Friday Dump 🥟 - Ohtani caught in a pickle, Peacock's retention plan, Olympics watch party

Who else is craving a Friday Dump 🥟?

Each Friday, we’ll breakdown 3 sports business stories that have caught our eye throughout the week. They will be assembled in the following format:

🔴 - Stories that make us stop, think, and question.

🟡 - Stories with a hint of risk and unpredictability.

🟢 - Stories that make us feel good to go and empowered.

Come on in and take a seat.

🔴 Baseball’s biggest star answering to the bookies. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Dodgers fired Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime interpreter and friend of 2-time American League MVP Shohei Ohtani, after allegations were reported of a “massive theft” of Ohtani’s funds to pay off gambling debts. How much you ask? Roughly $4.5M worth in credit 🤕. Reports continued to come out from The Los Angeles Times and ESPN that Mizuhara made bets using Ohtani’s money with an illegal Southern California bookmaker, Mathew Bowyer (as he’s in the midst of an FBI investigation). News is still coming out but, initial reports claimed Ohtani transferred funds to Bowyer to cover Mizuhara’s gambling debts — just in case Mizuhara pocketed the money and gambled it again. However, according to Mizuhara, Ohtani had no idea of his gambling activity, debts, or attempts to pay them (this story is starting to get a little sketchy right?). Well, why is this so newsworthy?

• In December, Ohtani signed with the Dodgers in a record-breaking 10-year $700M deal. He’s considered today’s most popular baseball player and a true modern-day Babe Ruth (a player that can play in the field, smack home runs, and oh yeah, he can also pitch!) 🤯.

• Separate from Ohtani, the MLB has gone through their fair share of scandals. From previous gambling issues (with the 1919 Black Sox and Pete Rose), to the steroid era, to the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing. The last thing the league needs is their biggest star in the middle of a gambling conspiracy.

• You might be asking yourself, well this is great and all but isn’t sports gambling legal now? And it’s not like Ohtani was betting himself, right? All great points!

  • Sports betting is legal in 40 states, however it’s still illegal in California.

  • MLB players and employees are allowed to legally bet on sports, but baseball bets are a big time no-no — Mizuhara told ESPN on Tuesday his bets were placed on international soccer, the NBA, the NFL, and college football…not baseball.

🟡 Peacock attracted to live sports feathers. If you’re a true OG (Original Gangster for our 65+ crowd 😉), then you might remember our first Friday Dump 🥟, where we went through Peacock’s exclusive NFL playoff game of the Kansas City Chiefs v. Miami Dolphins. And yes, the numbers are in. Now we can sit back, relax, and analyze. Peacock ended up adding ~3 million new subscribers, because of this game, to their streaming service (the free-trial option was blacked out for this playoff game), and the retention numbers were pretty great!

• According to IndieWire, new research from Antenna found that 71% (~2.1 million) of those new Peacock users were still around by the end of February…roughly 7 weeks after the game.

• The playoff game was the largest paid live-streamed event in US history and it consumed 30% of US internet traffic (see Table 1).

  • 16.3 million devices were concurrently using Peacock.

    • The game averaged 23M viewers, according to Nielsen, that includes: Peacock, NFL+ app, and local TV in the Miami and Kansas City markets.

  • Since CBS had the Super Bowl‘s broadcast rights, Paramount+ technically won the streaming honors, as it drew an estimated 3.4M sign-ups to Paramount+, Antenna estimates

    • But what’s interesting, Paramount+ did not hold the Super Bowl behind a paywall. This means anyone could sign-up and watch the game (see Table 1).

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🟢 Summer Olympics fiending for attention. We know you couldn’t wait until the fall for the “NFL RedZone” Channel, so why not introduce something similar in the meantime? (If you’re unfamiliar with this wonderful channel, 1. We’re so sorry for your deprivation and 2. Imagine 7 hours of commercial-free football where the best highlights from all games are shown to you in a well curated format 😍). Well, NBCUniversal announced a rip-off viewing format for the upcoming Paris Olympics called, “Gold Zone”, a whip-around Olympics show, that will stream live on Peacock during the Paris Games. Scott Hanson (current RedZone host), Andrew Siciliano (former RedZone host), Matt Iseman, and Akbar Gbajabiamila (co-hosts of “American Ninja Warrior”) will serve as emcees. The show will air daily from 7am to 5pm EST, and will look to provide similar “must-see” moments during the Olympics that NFL fans look for on RedZone. NBCU is the home for the Olympics, which means they will do whatever they can to bolster Peacock and their current ~30M subscribers.

• We’ve seen Olympic viewership has drop quite a bit in the US since the Rio Olympics in 2016, where the Games averaged 27M viewers in prime time.

  • Per Sports Media Watch, the Tokyo Games were the first Summer Olympics to average fewer US viewers than the preceding Winter Games since Athens in 2004, which followed Salt Lake City in 2002.

    • Sure it, could have been because the Tokyo Games were delayed a year because of COVID + the 13-hour time difference from the East Coast 🥱.

  • The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics were the least-watched Games in prime time on NBC ever, averaging ~10.7M viewers per night on linear TV — that number rose slightly to 11.4M if you included other platforms.