ESPN has signed a long term exclusive agreement with casino
operator Pen Entertainment licensing its brand for sports betting and
deepening the media giants ties to the growing online gambling
business. Pen will have the 10 year right to
use the ESPN bet name in the US. The
company said in a statement, Tuesday, Penn will
rebrand its Bartol Sports Book with ESPN starting this fall
. Pen also said it's selling all of its bars
sports subsidiary to David Portnoy, which is what they're
talking about on the social medias. Let's look ahead
now to Disney's earnings coming out later today with our
editor Chris Palmeri. So after the drama of Aig's
contract renewal, we go back to the existential question
that you and I posed around Sun Valley. How
do you become profitable in streaming? I think that's
what investors are looking for. It is. Well
, you know, one way is deals like this
one. I was a little surprised the market reaction
to the pen gaming deal.$1.5 billion guaranteed money
for Disney slash ESPN and, and they can still
, according to Penn on their call, have ads
from other sports betting companies on ESPN. So nothing
really kind of but upside it seems in this deal
. And that's sort of how you invigorate a legacy
brand like ESPN, which is, you know,
is struggling with losing traditional cable subscribers. So I'm
sure I is going to talk a lot about that
deal on the call and likely we'll get some questions
broader. You know, what we've seen this earning
cycle is after all, the pessimism about the legacy
media businesses. A lot of these companies have surprised
profit wise, Warner Brothers Paramount, you know,
their, their advertising business on traditional TV channels is
challenged, but they've cut a lot of costs and
they're saving a lot of money with the strikes.
And so the numbers have tended to look better.
You know, the ESPN pen deal. I wonder
how much of Iger's fingerprints are on it specifically because
the other question a lot of people are asking is
, when do we see the full Eger effect?
What's he going to do to restructure Disney's businesses?
Well, that's one of the things, but we'll
be looking since they did a lot of cost cutting
as you know, earlier this year, 7000 jobs
, 5 billion plus in savings they were looking for
. So may get an update on that. This
is definitely an ir deal. If you remember the
history of the sports betting thing, betting was something
that Disney historically shunned, didn't license its marvel superheroes
to machines, didn't allow them on the cruise ships
. This was a turnaround a few years ago under
the previous CEO Bob Chapek, he said, no
, we really can use the ESPN brand in sports
betting, but he never got a deal done.
There were a lot of talks and so this is
one that I finally did close and probably at the
last minute because the sports betting market has already pretty
much consolidated around a few players. All right,
Bloomberg's Chris Palmeri. It's going to be a busy
afternoon for both you and I with Disney. And
it's interesting, the stock, softer half a percentage
point in the session, but it's basically flat year
to today.