Fans of the NFL can breathe easy for another four years. The Super Bowl is contractually obligated to remain on broadcast networks until 2014.
Year after year, major league sports have been making the transition from on-air broadcast networks to cable. Ball State telecommunications professor Dom Caristi said the Super Bowl will soon follow suit.
"The Super Bowl will end up on cable, and it will probably be ESPN," Caristi said.
He said ESPN subscribers make up around 85 percent of total cable subscribers. He said this will limit repercussions if the switch is actually made.
All of this comes in the shadow of the Comcast takeover of NBC Universal. Rumors have spread throughout the sports entertainment world that NBC may take the Super Bowl and other major sports events to cable television, namely Comcast's Versus sports network.
The head of NBC's sports and Olympics coverage, Dick Ebersol, recently met with FCC regulators and assured them these rumors were false, according to a recent MediaPost article.
Caristi explained the irony of this statement, as a majority of the Olympics coverage is already on cable networks.
"There are many more hours of the Olympics on cable television than on NBC," Caristi said.
The Super Bowl on cable is an economic inevitability, he said.
Telecommunications instructor Mike Spillman said he's not so sure.
"Even if the broadcast networks have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for the rights, I think they're going to try to hold on to the NFL," he said.
This is not a new idea, Spillman said The migration of major sprts from broadcast networks to cable or other non-broadcast has been thrown around since the 1970s.
Spillman said the amount of money made on rights fees is a major barrier for the NFL.
"The NFL is not yet in a position to make as much money on its own selling advertising as it can make on the rights fees paid by broadcast networks," Spillman said.
Cable has its barriers too. ESPN and other networks have been raising their subscription fees periodically. This could cause concern from the NFL to switch to ESPN. In this case, Spillman says the NFL would most likely put the Super Bowl on their own network.
Another possibility is the Super Bowl becoming a pay-per-view or HBO event. This could cause quite a bit of backlash, Caristi said.
Even under these circumstances, the viewership could remain as high as it is currently.
"I don't think that there would be as much backlash as some people worry. ... ESPN is in over 100 million households" Caristi said. "A lot of Super Bowl viewing is done somewhere other than your home. Either at a bar or at someone else's house."
The Super Bowl is no longer just a football game, it has almost become a national holiday.
"There will be people who sit down in front of that TV this Sunday and say ‘So who's playing?'" Spillman said.
No matter where the Super Bowl goes, it is bound to cause controversy, because the NFL has become America's pastime, Spillman said.
"You could put five football players on ABC's ‘Wipeout' and people would watch," he said.
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