'll make your dreams come true. Give you anything you want, fulfill your fantasies. I'll make your dreams come true. You want a unicorn, I'll give it to you. You want a puppy dog, I'll give it to you. You want an ice cream cone, I'll give it to you. You want a Maserati, I'll give it to you. You want a satin pillow , I'll give it to you. You want an automobile, I'll give it to you.
You want a diamond ring, I'll give it to you. You want a thingy- thing, I'll give it to you. I know what you're waiting for. You don't need to wait no more. I can give you anything you want, give you anything you need. I'll make your dreams come true. Give you anything you want, fulfill your fantasies. I'll make your dreams come true. You want a taste of fame, I'll give it to you. You want a little gun tank, I'll give it to you. You want a cockatoo, I'll give it to you. You want a kangaroo, I'll give it to you. You want an American car, I'll give it to you. You want a Hollywood star, I'll give it to you. You want to go to the moon, I'll see what I can do. I know what you're waiting for.
You don't need to wait no more. I can give you anything you want, give you anything you need. I'll make your dreams come true. Give you anything you want, fulfill your fantasies. I'll make your dreams come true. Oh. I'm saying cockatoo. Yeah, cockatoo. Ooh. Impossible. I'll give it to you. I'll make your dreams come true. Cockatoo. Cockatoo. Kangaroo. Impossible. I'll make your dreams come true.
I stole the key to your black Trans Am.
I'm going to spend a dime, find a brand new song. Boy, I'm going to get your goodbye gone. You let me go and I'm losing sleep. Counting your lies like I'm counting sheep. Now it's time to right this wrong. Boy, I'm going to get your goodbye gone. I can stay out late if it makes me happy. Flirt with the boy who's looking at me. Whatever it takes to break this heartbreak. I've had to wait too long. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. I'm picking up my girls, first round's on me. With the money I got when I pawned your ring. Turning off my phone because tonight it's on. Boy, I'm going to get your goodbye gone.
I'm going to make up for all I missed. I'm crossing your name right off of my list. I can stay out late if it makes me happy. Flirt with the boy who's looking at me. Whatever it takes to break this heartbreak. I've had to wait too long. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Yeah. Oh. Get your goodbye gone, yeah. Stole the keys to your black Trans Am. Now I'm never looking back again. I can stay out late if it makes me happy. Flirt with the boy who's looking at me. Whatever it takes to break this heartbreak. I've had to wait too long. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone.
Get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye. Get your, get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. Get your goodbye, get your goodbye. Get your, get your, get your goodbye, get your goodbye gone. I lit a fire with the love you left behind. It burned wild and it crept up the mountainside. I followed your ashes into outer space. I can't look out the window. I can't look at this place. I can't look at the stars. They make me wonder where you are. Stars, up on heaven's boulevard. If I know you at all, I know you've gone too far. Oh, I can't look at the stars. Ooh. All those times we looked up at the sky. Looking out so far, we felt like we could fly.
Now I'm all alone in the dark of night. The moon is shining, but I can't see the light. I can't look at the stars. They make me wonder where you are. Stars, up on heaven's boulevard. If I know you at all, I know you've gone too far. I can't look at the stars. Stars. They make me wonder where you are. Stars, up on heaven's boulevard. If I know you at all, I know you've gone too far. I can't look at the stars.
Carry me far away. Let's start. Baby, pull me close to your heart. Lay me down under the stars. Tell me that we'll never change. With you, I am myself, my love. There's no one else on Earth. That's worth it all. If I fall, then I fall with you. Forever if we're wrong, then we'll both be fools. Together if we're lost, if we're safe. Risk it all either way. If I fall, then I fall with you. If I fall, then I fall with you. Forever if we're wrong, then we'll both be fools. Together if we're lost, if we're safe. Risk it all either way. If I fall, then I fall with you. You're mine. Leave the rest of the world behind. Only you can bring me to life. You know I won't hesitate. To fight. Laying everything on the line.
It's you and me until we die. It's always gonna be this way. With you, I am myself, my love. There's no one else on Earth. That's worth it all. If I fall, then I fall with you. Forever if we're wrong, then we'll both be fools. Together if we're lost, if we're safe. Risk it all either way. If I fall, then I fall with you. If I fall, then I fall with you. Forever if we're wrong, then we'll both be fools. Together if we're lost, if we're safe. Risk it all either way. If I fall, then I fall with you. Fall with you. I know you. I walked with you once upon a dream. I know you. That look in your eyes is so familiar a gleam. I know it's true that visions are seldom all they seem.
If I know you, I know what you'll do. You'll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream. If I know you, I know what you'll do. You'll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream. I know you. I walked with you once upon a dream. I know you. That gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam. I know it's true that visions are seldom all they seem. If I know you, I know what you'll do. You'll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream.
Come on. She's a girl with the best intentions. He's a man of his own invention. She looked out the window, he walked out the door. She followed him and he said, "What you looking for?" She said, "I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see. Something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see." He's been living in a pure illusion. She's gotta come to her own conclusion. Right when you think you know what to say. Someone comes along and shows you a brand new way. She said, "I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see. Something that I want.
Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. I need everything. 'Cause it's so easy to make believe. It seems you're living in a dream. Don't you see that what you need is standing in front of you? Oh, I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see. Something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. And I need everything I see. Oh, won't you give it to me now?
Can anybody find me somebody true?
Each morning when I get up I die, can barely stand on my feet.
Take a look at yourself.
Take a look.
In the mirror.
Cry.
cry.
Lord, what you did to me. I have spent all my years in believing you, but I just can't get no relief, Lord. Somebody.
Somebody.
Ooh, somebody.
Somebody.
Can anybody find me somebody to love? I work hard.
He works hard.
Every day of my life. I work till I ache my bones. At the end.
At the end of the day.
I take home my hard earned pay all on a Saturday night.
He's tired. He's tired.
I get myself drunk just to pass the time.
He's tired of work.
Till the tears run down from my eyes. Lord, somebody.
Somebody.
somebody.
Please. Can anybody find me?
Somebody to love?
He works hard.
Every day.
Every day.
I try and I try and I try, but everybody wants to put me down. They say I'm going crazy. They say I got a water in my brain. No, I know they're talking sadly, because I got nobody standing in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Lord.
Lord.
Ooh, somebody. Ooh.
Somebody. Anybody find me-
Somebody to love
Can anybody find me, find me someone to love?
Oh, I got no rhythm, I just keep losing my beat.
You just keep losing and losing.
I know that I'm alright.
He's alright, he's alright.
Ain't nobody.
Yeah, yeah.
I just gotta get out of this prison cell. One day I'm gonna be free, Lord.
Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. Find me somebody to love. It is, as we said, the highest rated studio show in the history of sports television, daily show. The guys are terrific, and Tony will be here this evening. Hope you had a good time on the tour in the world's largest studio. Welcome back. I hope you've gotten the sense that we do think of Bristol, Connecticut, as the center of the sports world. Connecticut was the center of the sports world for another reason last week, which is the men's and the women's teams both won the national championship.
We sometimes think of ourselves almost without peer in the state of Connecticut. We have a peer in the state of Connecticut. We're going to bring him out right now. I'll just tell you that the coach I'm going to bring out right now has a win-loss record of 877 wins and 133 losses. This is the kind of record we like at ESPN. I'd like you to welcome Geno Auriemma, the coach of the women's team at the University of Connecticut, and our next-door neighbor. Hey, Geno. Good to see you.
Good to see you, too.
Let's sit down. We'll be more comfortable.
Thank you.
Geno's going to be happy because I'm only going to ask him one question. Congratulations, Geno. You now have nine national championships.
Yeah.
One more than the great Pat Summitt, one less than the great John Wooden, I'd like you just to talk for a couple of minutes about the pursuit of excellence over an extended period of time. You've won nine championships in 19 years. That's a remarkable accomplishment. How do you do it?
Watching PTI all the time.
Okay. It's only been on 15.
That's where I get.
The first four years you were on your own
that's where I get all my inspiration. I think one of the simple things, the answer that y'all probably already deal with every day is, I don't recruit bad people. I don't have a lot of skills in my skill set. One that I do have is it doesn't take me very long to figure out whether I want to coach somebody or not, and it has nothing to do with how good a player they are. I think you do, too. I think you sit across the table from somebody, and in about 30 seconds, 45 seconds, you know exactly whether you want to work with that person or you don't.
You may have to, and you might convince yourself that it's a good idea because they're going to make you a lot of money, deep in your heart, you know whether that's somebody you want to spend time with or not. I try never I try not to bring people into my organization that I don't think I can work with and I don't think are great people that are going to get better. We start out with that. Then there's a limit to what people think they can do, and they set their own limits, and that's another thing that I'm really good at, getting people to do things that I never felt like doing when I was their age. I'm not exactly a plan guy.
I don't really get into five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever, I think I know what makes people better, and I work really, really hard with my staff at making them better. We have kind of a informal kind of a structure. I coach my coach. We depend on kids who come from the right families, the right parents, who understand the difference between right and wrong. In today's world, if you show up, you get a gold star. If you jog, people say, "Good job. You're really running hard." If you run, they think you're sprinting. We try to teach them the difference between walking, jogging, running, and sprinting, and they get rewarded when they sprint, and when they walk, they get something less than rewarded.
They're used to that because when you have good parents, they've taught you that as you've grown up, when you do this, you get rewarded. When you do this, you do not. We just try to tap into that. Plus, we recruit the best players in America.
Who are great people.
Who are really great people. Those of you that are basketball fans, no coach has ever won championships coaching mediocre players. I don't care if you're coaching the Yankees or if you're coaching UConn women's basketball. If you coach the best players who happen to be the best people, then you have a chance to win championships. I just saw something today that I thought you'd be interested in. Take a guess who. The NBA does a list at the end of the year, which player's position and which teams had to pay the most fines for bad behavior in the NBA during the past year. Take a guess which team was fined. Some teams, the New York Knicks, paid $450,000 in fines this year.
San Antonio.
One team paid $14,000 in fines this year.
The Spurs are well-disciplined.
One team is San Antonio, one team is the New York Knicks. One team has the best record in the NBA, the other team's not playing in the playoffs. It's not all about talent.
Right.
It's about getting the right people in your organization.
We've certainly done that. Geno's a great neighbor of ours. He's been a great friend of ESPN's. He came by today to say hello despite a very busy schedule in the last week. I want to thank you for coming by to see us.
I heard today was a big day out here, that this doesn't happen very often. I'm glad you know now you don't need a passport or visa to get to Bristol. Hopefully you'll make another trip out here in the near future. John's one of my favorite people, I've known him long before he got to the position that he's in, he's one of the good people. That's how I want to live. I want to spend all my time with really good people, John's certainly one of them.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate that. Thank you for coming.
Thank you, everybody.
Coach Auriemma.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
That was great. Thanks to Coach Auriemma for taking the time and coming over this afternoon. I thought that would be a great moment for everyone. Hope everyone enjoyed their tour, got a snack, and is refreshed because we're in the home stretch now. After spending the morning talking about how we buy and utilize rights, we want to switch gears, and now for the rest of the afternoon, we want to talk about how we generate financial returns. There's no better place to start than our compelling distribution story. Sean Bratches, as Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at ESPN, has led the negotiation for the most important deals we've done over the last two decades. Sean's been with ESPN for 25 years.
He, on top of affiliate sales, is in charge of advertising sales and research, so he has a big portfolio, and I'm really delighted to welcome him to the stage right now to walk through our distribution story. Sean Bratches.
Well, thank you. Hello, and once again, thank you for joining us here in Bristol for Disney Investor Day at ESPN, a little home field advantage for us. I started my career here over 25 years ago, many of those spent here on campus, and it continues to evolve to represent the great and innovative culture of this company. I'm here to talk to you about our distribution revenue, our largest source of revenue at ESPN. It's only right that we start the conversation with what's arguably the most important and powerful metric in the business, our industry-leading rates. When considering national networks by programming group, according to Kagan, our networks clearly hold the leadership position, and ESPN is the linchpin of that success.
This chart gives me great pride as I think back to the negotiations we had with operators in the early days of my career to simply launch ESPN on their 35-channel cable systems. Now, ESPN is the centerpiece of our distributor's core basic cable business and commands the highest rates in the marketplace. None of this happened overnight. It's taken us 35 years to get here. How do we become a marketplace leader? While ratings are important, we believe the key to success lies in the indispensability of a network to its audience. When you get down to brass tacks, there is no more important network on pay television than ESPN. Part of our indispensability is the power of the genre in which we toil, sports. Sports is the last bastion of live viewing. As Artie said earlier, 96% of ESPN's viewing is done live.
It's the only content that day in and day out is part of the immediate social currency. Our collection of exclusive events has grown steadily over the years. Over the past decade, we've moved numerous marquee events from broadcast to cable, including Monday Night Football, the new College Football Playoff, US Open Tennis, Wimbledon, and The Open Championship. For our distribution partners, the fact that our expansive portfolio of rights resides on pay television drives tremendous value as it creates greater demand for their products and services. We evaluate how well we're serving sports fans by asking two very critical questions. First, how much would our fans miss us if we were not part of their multi-channel subscription? Secondly, would they change providers if our networks were not available?
According to our ongoing studies with Hart Research, ESPN networks are the number one reason that people subscribe to pay television, and more subscribers would change TV providers if we were not available than would do so for any other network. Indispensability is absolutely paramount to distribution value, ahead of ratings and other metrics that are cited in the media. Core to our success is our ability to maintain strong relationships with our distribution partners and support their businesses. As John Skipper mentioned earlier, Beta Research ranked ESPN the number one most important network in cable for the 10th straight year. It doesn't stop at video service. ESPN is also critical to selling advanced services. Our viewers are higher income earners and more likely to buy critical growth products for MVPDs such as HD, DVR, and high-speed data services.
ESPN also ranked number one for the 10th straight year as the network with the most valuable programming to help generate local ad sales revenue. ESPN has the best affiliate sales group in the marketplace, period. We've completed eight out of 10 long-term renewals with the largest operators in the marketplace. All of these deals were done without a service disruption. We negotiate in the executive suite rather than the press. Distributors have made long-term investments in us and on this business model, evidenced by the recent deal we completed with Dish Network. These long-term deals have secured the framework of the multi-channel bundle well into the next decade. We're focused not only on sustaining the value of ESPN, but on positioning it for the future. This industry is changing faster than ever before, and that creates extraordinary opportunities for established brands such as ours.
We're well-positioned to capitalize on these new opportunities, largely due to our longstanding culture of innovation. ESPN is always at the forefront of developing and exploiting technology. I'd like to discuss three significant ESPN innovations. With WatchESPN, we became the first linear network to stream live content on the internet on an authenticated basis. The evolution of Watch on Xbox is also a great example of our continuing to innovate. Sports, like no other genre, is positioned to take advantage of the capabilities of new platforms like Xbox. The interactive channel guide allows subscribers to curate specific content into channels such as latest news, live television, and college football. Companion viewing allows viewers to simultaneously watch live sports highlights while playing highlights to the side of the main engagement screen.
A sure favorite among active gamers is Snap Mode, which gives fans the ability to watch ESPN video content on screen while gaming. These innovations and the capabilities of the Xbox platform drive usage 46% higher for the key 18 and over demographic than on traditional multi-channel platforms. We're not only focused on keeping subscribers in the ecosystem, but also creating new services that serve fans while driving revenue growth for ESPN and our distribution partners. ESPN3, our flagship dual-revenue stream broadband network, now available in over 90 million homes, does just that. It carries a variety of popular exclusive content like NCAA football and basketball, cricket, international soccer, and my personal favorite, collegiate lacrosse. ESPN3 has supported the value proposition of high-speed data for over a decade, but as screens converge, we're working with our distribution partners and exploiting technology to also take ESPN3 content to the television.
It's critical for us that we remain at the forefront of emerging platforms and that we work to establish business models that make sense for us and our partners. Among our biggest announcements in 2014 was the new personal subscription service that we developed with Dish Network. This is a product we will be targeting to the younger demographic that is part of the seven million broadband-only homes in the marketplace. We expect the personal subscription service to be service rather than a vehicle to exit traditional paid television subscription. Don't just take my word for it. I had the opportunity to speak with the president of Cox Cable, Pat Esser, in his office in Atlanta recently, and asked him to share his thoughts.
Let's roll that tape.
We've debated long.
Here I am again, the same old situation. Why does the guy thing have to be so complicated? Should've played it cool. Instead, I made a fool. Oh, the things I do. Because I'm young and I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love. Even if I always end up crying. Well, you can't blame a girl for trying. Oh, oh. No, we can't blame a girl for trying.
As we look to the future, we will continue to marry innovation with sound business strategies. It's imperative that we retain our leadership position with fans and distributors. We'll continue to embrace innovation in order to position ourselves for the future, touching more sports fans each day, wherever, whenever, and however they want our content. Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing all of you at dinner this evening.
Thanks, buddy. That's great.
Thanks, Sean. I hope that presentation does provide some insight into how well-positioned we are with regard to this really important revenue stream. There's another important revenue stream for us, and that's advertising. Ed Erhardt is the President of ESPN Global Sales and Marketing, a position he's held for 15 years. I think you'll see that during Ed's leadership, ESPN's ad sales performance has been excellent. He's going to provide some insight into how we've accomplished what we've accomplished and why we remain the name that we remain with advertisers. With that, let me bring up Ed Erhardt. Excellent.
Thank you, Lowell. It's great to be here with all of you. As you can see, my two favorite teams are Nielsen and close games. At ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales, we use that name because we literally put our customers first in everything we do. From our relationships with the top CEOs and CMOs in the business to our growth strategies and go-to-market communications, we lead with understanding our customers' needs. Yes, we're selling advertising. We're also selling our customers' products. The more goods and services we move for them, the better it is for our business and for theirs. It's the heart of our competitive advantage. The proof, well, it's in the pudding. Advertising represents a significant portion of ESPN's total revenue. At ESPN, as you can see, we've outperformed the marketplace.
Whether it's the total media market, television market, sports market, over the past five years, ESPN has outperformed in a big way. How do we do this? We focus on the customer. At the highest levels, our customers consistently tell us there are three main areas of focus for their marketing success. First, increasing fragmentation of audiences, both within and across screens. Second, ad model disruption, the result of time shifting, ad skipping, and new content formats. Third, macro demographic trends, specifically U.S. Hispanic growth and changing societal roles. We see these as opportunities to accelerate revenue growth and widen our competitive advantage. Let's take the first one, audience fragmentation. As you've heard, ESPN's mission is to serve sports fans anytime, anywhere. To our customers, this means that ESPN is always on, across screens, and at scale.
Increasingly, time spent with more screens throughout the day is a live experience, and it increases our revenue opportunities. Watching a live game on television, checking scores on the SportsCenter app on your mobile phone, or tracking your fantasy players on a tablet through Gamecast, these are all live experiences. They're additive behaviors. For ESPN, we're growing on all screens, not cannibalizing among screens. In this era of DVRs, binge viewing, and time-shifted television, ESPN's live. Our advertisers know they're reaching the audience they want to right now, not days later. Live also allows our partners to leverage the significant social buzz around real-time events, and we program with that in mind. Advertisers recognize that we're always on across screens, and they reward us. Every one and every four dollars that we write in advertising today is non-linear.
Part of that revenue growth is fueled by the growth of WatchESPN, which Aaron and Sean mentioned. We pioneered always on with our Watch product, it's a new and different advertising stream. WatchESPN allows us to play in both the digital and the television marketplace. It's a unique stream with dynamic ad insertion. It allows us to garner, in many cases, CPMs that are often. Consumer purchase intent increases by up to 85%. A good deal of that growth is now being fueled by the over-the-top devices, which are the rage. Apple TV, Xbox, Roku, and more, ESPN is on every one of them. Not surprisingly, we're seeing that the WatchESPN audience is younger, more affluent, and more technologically savvy than both the general television audience and ESPN's linear audience.
We believe as addressable data-driven advertising picks up steam, WatchESPN is in an excellent position to take advantage of this opportunity and industry trend. This provides us another way to monetize our fans wherever they consume sports. Among our advertisers who spend $2 million or more, 80% buy ESPN on multiple screens, that's a 23% growth since 2009. As clients demand for more improved measurement, we think this will accelerate ESPN's ability to monetize all screens and widen our gap over our competitors. As Artie said, we're leading the industry to accurately count impressions across all devices. We're also investing in understanding consumer behavior on those screens. Marketers want to know how multi-screen consumption impacts their advertising, something ESPN is uniquely positioned to do because of our scale.
Our clients come to us for our expertise on which combination of screens, at what levels, and how they can drive specific results for their marketing goals, whether that be awareness, brand favorability, purchase intent, most importantly, sales. This is a core advantage for us. John Skipper referred earlier to our share and growth in mobile. Currently, as you guys know, mobile is the platform that's the most challenged in terms of measurement. It's also the one, as the industry figures this out, and they will, that has the most upside for ESPN. We also see that opportunity in audio, and we see it in out-of-home. Our leadership in these areas differentiates us and provides revenue upside. Our clients' second challenge is the disruption of ad models.
Being live, of course, the very nature of sports blunts the effect of time shifting and ad skipping. We don't rely solely on that to best serve our customers. Just as ESPN is always on, we're also always innovating. That innovation comes to life in three key areas. The first is breakthrough ad formats, which we're doing across every screen. In television, we recently created the transition unit between live events and SportsCenter. This allows us to hold fans' attention to the advertising and helps increase ratings at the same time. In digital, we introduced the flip unit, which was created at our own 2013 Ad Sales Hackathon. The ad flips back and forth between advertising and content and keeps the user engaged and the advertising viewed. In print, we launched a never-been-done-before branded integration unit with Coors Light Cold Hard Facts, a television-inspired idea.
An industry first, it puts a print spin on branded content. At ESPN, we've been doing native advertising for many years. The second way we innovate is through branded solutions fueled by Creative Works, our in-house marketing agency. These innovations create compelling ways to connect brands with our fans. You know them well. They range from the highly successful GameDay, built by The Home Depot, to the Nissan Heisman House, and the Wendy's Wooden Award, and so many more. These are IP-free, co-branded marketing has led to clients such as Charmin, Duracell, Toyota, and Paramount to ask us to create their brand advertising, as they know we speak to men better than anyone. We're very proud of the branded content that we've done for clients such as this video series for Levi's, which stars the Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Russell Wilson.
Take a look.
Should have played it cool. Instead, I made a fool of all the things I do. I'm young and I'm dumb. I do stupid things when it comes to love and even if my-
Those distribution channels enable us to pioneer beyond our walls to engage consumers wherever they are. Fans can watch ESPN on Xbox, get instant replays from Twitter. Watch ESPN video on AOL. We regard social as an opportunity, not a threat. We use Twitter, for example, as a distribution channel for our highlights in partnership with Verizon while still controlling the sales channel and connecting fans back to the scale of ESPN. For us, social is complementary. We do it well. We figured out how to monetize it. Dunkin' Donuts partnered with us during the NFL season to run Vine videos as billboards in Monday Night Countdown. This was the first-ever television advertising made completely from Vine videos. The proof of how ESPN innovates in ad disruption is in our numbers because as you know, the numbers never lie. Take a look at these numbers.
23,000 on-air features with our customers' brands integrated into ESPN's content. 850 integrated sponsorships. That's scale. The biggest focus for our clients, which transcends their marketing and their media strategies, is the changing macro demographic trends that we see across America. We're ahead of this curve, and we're well-poised for growth. First of all, on the Hispanic front, ESPN Deportes has long been the product of choice for targeting Hispanic sports fans. As you know, sports is the great unifier. As population growth and marketing budgets shift from Spanish-dominant to bicultural and English-dominant Hispanics, demand for English language programs on ESPN will only increase. We're bridging language and culture to better serve our fans and our customers. Moreover, young Hispanic men greatly over-index on mobile, so there's a significant upside and leverage to our strength and scale in mobile for this market.
Our clients recognize our power here and use us to reach this growing population, both in English and in Spanish. For example, Toyota sponsored SportsNation on ESPN and Nacion on ESPN Deportes. T-Mobile partnered with our own ESPN CreativeWorks to do our first-ever dual language co-branded spot. The casting reflects the diversity of the Hispanic market. The ad ran in both English and Spanish. With the magic of a little editing, we took the liberty of giving you the flavor of both in the same spot.
There's always gonna be some canyon in the way. There's always gonna be a river I cannot cross.
Another macro trend clients are embracing is the shifting role of men in society. More men are staying single longer, and if and when they do marry, they're assuming non-traditional roles in the family. Men are picking up more responsibility for childcare and grocery shopping, which increases their buying power. According to the National Retail Federation, men spend 39% more per visit than women around the holidays. This means men who have largely been ignored by high-spending categories such as fashion, retail, and consumer packaged goods are now lucrative targets for a whole new group of advertisers. Those advertisers turn to ESPN first to understand how to best market to men. As the men's grooming category grows, so grows ESPN. So does our client base. In 2009, we had clients such as Gillette and Old Spice.
Since then, the number of men's grooming brands on ESPN has increased by 75%. 2014, we carry advertising from all these brands, and this category has grown, and we're getting more than our fair share, as you would expect. What you might not expect is the growth in the retail category we're experiencing. As men's fashion becomes more mass and e-commerce more popular, our retail business has grown 44% since 2009, and ESPN now does business with retailers such as Macy's and Target, which traditionally had targeted women. We have helped retailers such as Men's Wearhouse, Belk, and Jos. A. Bank grow from regional to national players, and we're helping drive e-commerce with all of these clients, as well as the online companies like Overstock and Amazon. At ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales, we're optimistic about future growth.
All the winds of change blowing across the marketing and media landscape play to our strength. We have opportunities to compete in so many different marketplaces and across new and growing categories, and this leads to new advertisers. Across all media, ESPN signed 630 new advertisers in the last year. These new advertisers have an average spend of $200,000, that gives us a lot of room to grow that business. This year, as John discussed earlier, we're bringing a very exciting product. True vertical partnerships that are season and year-long with some of the very biggest brands around the College Football Playoff. Led by Dr Pepper's recent announcement, ESPN has a dozen deals and counting to announce over the next 90 days. Clients like our college football partners recognize ESPN's strength. Don't take just our word for it.
John Skipper mentioned the most recent Beta Research Study, studies 225 advertising media professionals. Not surprisingly, ESPN was number one in all these areas, outranking 42 other cable media companies and all four broadcast networks. Over the past three years at our annual upfront event in N.Y., senior executives at leading companies have been gracious enough to talk on the record about how ESPN drives their business results. Here's what just a few of them had to say.
Carry on, and carry on. Full moon is shining like a spotlight. I could just sit and listen to you talking all night. When you whisper, yeah, baby, when you lean in. I get a crazy good kind of feeling. It's like amen from the back of the choir. Sweet home freedom underneath the tires. Kickback, sitting by the crackling fire. Strumming them guitar strings. Like an old song on the radio. That you grew up to and everybody know. Gushing of the water when the river rolls. Wild and wild and free. Baby, you sound good to me. Baby, you sound so good to me. Like a melody. Baby, you sound good to me. Tell me all of your stories. Don't you leave nothing out, 'cause baby, I ain't-
To end, let's go back to where we started. It's about our customers being at the center of all we do. It drives our success, not just for today, but for where we're going to go next. Thanks.
Thanks, Ed.
Thank you.
That was great. Thank you, Ed. I remember it was just a couple of years ago, we started talking about men's grooming as a category, people would look at us funny. It's become a real significant category for ESPN, I think that's a credit to Ed and his team and the work they're doing with clients. We're often asked about our international business, we've spoken a little about this over the last five years, but not extensively, we thought this was a great opportunity to dive in a little deeper. Here to take us through that is Russell Wolff, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of ESPN International. He's going to talk about a few of our international executive initiatives. Russell's been with ESPN 17 years.
He leads our efforts outside the U.S., I'm pleased to welcome him up right now. Russell Wolff.
Thanks, Lowell. Good afternoon. I know getting towards the end of the day, so stick with us here. I'm Russell Wolff, I lead our businesses outside the U.S., I'm excited to be here. I've been at the company since 1997, and while I'm based in New York today, I've had stints in Hong Kong and Singapore. I'm both a Dartmouth and Tuck School graduate. While I spend about 50% of my time outside the U.S. visiting with our staff, our clients, and rights holders, I still get a chance to play ice hockey when I'm home in New York with my men's league team, which is great. I cheer for the New York Rangers, as you can see.
Big game tonight against Philadelphia in the opening of the playoffs for them, a few other teams which you may or may not recognize, including the Indian national team. Over the last few years, we've made some moves that have refined our international strategy and our portfolio. We're now focused on our multimedia businesses in Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and our digital businesses around the world. You'll hear a bit more about our strong digital presence in India in just a few minutes. As you can see from this next map, we have a very broad footprint. ESPN has a presence in almost every country around the world in at least one medium. We have 24 television networks outside the U.S. that reach 162 million households. These networks are complemented by more than 50 websites, mobile applications, radio, broadband, and magazine in key markets.
In honing our strategy, we believe we're focusing our efforts on the TV markets and global digital spaces that have the best marketplace structures, dynamics, and continued growth projections to continue to create profitable and growing ESPN businesses. ESPN International continues to grow, today the revenues in this business, including our joint ventures, which includes the Canadian business, are in excess of $1 billion per year. Today, we'd like to introduce you to two very specific businesses at ESPN and their growth dynamics. Our Latin America business, which I'll get to in a few minutes. First, let me introduce you to ESPN's multi-regional cricket business, ESPNcricinfo, the world's number one cricket website and online cricket brand, which we acquired in 2007.
Cricinfo provides the best cricket content in the world, whether that's breaking news, statistics in a sport that has more statistics than baseball, detailed analysis, or live match coverage. We're excited about the growth prospects of this business. It's driven by cricket fan avidity in places like India and other Commonwealth countries, the technology adoption that's going on in these places, whether internet-enabled phones or tablets and broadband, and the immigration patterns right here of South Asians in the U.S. Today, almost 30 million Americans self-identify as cricket fans. 30 million. Product improvements on ESPNcricinfo continue to deepen engagement with fans. From 2009 to 2013, we've seen Cricinfo grow 190% across the web, mobile, and apps. In March, the short form of cricket, the 2020 format, had its World Cup in Bangladesh. Now the world awaits the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup.
This is cricket's equivalent of the FIFA World Cup. We are well-positioned to take advantage of the strong growth factors in the cricket business around the world, and we expect the 2015 World Cup to set an all-time record for Cricinfo. I imagine most of you don't spend much time in the world of cricket like I do. I thought we'd take a minute to show you the world that Cricinfo plays in.
I can't remember what I did tonight or even yesterday. Like, dude, where's my car? Excuse me, what's my name? Someone gave me these clothes. I can't remember who. My mind is total blank. I just can't forget about you. Ooh, forget about you. I just can't forget about you. Forget about you. Oh.
It may not be where you spend your time, last week we had our first ever live cricket match on ESPN2, the final of the Cricket T20 World Championship. For U.S. cricket fans, Cricinfo, and yes, there are U.S. cricket fans, Cricinfo is about live cricket, including 125 match days under contract from key rights holders, whether the ICC, the Indian Premier League, or others. We've integrated, as you can see here, the ESPN3 experience right onto the front page of Cricinfo for U.S. fans, it's working. We're growing usage. In December alone, we had 2.1 million video starts on Cricinfo here in the U.S. The top 10 exclusive events on ESPN3, a product you've heard a lot about today, are all cricket events, we've just come off this great T20 event in Bangladesh.
It was one of the best cricket tournaments we've ever aired on WatchESPN and ESPN3, and it ended up garnering the most uniques and highest average minute audience of any event on WatchESPN in its history. As I said, the final of this event also aired live on television on ESPN2. The interesting thing about ESPNcricinfo's fan base here in the U.S. is it's mostly additive. 40% of ESPNcricinfo users are not espn.com users. They're coming to our company for cricket. We're now preparing for employees to take advantage of the upcoming 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup. In the U.S., where we have the TV rights, we'll air the event in full, and we will cover the event cover to cover, start to finish digitally around the world. Now let me take you back from the world of cricket down south to Latin America.
As I introduce you to ESPN's business in Latin America, you'll see that this landscape has many of the characteristics that the U.S. media landscape had 20 years ago, such as low and fast-growing pay TV penetration, developing and fast-growing TV ad sales marketplaces, emerging economies and rising middle classes, and accelerating adoption of media technology such as broadband, mobile phones, HDTV, and tablets. Let me tell you a little bit about how we think about Latin America. We've divided Latin America into two main regions, Spanish-speaking Latin America and Brazil, always shown in green. This division is driven primarily by Portuguese and Spanish language distinction between the two. This business, which we first entered in 1994, has grown significantly over the years. From 2008 to 2013, the operating income CAGR on the entire ESPN Latin America business has been 45%.
This growth has been driven by four really important factors. First, multichannel television household growth. ESPN subscriber growth and subscriber fee rate increases, both achieved through negotiations with platforms, and of course, ad sales marketplace growth. Over the past five years, to continue to serve fans in these markets and take advantage of these dynamics, we have launched 12 new products, networks, and services in Latin America. With Spanish-speaking Latin America, we further divided it into Latin North and Latin South, the North being anchored by Mexico and rounded out by Central America, and the South being anchored by Argentina. The division is based primarily on fan avidity for various sports, with Mexico having more interest in U.S. sports and the South having interest in rugby and polo. Of course, in both places, soccer is wildly popular.
We're focused on being pan-regionally efficient and driving local appeal at the same time, whether in Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina. As we deliver fans great multimedia content, we lead the industry in Latin America with a combination of technologically driven products such as WatchESPN, piggybacking on the products here, and it leverages our U.S. technology group and the investments we've made. We're also replicating our very successful U.S. sales strategies. First, the multimedia ad sales and sponsorship approach, which you heard about from Ed. Our sales team is both locally focused and part of our Global Sales and Marketing organization. Our global, regional, and local capabilities allow us to sell to clients where they want to buy.
On the distribution side of our business, which you heard about from Sean, we've modeled Disney and ESPN media networks team after our joint U.S. distribution team, which does an excellent job across the industry with Disney and ESPN products. We believe these four areas of leverage provide us smart, efficient, and cutting-edge products for fans and amazing approaches for clients while positioning us for ongoing growth. Let me take you into the region for a bit more detail, if you don't mind. As you look at Latin South, it's anchored by the TV networks listed above, ESPN Deportes, ESPN Trace, and ESPN HD. The ESPN Xtra product is offered to cable operators around special events. These networks are complemented by ESPN Radio, ESPN.com, and ESPN Play, our broadband product in Latin America, which is just like ESPN3 here in the U.S.
Football is key to fans in the South and the Andean regions, we have a very strong mix of products, including the UEFA Champions League, Spanish League, and English Premier League. Argentine rugby and polo are wildly popular and have very strong appeal. We have an excellent rights position in these territories in rugby, polo, and football. As we head north, we also have a suite of TV networks tailored for the market and complemented by multimedia offerings that you see here on the left. Football remains at the heart of our offering to fans, the Champions League, Serie A are key. We also have a package of Mexican football in the mix, which of course is a fan favorite. In Brazil, where football is king, we have a growing position in local Brazilian football. Here, Copa Sadia do Brasil.
We're expanding our presence in the under-20 and under-17 product, which we were the first ones to ever launch, and that's in addition to our main position in the main Brazilian football league. Brazilians are also everywhere in European football. Brazil is the number 1 exporter of football talent to Europe, where 515 Brazilians currently play, making European football, of course, a Brazilian fan favorite. To serve these fans, we have a variety of European leagues that complement our Brazilian football efforts, and that's headlined by the UEFA Champions League. U.S. sports are popular across the region. The NBA works in almost all these markets. Major League Baseball has strong appeal in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, and the NFL is highly popular in Mexico. The offering of major golf and tennis events in the South is similar to the North, and both hold really strong appeal.
Our Brazilian fans also love the Grand Slams and Majors and are offered the best of both throughout the year. No matter which rights set we have in any market, ESPN is always focused not just on the game, but also on the game around the game, which you've heard about today. The SportsCenter franchise, which you got a chance to tour, is at the heart of our news and information effort in Latin America as well, and it's continued to grow. We now have six editions. Let's take a look.
[Foreign language] Esto es SportsCenter.
[Foreign language] Buenos días, México.
[Foreign language] Boa tarde, Brazil.
[Foreign language] Buenas noches, Argentina.
SportsCenter in Latin America has the iconic look and feel of the SportsCenter you know and love in the United States. From the day we launched our first Latin American SportsCenter in 2000, the show's presence on our networks has grown from once a day to six different local versions produced at three different studios in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. Over 10 hours of SportsCenter are produced daily for Latin American fans, with contributions from around the globe.
In Madrid
Okay. Thanks, Russell. It struck me during Russell's presentation, had we been thinking ahead, we would've planned this day for June in Rio, but instead you got April in Bristol. Okay, while most of you were out touring, our two lucky quiz winners got to film their SportsCenter highlight, now we're all going to get to see the results. First, we're going to have Phil Ravinsky. Phil, thank you for doing this. We appreciate it. As you see the clip, you are going to hear a producer in Phil's ear. That's what he heard. He had two highlights. I think they were relatively straightforward, let's take a look and listen.
Come to the wrong conclusion. Right when you think you know what to say. Someone comes along and shows you a brand new way. I said I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. I need everything I see. Something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. I need everything because it's so easy to make believe. It seems you're living in a dream. Don't you see that what you need is standing in front of you? Oh, I want something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. I need everything I see. Something that I want. Something that I tell myself I need. Something that I want. I need everything I see. Yeah. Oh, won't you give it to me now?
One, two. One, two, three, four. Give it to me.
That was great, Phil, that was great. I have to tell you that as part of a training program about five years ago, I had a chance to do that, and it is incredibly difficult to do, and that was super, Phil. You might want to stick around after dinner. There could be some work for you tonight. Look, here's the reality. It's not always so easy, and things don't often go as we plan. Sometimes we veer off the script, and sometimes things take a certain TV twist.
Now we're going to take a look at John Marion, who had a situation that I'd say was moderately different from the one Phil faced. John, let's see how you handled it. We can roll that one.
I love you. Give me more love from the very start. Piece me back together when I fall apart. Tell me things you'd never even tell your closest friends. Make me feel good when I hurt so bad. The best that I've had. I'm so glad I found you. I love being around you. You make it easy. As easy as one, two, one, two, three, four. There's only one thing to do. Three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words. That's what I'll do. I love you. I love you. I love you. You make it easy. As easy as one, two, one, two, three, four. There's only one thing to do. Three words for you. I love you. I love you. There's only one way to say those three words. That's what I'll do.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. One, two, three. I love you. I love you. I love you. There's always gonna be some canyon in the way. There's always gonna be a river I cannot cross. Somewhere along this path that's chosen me. I know I'm gonna fall down, feel lost, feel weak. Wherever it leads. No one said this would ever be easy, my love. I will be by your side when the impossible rises up. We will travel this life well-worn. No matter the cost, no matter how long. We will leave our footprints behind and carry on. Carry on. Carry on.
That was great. That was great. Thanks, John, and thanks Phil for doing that, and thanks to Lee Fitting, who was in his ear and having some fun, I could tell. We'll make sure that you guys get copies of both of those. It'll be a memory to hold on to. That's fun. All right. For our last business presentation, we want to turn to our newest network, the SEC Network, and in a moment, you will hear from Justin Connolly. Justin is the Senior Vice President for College Networks, and he's leading the SEC Network. He's been with The Walt Disney Company for 14 years, 11 of those at ESPN after a short stint in corporate, working in our treasury group. I realize that most people in the room don't live in SEC country and don't regularly attend SEC football games.
Before Justin comes out, we thought these spots might give you a sense of the passion fans have for the SEC and why we are so excited about the launch of this network.
Something's got a hold on me. Yeah. I went to a meeting one night, and my whole world changed. Oh, something, something's got a hold on me. As we travel along this road. We will be all right. I will never let you go. No one said this would ever be easy, my love. I will be by your side
Good afternoon. One of ESPN's hallmarks is building great creative campaigns, and we've done it once again there. What you just saw is a small sample of our SEC Network marketing campaign, which will ramp up in anticipation of the network launch on August 14th of 2014. We are inviting fans to take it all in, take in the magnificence, the spectacle, the excellence that defines the Southeastern Conference and will live on our newest network. As Lowell said, I'm Justin Connolly, I'm the Senior Vice President of College Networks at ESPN, and I've spent most of my 11 years here at ESPN within our affiliate sales group, working on distribution deals with our cable, satellite, and telco partners on behalf of all of The Walt Disney Company properties and ABC.
Our crack investor relations team has done some advanced scouting, and among our 100-plus guests here today, I understand that only two are SEC graduates. I'll reserve any judgments on that fact for the moment. However, in light of that information, I thought a quick review of SEC geography and membership is only appropriate. The Southeastern Conference schools span across 11 contiguous states. There are 14 total schools that comprise the SEC, including Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas A&M, and last but not least, Vanderbilt. I've spent the better part of the last year traveling the Southeast and experiencing almost all of those 14 campuses. I personally have had a chance to take it all in.
If you haven't enjoyed a fall Saturday tailgating in Tuscaloosa; Athens, Georgia; Lexington, Kentucky; or Oxford, Mississippi, you should add it to your bucket list. It's a powerful and eye-opening experience. It's a must for anyone seeking a collegiate fountain of youth, and it's unlike any college experience in the country. The SEC is unique and it is special. Many in the room are familiar with the Big Ten Network. They launched in 2007, and despite some early hiccups and challenges, they ultimately achieved both distribution and financial success. We believe the passion among SEC fans and the SEC athletic performance is superior to any conference in the country. We're optimistic and enthusiastic about the opportunity in front of us. The game plan for today is to dive into this and cover it in a more deep fashion in three ways.
First, we want to show you why we feel so strongly about this opportunity, and we're going to do that in the context of the overall marketplace. Second, we're going to demonstrate how we're going to succeed in this space by highlighting the core tenets of our content plan. Third, and finally, we'll review the initial response and traction among fans, distributors, and advertisers. Let's start by talking about the marketplace and the source of our optimism. First and foremost, we are a nation of college sports fans. You've seen a version of this data before this afternoon. College sports, taken as a whole, has become the second most popular sports category behind the NFL.
The biggest driver of the popularity of college sports is the interest in college football, which above every other professional league except the NFL, in total fans, and most importantly, among avid sports fans. Let's take a look at where those avid fans live. While there are pockets of avid college football fans or fans throughout the entire country, in the Southeast, college football fan avidity is off the charts, particularly in those states with SEC schools. That fan avidity translates into ratings and viewership for college football on ESPN. Nine of the 10 highest-rated DMAs for college football are in SEC country. Those pesky Ohio State Buckeye fans make Columbus, Ohio, the only DMA to crack the top 10 outside the SEC footprint.
Likewise, if you dig a layer deeper, when you look at how college football games featuring SEC teams compare to those games featuring schools from all other conferences, the interest in leadership position is clear. On the ESPN networks, games with SEC teams deliver more than double the rating for those games without an SEC team. The SEC's dominance in football is legendary. SEC football is the closest thing to the NFL. The SEC has won seven of the last eight BCS national championships, and one of those games for the 2011 championship actually featured two SEC teams playing each other. This past year, Auburn was less than two minutes away from making it eight in a row for the SEC. The college football measuring stick is chiseled in the SEC. If we focus only on football, we'll miss the bigger and more impressive story.
SEC's dominance, success, and strength across a broad range of sports is unrivaled. Since 2000, the SEC has won 87 total national championships, 46 men's titles, and 41 women's titles. The interest in sports across all categories also translates into ratings and viewership beyond college football. Across ESPN, on a total day rating basis, eight of the 10 highest-rated DMAs are in SEC country. You've heard a lot today about the power of the ESPN brand. ESPN is the most well-known brand in sports. It is more recognized than brands like the Olympics and the NFL. We are marrying together the most well-known brand in all of sports with the recognized leader in college sports. When self-identified college sports fans were asked, "Whom do you consider to be the leaders in college sports?" The SEC was mentioned 27% of the time, ESPN 21%.
Alabama, an SEC school, was third, mentioned 17% of the time. The Big Ten is fourth with mentions 15% of the time. We are drawing on the strengths of the SEC and ESPN. We are bringing together unprecedented quality and expertise to launch the SEC Network. Now I want to introduce to you Stephanie Druley. Stephanie is the Vice President of Production for College Networks, and she's going to lay out for you the core tenets of our content plan.
Thank you, Justin. I came to ESPN fresh from the University of Texas 24 years ago. In Texas, we're all about football. I've been lucky enough to make a career out of it, covering the NFL for 16 years before launching the Longhorn Network three years ago. It's fitting that my next step is to launch a network for the most passionate football fans in the country. I'll highlight the keys in our content plan, and I'll get some help from a few others along the way. First and foremost, we'll extend ESPN's mission to serve SEC fans anytime, anywhere. We'll surround them with content across platforms, mobile devices, tablets, PCs, so they can take it all in wherever they might be. Our content focus will be on events. In total, we'll air over 1,000 exclusive live events in year one.
We will do over 450 events on the television network and another 550-plus exclusive events on the network's digital platforms. We'll cover the full breadth of SEC sports: basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer. If the SEC competes in a sport, we're going to cover it. At the same time, we're going to make a big priority of football. During college football season, every Saturday, we'll feature a triple header exclusively on the SEC Network. In total, we'll air over 45 exclusive games. Each weekend, we'll feature games at noon, 4:00 P.M., and 8:00 P.M. Eastern. We're also going to launch the college football season with a bang. On August 28th, we'll have a double header of SEC action. Texas A&M will play South Carolina, a key conference match-up with national championship implications. In a later window, Temple will visit Vanderbilt.
Rarely do SEC teams play on Thursdays, but on this opening Thursday, we'll have three teams who were ranked in the top 25 to close out the previous season. It's not just about big games for us, it's about big names. A legendary voice in college football, Brent Musburger, will call our premier game every week. Brent called the national championship game in January, and in August, he'll call Texas A&M and South Carolina on opening night. Joining Brent in the booth will be Jesse Palmer. Jesse's been an analyst since 2007 for ESPN, and for the past six seasons, he's been in the booth for our Thursday night primetime game. Jesse has SEC roots, having spent three seasons as the Florida quarterback.
The caliber of the booth that we've put together speaks to the commitment to quality that we're making for the SEC Network. That commitment will be seen every Saturday morning when we launch SEC Nation, a weekly pregame show from a different SEC campus. We're going to provide the best storytelling, insight, and analysis for the games that day and bring the SEC tailgate experience to the fans at home. A familiar voice on ESPN, Joe Tessitore, he'll be our host for two hours. Joining him will be the two gentlemen I'd like to introduce to you now. The New Yorker dubbed Paul Finebaum "The Voice of the South." For the past 24 years, Paul has hosted a radio show in the heart of SEC country.
Previously on "The Paul Finebaum Show.
In August, Paul's radio show can be seen on SEC Network five days a week from 2:00 to 6:00 Eastern. Tim Tebow. I'm not sure there are many people who don't know who Tim Tebow is, but I will remind you that he won two national championships and one Heisman Trophy at the University of Florida. He has 2.5 million Twitter followers, and he made his ESPN debut on the BCS Championship, where he predicted that Florida State would win 35-31. Tim was wrong. Florida State won 34-31. Please welcome Tim Tebow and Paul Finebaum.
Gosh, I look young in that picture.
You do.
I do. I like it. Those are my better days, my younger days. How we doing? Stiff room. Tough room. Gosh. How we doing? That's what I'm talking about. I like it. All right.
Thank you, Tim.
Paul, you're up.
Paul, I'll start with you first since Tim's gotten the first word in. You made a career in the SEC, and you have a new book coming out in August, "My Conference Can Beat Your Conference." What makes your conference, the SEC, so unique?
Well, I think if you look at the picture, that is a cover shot. We had fans come to Tuscaloosa on a very cold November morning from all over the country at their own expense because they wanted to experience this cover shoot and be on the cover of, hopefully, a best-selling book. The SEC is unique for a lot of reasons. I think perhaps the most important is the fact that in the South, there are not many professional sports. This isn't New York, where you have two teams of every kind, and the fans take ownership. This Saturday, I'm going to be in Tuscaloosa for a spring football game. That means you divide the teams up, and you play each other. Alabama officials are expecting 100,000 fans Saturday, and that would break the old record of 92,000 held by Alabama. Alabama's unique.
I've spent most of my career there. It's not uncommon for children to be named after the legendary coach, Bear Bryant. One person I know. He actually named his older daughter Crimson Tide, and his wife stopped him when he wanted to name the younger daughter Ally, A-L-L-Y, Bama.
It's not what we're most proud of in the South.
He, by the way, he won.
it shows the passion.
He did win the battle to name his dog Nick Saban.
Ugh.
Tim, you've had a unique experience that not many people get to have. What's it like to play on Saturday in an SEC stadium?
It's just not a game. It's a way of life. I don't know how I can explain that. It's just when people go to support you, they come to your games, they're not coming to hope you win, or we're going to go support the team, or clap them on, or like win the Rose Bowl, when your team scores, they give a nice little, like a soft clap. They're going crazy. They're living and dying with this, and I know because I grew up that way. My grandfather, it was his dream to see Florida win an SEC championship, and he passed away before that could happen. Every time my grandma would come to a game, she would say, "You wouldn't believe how happy your grandfather would be if he could be here.
You just don't know what it would mean to him." My parents' first date was at the Florida-Georgia game, where it's red and black, and it's orange and blue split right down the middle, and it's the most intense environment you'll ever be in. As a player, you don't want anything else. When we go to a Gator walk before a game, or we're going into The Swamp, where no one else likes to really come, because they don't get a lot of wins there. When we're walking into it, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm shaking everybody's hands, and I see two or three guys with my face tattooed on their shoulder. These people really love this game, and they're passionate about it, and it's just different.
We got to play other conferences, and I've been able to play around the country on different teams, and there's just not a place like it.
You had the Florida experience. Paul spent most of his time in Alabama, so he knows those fans really well. Paul, you've heard a lot of Alabama stories. What's the one that sort of impacted you the most?
There's a family in Birmingham, the Reese family. Mr. Reese was trying to attain the record of having attended the most consecutive Alabama football games at 831. That streak started in 1946 and finally ended in 2012. He was felled by a bad case of the flu, so I think it stopped somewhere in the 700s. He's not known for the games he attended. He's known for the wedding that he missed. I think you can figure out where I'm going. In 1993, his daughter decided to get married, his family, the family, Betty and Fletcher, said, "Do not get married during the football season." She, like some children, resisted, she decided to get married on the day of the Alabama-Tennessee game. They did not go to the wedding.
They went to the game, they did get to the church in time for the reception. The most important part of the day, Alabama won.
Tim, just one last thing. Tell us what it's like to be a player in the SEC, to take the field.
Well, every game is so big. Every team thinks you're their rival, really, you only have a few real rivals. For us, those top three rivals were Florida State, Georgia, and Tennessee. Ever since I was a kid, if we would win, I couldn't wait to go somewhere and tell people. If we would lose, I would beg my parents, "Please don't make us go to church tomorrow because I don't want to have to face all the opposing fans." For me, probably my greatest accomplishment, or something I'm most proud of because it means the most, is that I was 11 and one versus my rivals because those games mean more than anything else. They mean more than the Heisman Trophy. They mean more than championships. In the South, that's your legacy. It's what you did versus your rivals. What did you do versus Georgia?
What did you do versus LSU? What did you do versus FSU? Those games mean more to the fans of the SEC than anything else. That's why winning the SEC a lot of times means more to the players and the fans than winning a national championship.
Well, you got some of those too, though. I will thank both of you, Paul and Tim. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Jas.
Thank you, guys. As a reminder, our SEC Nation debuts in August, and that's just a little under four months away, so we have a little bit of work to do. The final piece to the content puzzle is storytelling. In addition to ongoing player profiles and features on the network, we're going to expand a franchise that ESPN Films Group has built over the past several years. We're doubling our production of SEC Storied features. The incremental films will debut exclusively on the SEC Network. Before I leave you, Justin and I wanted to give you a sample of a recent SEC Storied film that aired that captured the essence of this brand and the stories that we aspire to tell.
Peyton, who's your favorite football player, eh?
My dad.
Your dad's your favorite football player, too? Well, you're on the right track. You going to be a football player when you grow up?
I don't like the perception that it was a plan. I was a NFL quarterback, and now I've got these boys, and I'm going to mold them into being NFL quarterbacks. Not so. Peyton, you drop back and throw Coop one. I wasn't necessarily trying to expose them to it. I was just trying to have a great father-son relationship. That's what I wanted. My dad was really proud of me. He was a tough guy, and I think he made me a tough guy.
The pride of Ole Miss, quarterback Archie Manning. Mr. Manning, the pride of Drew, Mississippi, has made number 18 mighty big.
I'm kind of rolling along, playing college football, enjoying life, and all of a sudden, bam. I had to be a man. Number 1 picks in the draft. Win Super Bowls, MVPs. Yeah, we pinch ourselves.
Needless to say, there is a deep well of stories waiting to be told on the SEC Network. Our efforts are actually already bearing fruit among fans, distributors, and advertisers. SEC fans are among the most dedicated in all of sports, as you just heard. There are approximately 430,000 students enrolled at SEC institutions, and over 3 million total graduates. SEC fandom lives in all corners of the U.S., both SEC fans and fans across the country have told us that they want the SEC Network. We asked self-identified college sports fans if they want the SEC Network, hands down, it has national appeal. Across the country, approximately 75% of people said that they would like their TV provider to add the network. Certain large distributors have already acted. 4 months prior to the launch, we have both AT&T U-verse and Dish Network on board.
We will continue to use the time prior to launch to build on this early success. Likewise, we have a series of advertisers and sponsors already committed to the network. This is just a cross-section of both national blue-chip advertisers, like Dr. Pepper, Allstate, and AT&T, among others, a growing list of regional players, like Belk and Regions Bank. They all understand the power of connecting their brands with the upcoming network, this list is growing. I want to thank you for the opportunity to share our vision and our plan with you today. This is an important initiative and a big growth opportunity for ESPN. As demonstrated, it's right in our wheelhouse, we look forward to having all of you take it all in this coming August. We'll leave you with one last glimpse into the spirit of the SEC.
Hotty toddy, gosh almighty. This is what you meant When you said that you would spend
Oh, my goodness. What a hit.
He scored it. Yes.
The SEC reigns supreme one more time.
I don't ever want to let you down.
Shot.
I don't ever want to leave this town.
That's it. Lightning in a bottle in Tuscaloosa.
'Cause after all.
Oh, touchdown.
The day does sleep tonight. The time has begun. Is it me? I get a little bit angry sometimes. I'll admit. I'm just as bad as you.
Oh, you hurt so often.
My blood.
30 minutes with the rest of our lives.
I said I'm never changing who I am. I get a little bit. I get a little bit.
There goes Davis.
My God.
Davis is going to run it all the way back. Auburn's going to win the football game. They're not going to keep them off the field tonight.
SEC. SEC. SEC. SEC.
I hope that entire presentation gave everyone in the room a sense of why we are so excited about the launch of this network. I hope you enjoyed hearing from Tim and from Paul. I love that people have his face tattooed on their shoulder. It is quite remarkable. Listen, Paul's book is coming out in August, and I am delighted to tell you that everyone in this room, when it is released, will be getting from us a digital copy of Paul's book, so you can learn a little bit more about the SEC and the passion and culture of the conference. In a minute, Jay Rasulo, our Chief Financial Officer, is going to come up, and he is going to wrap up the day. Before that, I hope that during the day, you got a sense of the importance of SportsCenter to ESPN.
Over the years, we have supported the franchise with our incredibly successful This Is SportsCenter campaign. We thought you would enjoy seeing a few of the spots we have run over the years, including one you may have missed.
Love will find me. There ain't no denying. You can't blame a girl for trying. No, you can't blame a girl for trying. The full moon is shining like a spotlight. I could just sit and listen to you talking all night. When you're with.
It's like amen from the back of the choir. Sweet home and freedom underneath the tires. Kickback, getting by the crack of fire. Strumming them guitar strings. Like an old song on the radio that you grew up to and everybody knows. Watching on the water when the river rolls. Wild and wild and free. Baby
It's pretty obvious that doing commercials is not in my job description. What is in my job description, though, as is certainly Lowell's and Bob Iger's, is talking to all of you about the great parts of our company and how you can think about them. That is not in the job description of John Skipper and his management team here at ESPN. I hope that you will all agree that they did a terrific job in delivering to all of you how they think about their business, where the value comes from. Please join me in giving them a huge hand for that. Bob mentioned when we kicked off this morning that ESPN has been an important driver of the growth in our cable businesses.
Over the past five years, cable operating income has grown 8% on a compounded annual basis, as he showed you. These results have been a huge contributor to the strong growth in the overall earnings per share during this period of time. Today, you heard a lot about the ESPN business and strategy. As you know, we don't break out ESPN's financial results, so today I'm going to provide some insight into the financial outlook for our cable business, of which ESPN is obviously a large component. Overall, we feel very good about the long-term growth prospects for our cable business. We've renewed deals with eight of our top 10 affiliate partners, and we expect to complete the last two deals by the end of this calendar year.
These are long-term, comprehensive deals, and we expect them to drive high single-digit compounded annual growth in domestic cable affiliate revenue through 2016. ESPN's programming costs constitute the majority of the total programming costs for the cable segment. Since ESPN's key sports rights contracts are in place through 2016, we have a very good sense of visibility into cable programming cost growth over this period as well. Additionally, we continue to aggressively manage non-programming costs across the cable business, and over the next three years, we expect them to grow at a rate meaningfully below the growth rate of our programming expenses. Given this, and assuming a relatively stable economic environment, we expect total operating income to grow at high single digits compounded annual growth through 2016 for our cable group.
Due to the timing of the affiliate contract renewals, new sports rights contracts, and other comparability items, annual operating income growth may be above or below that compounded rate during any year during that period. Let me discuss some of the factors based on what we know today that will influence the results in 2014, 2015, and 2016. In fiscal 2014, we have the first full year of our Major League Baseball contract. You'll also see a partial impact of our new NFL contract in the fourth quarter of the year as the season gets underway in September. As we mentioned during our Q4 call, we expect the impact of these new contracts to drive high single-digit growth in cable programming costs for fiscal 2014, with the increase predominantly in the second half of the year.
In fiscal 2015, you'll see continued impact from our new NFL contract during the first quarter. In the second fiscal quarter of 2015, our new deal to broadcast the College Football Playoff will take effect. Also in 2015, our results will benefit from a 53rd week. If you recall, due to our accounting calendar, we have an extra week in our fiscal year approximately every six years. In fiscal 2016, our results will comp against the benefit of that 53rd week in the prior year. There's no disputing the tremendous power of ESPN, both as a brand, a cultural phenomenon, and the preeminent sports media entertainment business.
What you saw here today and what you see every day, whether it's on your television, your radio, tablet, PC, or mobile phone, is the product of a 35-year history, a culture of innovation, and countless hours of hard work and dedication from an incredibly talented team of individuals who are passionate about sports and about storytelling. While the financial outlook I just provided pertains to the cable business as a whole, I'd like to summarize the key takeaways from the presentations you heard about the ESPN business today. These are what I think they are. Bob started the day out by stating that like Disney, ESPN is a franchise-driven business. We believe this strategy's been very successful and positions us to continue to deliver strong financial results. ESPN is committed to serving sports fans anytime, anywhere.
This simple yet powerful mission is ESPN's guiding principle, it's evident in everything we do. ESPN is the clear leader in sports multimedia television and is well-positioned for the foreseeable future. Already touched on the competitive landscape, while we take the competition very seriously, we're confident in our ability to sustain and even extend our strong leadership position. Our confidence is due to a number of factors, of which the strength of our sports right portfolio is one. Simply put, we hold the deepest and broadest set of sports rights by a long shot, which further strengthens our position in the marketplace. It's not just about sports rights. ESPN's ability to create compelling content in and around the game is unrivaled.
Whether it's franchises like College GameDay, SportsCenter, or Pardon the Interruption, viewers recognize ESPN is the home of both marquee sporting events and the destination for comprehensive news, information, and analysis after the game is over. You got a sense today for the technology infrastructure that powers ESPN. We've made investments over the years in assets and people to ensure that ESPN is always at the forefront of technological innovation. ESPN's culture of technology can't be easily replicated, and it's a significant competitive advantage. Our focus is on serving sports fans with the deepest and broadest content in sports. This has led ESPN to be consistently rated number one with fans, number one with advertisers, and number one with affiliates. We continue to invest to further strengthen our relationship with fans.
ESPN has enhanced the value of the multi-channel television subscription with its best available screen strategy that enables authenticated subscribers to watch ESPN across devices wherever they are. We work in close partnership with multi-channel operators to enhance the value of the multi-channel subscription through innovation and the delivery of products and services that consumers demand. Increased digital and mobile consumption of ESPN provides a meaningful revenue opportunity, once we have third-party cross-platform measurement in place, we believe this will unlock an even greater monetization opportunity. We're capitalizing on a number of growth opportunities, which include a growing multimedia business in Latin America and digital businesses around the world. We see tremendous opportunity presented by the popularity of college sports and the strongest brand in college football, the SEC.
Justin and Stephanie gave you a sense of why we're so extremely excited about the launch of the SEC Network. Finally, we feel very good about the long-term growth prospects for our cable business. As I mentioned earlier, we expect high single-digit compounded annual growth in both cable domestic affiliate revenue and operating income through 2016. I hope you found the day productive, have a greater appreciation for why we feel so incredibly good about ESPN, its competitive position in the marketplace, and our financial outlook. I'm going to turn the floor back to Lowell, and he's going to lead us through a Q&A session.
Thank you, Jay. I just want to make one thing clear because someone has already asked me on the growth forecast. The chart said 2014 through 2016. Those are the three years of forecast. Obviously, 2013 is the base year for that, just so everyone's clear on that. Jay and I are going to be joined on stage right now by John Skipper, who you heard from earlier, and by Christine Driessen. Chris is the CFO of ESPN, a role she's held for 20 years. She's been with ESPN for 28 years, joining in August of 1985 as ESPN's controller. I just want to note on a personal note, since I joined Disney seven years ago, Chris has been an unbelievable partner for us in investor relations and a great support to everything that we do in our efforts to try to better inform the street.
We appreciate that. We're going to try to take as many questions as possible in the time that we have. We obviously have a bunch of our talent waiting for cocktails. We will try to get through some questions before we head down there. We do have a bunch of people listening to the webcast. I'd ask that you raise your hand. I will call on you. Please wait for a microphone. The folks on the webcast can hear you. Let me apologize in advance. We won't have time to get to all the questions. We will try to get to as many as possible. With that, let's start with Mr. Swinburne in aisle 4 on the left. Do me a favor also, just give me your name and firm name. People in the room and on the webcast can hear you.
Sure. Ben Swinburne from Morgan Stanley. Can you guys talk about your vision for what the personalized subscription service is going to look like from a consumer perspective, other than streaming and personal as the name suggests? How did you get comfortable that that's not going to be something that might cannibalize the core pay TV business?
We do not think that's a substitute for the core pay television business. As it suggests, it's a personal subscription. We believe, as Sean said, exactly that. It's an on-ramp for people who don't currently have the service, not a trade-down for people who do have the service. As it rolls out through Dish, I think you'll understand even more clearly why that's not the case. We do not fear that consequence.
Needless to say that in the deal, there are many elements, some of which we can discuss, some of which are really Dish's to discuss, that give us some comfort.
I'm just curious, is U-verse and Dish fully distributing SEC Network nationally?
Yes.
Thank you.
I should also note that every executive who presented today has rejoined us. If there's a question that we want to go to them on, we have that capability. Someone in the back has their hand up. I can't see who it is, let's bring a mic back there.
I can't see who that is.
It's Barton Crockett from FBR. There's a couple of big unknowns in your outlook over the next three years. One is the timing and the level of carriage for the SEC Network. The other is the NBA kind of programming negotiations. I was wondering if you could give us some parameters of how much impact various kind of likely scenarios for those things could have on your forecast for the high single-digit operating profit.
Let me start out by saying, if I heard everything you said, Barton, I don't know, for some reason, mics don't carry that well up here. Let me start out by saying that in that outlook we gave you, it did include all those growth opportunities you saw us present today, including the SEC Network was included in that. You heard, because of all the factors that Justin and Stephanie shared, how confident we are as to ultimately getting carriage on the SEC Network. We've rolled it into our numbers. We're pretty confident about it, and you can assume that is in there. On the NBA, we've talked for a very long time about how we think about sports rights.
You've seen the net result of what, for lack of a better term, and I think John even used this earlier today, is a portfolio concept about just like you guys and women manage portfolios, and you'd like to own everything in the world, but you pick and choose among what you think are going to be the key drivers. We've got two properties that John showed in his presentation that are not part of our long-term portfolio, and we will deal with acquiring those as we have with everything, with a sense of financial discipline on the one hand, with a sense of knowledge about what drives our business on the other. I can't really give you any more impact than that. I will say for the growth numbers we gave you, the NBA won't be part of that because the NBA renewal will start after 2016.
I'll give you-
Both the NBA and the Big Ten would lie outside the scope of 2014-2016. The only thing I'll say on the SEC Network is you saw the quality of content. We're highly confident in our distribution prognosis for that.
Thank you.
Sure. Let's go to this side. Michael Nathanson, row 3.
Thanks. Michael Nathanson. Jay, you mentioned in your summary that one of the issues facing you is just a better measurement system for online ratings. I wonder if, maybe for John or for Ed, how much of a gating factor has it been not to have Nielsen rating cross-platform? I know later this year it's coming, if you could talk a bit about maybe how big you think that opportunity could be and any examples of it holding back dollar growth.
I think John.
Well, you clearly see how significant we think it can be by the fact that we started doing it without waiting for anybody else. It's just a question of the rate at which we can monetize the opportunity we have. We have such a lead. It's very important for us to get the measurement, to get the opportunity. You saw Ed talk about the fact that already 22% of our revenue is nonlinear, and that had I think, I can't remember, Ed, exactly the growth rate we'd had over the last couple of years.
10.5%.
No, no. The growth rate of the nonlinear business. 23% growth for that 22%. We can accelerate that kind of growth if we can get the measurement.
Thank you.
David Miller here, row two.
Question for John. How are you doing?
I hope well. I hope we're very well.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
Turning to the Big Ten, the Big Ten contract, which comes up in 2017, how do you think about that negotiation? Obviously, we have a few years here, but how do you think about that negotiation in light of potential Big Ten expansion beyond the 14 teams that exist right now? Within that, there's this sort of rumor going around, in just sort of the college sports world, that the SEC and the Big Ten may collude to poach additional ACC teams. We've already seen that with Maryland going to the Big Ten. The SEC is rumored to want maybe Duke and North Carolina. The Big Ten wants Virginia because it's a land-grant university. It kind of fits in academically, whatever. If there's expansion there on both those swaths, if you will, how do you think about those negotiations?
How do you think about the ACC and your rights there if the ACC becomes a shell of what it once was?
Look, it's been one of the more interesting things happening in the college landscape. It's a fairly profound matter for us, and I'm happy to tell you that the five conferences, major college conferences, their members are pretty locked in. In the deals that we have, there are grants of rights. I do not expect there to be movement from the ACC, out of the ACC, into the Big Ten, into the SEC. We are not responsible for I can tell you, those schools are pretty locked. Again, we don't expect any big movement. We've been on record as preferring there not to be movement, and I don't think there will be significant movement. I think it is quiet for the time being. I don't expect the conferences to expand.
Let's go Jessica. I see back there.
Reif Cohen from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. I just want to go back to the OTT service. It took you a long time to reach a deal. Obviously you guys were very thoughtful about it. Is this the blueprint for more deals? Do you expect more OTT deals? Can you give us any color on the things that you were looking for, and how you actually priced? I don't expect a number. How you priced versus the linear service when you're breaking up your own bundles. They don't have to take the full suite of ESPN channels.
Well, the first thing I'll speak to is, Jessica, is your point about the time that it took to get the deal. We were quite anxious, again, as we pointed out before, to have this happen in a negotiating room, to not go public with interruption of service, because with all the sort of Sturm and Drang in the atmosphere, we wanted to avoid that. That's the reason for the length of time. It wasn't really about the personal subscription service. You heard me say that we will continue to experiment with new business models. I don't think this will be the last over-the-top deal we do. Whether it's a model, I don't know. We'll talk, as Sean pointed out, to all of our distributors about how to create value.
Again, we don't comment on the price, but we've been very clear that we value the relationships we have. We value the cable television subscription, and you cannot expect to see us undercut that.
I think it's also important to know in that deal, our most important networks are part of that service, if and when they launch it. It's not as if we were giving them a bundle. Most of the rate is captured in that deal across our network. I think we feel very good about that offering.
I don't think you can talk about it as an OTT deal the way you would talk about an OTT-only provider. Remember, the whole deal was done and negotiated in the context of an MVPD full-service provider. As we did with Comcast, I've told you all many times, there were 70 separate services. Some of them are very different from what has become part of this Dish deal. Every one of those negotiations is somewhat different, and they are negotiated, however, in the context of one of the tenets that I think I even mentioned in my wrap-up, which is we want to continue to create value for the end consumer of the MVPD infrastructure, and this was one of those examples. I agree with John, it's very unlikely to be the last.
We only have two more to go in this round, which is quite a long round.
Michael Morris, back there.
Thanks. Michael Morris with Guggenheim. My question's on advertising, a couple things. Can you help us with what type of advertising growth is implied in your guide for the operating income outlook and the affiliate outlook? Then second of all, you talk about the strength of sports programming and its unique qualities. Are you seeing pricing on average for sports-related programming above that for entertainment-related programming? Are you seeing a trajectory that pricing for sports is growing faster than for entertainment? Thank you.
Okay. Let me try to address those. First, on the first question, Mike, I think we provided today the outlook that we're going to provide, which I think is a big step for us because we don't generally provide it. I think we have some visibility into affiliate revenue, and we have some expectations for how we can grow the business. I don't think we're going to get into the specifics of what our advertising outlook is. I think if one were to infer from Ed's presentation that we are confident in our ability to grow that business, I think that would be a reasonable inference to draw. I think the historical performance of our ad sales group has been spectacular, and we've talked about all the reasons why we think ESPN is a great place for advertisers to be.
On the second question, we actually looked at this recently for some work we were doing in corporate. It's a very complicated answer. It comes down to it depends. I will tell you that we are seeing great pricing power on sports in general for all the reasons that Ed laid out. A lot depends on what show you're comparing it to. There are advertising opportunities on ESPN where we can charge CPMs that are at rates that would be at the high end of what we're seeing in the entertainment industry. There are other things that are sold at rates below the average in the entertainment industry. Remember, we've got multiple networks. We're selling 24/7. Tremendous amount of live programming.
I think it is a very complicated answer, and I think you should know that we're obviously pushing as hard as we can on the rate side.
Question was about programming costs, by the way.
Alan.
Advertising. I think he meant programming. He's happy with it.
Alan Gould from Evercore. John, can you tell us what impact you think the change in the BCS has on the network, the ratings, the fan-- what are we going from three games to seven games? Jay, can you give us some idea of the economics, the extra costs? Is there sponsorship? Obviously, the advertising will come with the ratings.
If you'll remember before, there were four games embedded. There were four bowls and one championship game. We're going from four games and one championship game to six games and a championship game. It'd been the addition of two games. In addition, two of those 6 are semifinals now, right? You kept the four bowls, added two semis, and then got the championship. We think that the ratings impact will be pretty profound. You heard me say, I think that I think it will be the second most important sports day in the calendar after the Super Bowl. We think it's fairly profound.
I'm not going to give you guidance, obviously, on the economics of that. First of all, I think as we've said many times, it never makes sense at ESPN, and I think what you've seen today supports that, to talk about any weekend square peg that you buy to fit a strategic, because you're talking about overall stickiness and value to affiliates, stickiness to consumers, and it's a portfolio. I'm sure that Chris can take you through the components that we look at when we make a purchase like this, and obviously make the evaluation as to what we're willing to pay and how it works.
We look at the value to our affiliates first off, and we look at also then the advertising, not only within the 3-hour window of the game itself, but the lead-in for that day's studio shows, as well as the impact on SportsCenter. We look at all that. We are pretty tight on our production, that's a number we feel really comfortable about, given the many years we've done doing this. This championship game will be a little bit different because of the visibility. We will obviously factor that in as we think about our production and scope of production.
We look at all that at the end of the day, and then we get comfortable and work very closely with Ed's team on where we want to put pricing on CPMs, sell-throughs, ratings, all the guarantee on that, and it all rolls up into the final P&L.
You did hear Ed say that you could expect to hear about a dozen announcements in the next 90 days relative to sponsorships.
Let's go. David, is that you? I can't see. David Bank.
Got an existential question. Is that you, David?
I did not expect to hear the term existential today. There's been a lot of chatter. There's always a lot of chatter, I think, about the high cost of sports programming as a portion of the overall MVPD sale and how it pressures the consumer. I think you've illustrated really well the fact that that seems to be more chatter than reality, because subscriber trends have been sort of unimpacted. It's like a phantom problem. I do think historically, you've allowed the MVPDs to offer lower priced tiers without sports programming. I'm wondering if that carve-out has evolved over time, whether or not it's being used. If you look at this round of affiliate agreements, you just did eight, and you got two more left. The ones before that, were the carve-outs materially different?
Are the trends in the carve-out for the lower priced tier basically the same that we've seen?
Look, we do our deals, the previous era and this era, under a set of NDAs. I don't want to talk about the details of the deal. I think that what you heard from Artie, what seems to be the case is that to the extent that we see smaller packages that exclude our product, we believe that, and we've been told by the MVPDs that this is fundamentally due to economic circumstances that they believe and have told us are temporary. They want to keep the family, the household, in the system with the hope, they tell us, of getting them back to full service. There hasn't been, to Artie's point, what we see in the decrease in subscriptions has been fractional. You saw the data he presented. I don't think I have to repeat it.
I don't want to talk about how our deals changed between the last time and the first time, because I don't think it's fair to our partners. I hope that gives you some insight into that question.
Laura.
Hi. I'm kind of losing my mind with age. John, my recollection is DC1 cost about $100 million, which we amortized over about 10 years. You own that free and clear. Going to the cost of this facility, I'm going to estimate $300 million. I'm interested in two things. One is, I thought on the tour, they said that it was going to be up and running 70%, and they were having issues figuring out when they were going to upgrade the rest. Using my estimate of $300 million, does that mean I have another $100 million to spend, or I have another 30% to spend? Jay, amortization. Has it hit the P&L already, the cost of this building, which I know is substantially done, or does it come in evenly over 10 years?
I'm going to let John talk about the timing of it and whatnot. First of all, D.C.1, there's nothing static in the technology world, right? D.C.1, just because it was built 10 years ago and whatever that number is, I don't know it, so I don't have to tell you that it's right or wrong. Whatever that number was 10 years ago, there's been lots of stuff added to it. You know that when you build a facility like this, there are some aspects of it, the technology side of it, that depreciates very rapidly. There's the building, et cetera, pre-improvements that depreciates more slowly. Having said that, and I'm not going to give you any guidance on your $300 million number. Could be high. There's an over and under. We can take a poll here.
The simple fact is that it's not put in service. Today I don't think counts. When it is, which is John will tell you when, then we will obviously start to depreciate it. I will tell you that the vast majority of the investment is behind us. As you can imagine, the infrastructure it takes to put together a studio like this far exceeds what the fit out of the studio itself is ultimately. The vast majority of the spending. There's not a third of the spending or half of the spending left to go.
We will do our first SportsCenter from the new SportsCenter set you had a chance to see on May the 26th. Coming out of an NBA conference championship game. You'll see us use the NFL studio August? August. Mike, what?
September.
September. John? September. The NFL studio in September. Fully operational by? September. By September. You mean the whole facility?
Yes.
Yeah. You did hear Aaron LaBerge say it is built to never become obsolete, so we'll be using it for a long time.
All right. We're going to take two more questions. I see Tuna here, so let's go to Tuna.
Thank you. Tuna Amobi, S&P Capital IQ. I'm trying to understand here, ESPN International. It sounds to me that this can be a much bigger business than the $1 billion revenue that you're doing today. I know that you kind of pared back your operations in Asia. You had some challenges in the U.K. Clearly, you're focused on Latin America. I'm just kind of wondering, what are the barriers to growing this international business and how big you think that it can get? Is it a question of the rights issues in some of these countries? Talking about that, there's been a few assets on the international marketplace that have come to market, sports assets, and I'm not sure if you guys are kicking the tires on those and how you view the overall international opportunity. That would be helpful. Thanks.
I think on Latin America, I think Russell was quite clear. We're very bullish that we will continue to grow that business at significant rates. I believe it was 45% CAGR over the last, what was that, Russell, five years?
Five years.
The barriers are the continued factors that Russell laid out, right? That Russell laid out, the income growth in the region, the growth of multi-channel subscribers, our ability to negotiate deals with new increases to get more subscribers. We expect all those to continue to grow, and we believe that the model we have in the U.S., the multi-platform, using SportsCenter as a flagship, that those things all work. It is why we took resources and moved them to Latin America because we believe that is the most immediate and the most significant opportunity we have.
I understand the opportunity in Latin America, but outside of Latin America, where do you see other opportunities?
We think that's going to be in digital news and information. While Russell laid out Cricinfo, we think ESPN FC is a real opportunity. We have grown from the 18th largest soccer site. What was that, John? When did we change to FC, John? November 4th. November 4th, we were the 18th largest soccer/football site in the world, we're now the fourth largest in the world. We think that's a fairly significant growth opportunity. We're going to look for other places to do SportsCenter, news and information. You look for us to think about other kinds of partnerships and opportunities.
Just real quick, any color on the margins, international versus domestic? Thanks.
I bet you the answer is no to that.
It's a complicated story. First of all, I'm not going to tell you what the margins are. If I've told you once, I've told you guys 1 million times. That is not how we run our business. You guys and ladies are somewhat obsessed with that. We are not obsessed with that. We are obsessed with the growth of the income of our business. Having said that, remember, there's a mix of some equity interests internationally and some directly run businesses, that even if I told you the number, you wouldn't be able to make sense of it one way or another, because it is a mix of those two business models.
I can confirm that the pressure is for growth, not margin.
All right, let's do one more. I see a hand up, I don't know, five rows back. Yeah. Is that Will? Okay.
This has been a very impressive day. I'm curious, John, if you could describe the advantages and disadvantages of being part of a large corporation like Disney. Secondly, if you were an independent company, running an independent company, if you'd be doing anything differently than you are today. Thank you.
I'm highly satisfied to be a division of The Walt Disney Company. Let me emphasize, I'm highly satisfied. Look, I was at The Walt Disney Company when they bought ABC Cap Cities acquiring ESPN, I had the opportunity to move over in 1997. The company has been transformed since 1997 because of the investments, the capital, the resources that The Walt Disney Company has been able to put into ESPN. Nobody at ESPN, my predecessor, George Bodenheimer, his predecessor, Steve Bornstein, would all make the same answer. The other thing that works very well for us is our culture is very similar. You heard Bob talk about franchise focus. You hear Bob talk about integrity. You hear Bob talk about innovation. You hear him talk about being flexible, being nimble-minded. That suits our culture.
That's part of what we wanted to relay today, is what kind of division we are and how we think about doing things. You heard Bob talk about how he thinks of it fitting within The Walt Disney Company. We're a very comfortable fit. While I was having fun with the answer to the first question, it's also a genuine answer, thank you.
I'll remind you, Will, that obviously when you get up at the user interface, like we're at today, ESPN and Disney look very different. ABC, they all look very different. Somewhere down in the stack, and particularly remember when you are dealing in an MVPD universe in which you enter with a package of assets that you would like distributed, we have a single unified team that does the negotiation of these 8 of 10 and soon 10 of 10 deals that you've heard about. We think that we are able to share expertise and be better at that because of ESPN, because of Disney Channel, because of ABC and the other things that are involved in those negotiations. There are definitely some shared benefits that, by the way, Disney franchises get and learn from what goes on technologically here and vice versa.
There's more than meets the eye. I know at the user interface, it looks like these could be completely different companies, we try from an enterprise perspective to take as much advantage as we can of the commonalities that occur somewhere down in the stack of running this business and the others.
Thank you, Jay. Will, thanks for the question. Thank everyone for their questions. I'd like to let everyone on the webcast know that this will be the conclusion of our webcast. We thank you for joining us on the webcast today. Thanks to everyone in the room for making the trip