THE NIKE CHANNEL

My early prediction for the 2012 and 2014 Summer & Winter Olympics is that ABC/ESPN (Disney) is going to make a bid to televise the Games. ESPN is such a money maker for the Walt Disney Corporation, that they are almost completely autonomous within the conglomerate and the head of ESPN reports to the chairman, Bob Iger, not the head of Television (Anne Sweeney).

And there's no doubt about it, no sports network does it better than ESPN. I was just thinking the other day how from 2005 when Monday Night Football went off the air on ABC to 2010 when Dancing With The Stars and Castle with all 3 shows bringing equally large audiences to ABC's Monday night, that no other network had transitioned a from an all male to all female demographic so successfully. Now on Monday nights, ABC has all the Women, ESPN has all the Men and Disney captures huge amounts of revenue from the CPMs for advertising on both broadcast & cable, cable subscriber fees, online revenue, and makes all that money from just 1 evening a week on television - Monday night. ESPN's Monday Night Football brought the largest audiences that have ever been to any cable network anywhere in the United States with over 21 million for some of its top games.

Needless to say, if the Walt Disney Company buys the Olympic rights, they'll have the Olympics in theme parks all over the world and the Olympic Committee can't buy that kind of publicity. The Walt Disney Company can use that leverage to keep the Olympic rights costs down to a reasonable level for Wall Street and still make a healthy return on the rights investment.

ESPN has to be leading the charge internally and tempting Bob Iger, who has already grown out of the shadow of Michael Eisner to be a worthy successor to run the only blue chip entertainment company.

While there is no clear current competitor to ESPN, only FOX comes close with its U.S. regional networks and the FOX Soccer Channel. So what other company could challenge ESPN with a rival sports cable channel? Only NIKE has the global brand recognition to do it. The Nike Channel can challenge ESPN. They have the money, can use the brand extension to grow the company and basically have a barker channel to sell all their sports equipment and apparel.

Anyone else think this is good idea? If Portland wants me to head up this venture, I'm looking at all reasonable job offers.