I’ve made it to page 1,154 of the Sunday Ticket trial transcript. I still have 1,352 to go.
The bulk of the sixth day of the trial featured live testimony from NFL Chief Media and Business Officer Brian Rolapp.
The case focuses on whether the NFL, acting as 32 independent businesses, improperly fixed the price of Sunday Ticket at a level high enough to get a large percentage of fans who would have liked to watch out-of-market games to instead settle for the “free” CBS and Fox games served to their local markets. Toward that end, the plaintiffs have tried to prove that the NFL essentially set the price of the Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV, even when the NFL claims it didn’t.
Multiple portions of Rolapp’s testimony felt like an Abbott-and-Costello routine, with Rolapp denying that the NFL sets the price while admitting that the NFL wants it to carry a premium price, and to be a complementary product.
Rolapp also was asked about ESPN’s desire to provide the full Sunday Ticket package for only $70 and to offer a single-team option. Rolapp admitted that the NFL didn’t like that, and that was why they didn’t take the Sunday Ticket package to Disney.
“I think $70 and the team-by-team, the entire product and offering they were going to make to consumers, we felt was not going to be complementary to Sunday afternoon,” Rolapp said. “So those things all put together did not feel right, which is one of the principal reasons we didn’t go with Disney.”
The testimony proved that the NFL knows not to say that it sets the price, while it also strongly influences the price. So that the Sunday Ticket package won’t dilute viewership for the CBS and Fox games in ech market.
It’s a party line that is hard to parrot all the time. Toward that end, Rolapp was confronted with a podcast interview he gave to Andrew Marchand and John Ourand. In it, Rolapp didn’t say that the NFL has no control whatsoever over the price of Sunday Ticket. Instead, Rolapp said, “We don’t technically set the price.”
Technically, they don’t. As a practical matter, they do.
It’s obvious from the testimony. The 32 independent businesses of the NFL came together to set the price of Sunday Ticket at a level high enough to keep most people from buying it. That’s the antitrust violation, and it was proven as clearly as it could have been.