Steve Ballmer Should Be Bold With LA Clippers’ Broadcasting Options

With Steve Ballmer and the LA Clippers showing off their new superstars and their visual presentation of a proposed new arena, buried in all that are discussions about how future Clippers content will be broadcasted. Contributor Logan Rapp has an urgent message to those decision makers: take control now. Not tomorrow. Right now.

So, when it comes to baseball, I’m a weird Dodgers/Red Sox fan. There are a lot of reasons that go into it that are outside the scope of the article, but I’d like to use both teams’ broadcasting situations as examples for the future of LA Clippers broadcasting.

When it comes to broadcasting games, Angelenos have it extremely tough. If they want to watch the Dodgers, they have to pay for Spectrum SportsNet LA. How do you do that? You get your television service from Spectrum. That’s it. In exchange for having 50%  ownership of Spectrum SportsNet LA, the channel has broadcasting rights for Dodgers games for twenty-five (25) years.

And because they (they being Time Warner Cable which became Charter Communications) overpaid for those rights, they’ve kicked the fees up and have taken such a harsh negotiating stance for other carriers to broadcast it to the point that every other carrier has walked away.

The result? A large majority of people who live in Los Angeles cannot easily watch one of their most famous and longstanding sports teams. In my personal case, it is literally easier to actually attend a game, than to simply watch it on television. This rings true for a majority of Angelenos.

Meanwhile, for the Red Sox — NESN is majority-owned by the Red Sox’s ownership group, available on the widest platforms, and launched an in-market streaming service a couple of years ago. If you’re out of market, you already have that option available to you on MLB TV. If you want Red Sox baseball, the roadblocks are as minimal as they can be.

But this is a Clippers news outlet, isn’t it? Why am I bringing this up? In case you blinked and missed it, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s been talking pretty radically about how the LA Clippers could broadcast their games in the near future.

And frankly, while Steve is in “nothing’s on the table yet, but nothing’s off it, either” mode, I’d like to take this moment to urge him to go all-in and take full control of the Clippers’ broadcasting rights and capabilities while the opportunity is still available.

I am one of the 1,500 test viewers for Clippers CourtVision. Until the above LA Times article, I didn’t realize we were limited to that few people (if I understand it correctly, and I’m often dumb), so I feel even more fortunate than I did before.

Much has been made about CourtVision’s unique features — Coach Mode, which diagrams plays in real-time, Player Mode, which shows a player’s shot % based on where they’re currently standing on the court, and Mascot Mode, which is just good fun with filters and such.

Not to mention the ability to just change camera angles with a click. Do you want your normal Prime Ticket broadcast angles? You can do that. Do you want to watch from the backboard of a hoop? You can do that too, and you’ll still hear Ralph Lawler (or now, Brian Sieman) as it all happens. You can also choose the Prime Ticket audio or simply the on-court audio of squeaks and dribbles and no commentary at all.

Those are all great, but I would love CourtVision and find it vital to the future of the LA Clippers even if it didn’t have any of those things. Because the most important things are as follows:

1. I’m not blacked out for regular season games.
2. I can watch or re-watch on-demand.
3. I can watch on any device.

Two of these three things are already possible with CourtVision as it stands now with minor exceptions (for example, if a game is on TNT, or the game is a Lakers home game and thus is broadcast on Spectrum SportsNet — not to be confused with Spectrum SportsNet LA, which is Dodgers-only).

As far as the third point, I can tell you that through surveys I’ve taken as a test viewer questions have been asked of me about my interest in CourtVision being available on devices like Roku or Apple TV. The answer, of course, is that my interest is extremely high.

I would like to walk you through what the possibilities could be for a Clippers fan in Los Angeles. CourtVision in this scenario available on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, all the streaming devices.

"In this scenario, I pay a monthly subscription and I have access to CourtVision on my Roku, my smartphone and on any web browser. I’m in my home streaming the pre-game and tip-off on Roku connected to my TV. I see a tweet that the Locked on Clippers guys are having their meetup at Tom’s Urban by Staples Center. I open up my smartphone app, log in, turn off the TV and start watching the game on my phone while I’m on the move. For me, I’ll be taking the Red Line to 7th Metro, but whether you’re doing that or taking a Lyft, the point stands — you still have the game in your hand. I get to the meetup, not missing a second of the game, have a great time watching the broadcast with ClipperNation, and then after the game, go right back home, watching the post-game as I travel. Once I’m home, maybe I want to re-watch the game, see that killer catch-and-shoot from Landry Shamet (’cause you know you want to see that again). I can simply hit the replay, on-demand, scrub through the timeline until I get to that Bingo moment, and watch it again. Or maybe I want to watch the previous game, or a previous game against the same opponent, and I can do that as CourtVision archives all games they have the rights to for on-demand replay. I’m never once prevented from doing any of that, with the minor, completely reasonable exceptions I’ve outlined above."

There is an opportunity here for Mr. Ballmer to take near-full control of Clippers broadcasting options, taking what NESN has done and going even further — killing all but the lightest of roadblocks in one fell swoop.

But the reality is that in order to do that, he will have to buy one of either Fox Sports West or Fox Sports Prime Ticket, the latter of which currently carries the Clippers’ broadcasts.

Sure, you could make a deal with Prime Ticket in order to ensure that digital delivery is not hampered in any way, shape or form. That’s a possibility, I am extremely pessimistic about, for one reason only — the incoming owners of Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket is the Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sinclair has taken media consolidation to new heights, using local agreements to effectively circumvent regulations specifically designed to prevent such monopolies. There are also a lot of problems with them outside of sports that are beyond the scope of his outlet, but I’d encourage you to look into their practices and formulate your own opinions.

What’s troubling, sports-wise, is their encroachment on sports carriage following their failed bid to acquire Tribune Media.

They’re now building a channel to have exclusive rights to the Chicago Cubs. They now have a minority stake in the YES Network. And now, they’ve bought the Fox Sports Regional Networks from Disney after Disney was disallowed to keep those networks following their acquisition of Fox.

I know that it’s no simple task, regardless of what Steve Ballmer is worth, to buy an RSN in order to disrupt the current status quo of turtle-speed progress with regards to digital delivery.

However, right now offers an opportunity. One that comes at a high up-front cost, but guarantees control of how Clippers media is delivered to their fans. That control will become more and more valuable as Ballmer and the team works to increase the value of the Clippers brand both on and off the court.

Three years from now, when the existing Fox Sports contract is up, three years into the Kawhi Leonard and Paul George era of the LA Clippers, if you expect me to believe that Sinclair Broadcast Group is going to magically negotiate in good faith for a new contract that protects digital delivery, well, my friends, I have a bridge in Nevada to sell you.

Steve, you’re gonna have to be bold with this one, and it’s going to require taking control of who broadcasts Clippers content, and how they broadcast it. Sinclair does not give a single damn about the LA Clippers, or their fans, or what’s best for Los Angeles basketball. But you, Steve, you do.