Canadian Business has posted a sizeable feature on FNTSY, a new fantasy sports channel launched by Anthem Media and Leonard Asper. The excerpts below show humble beginnings (100,000 households) and some promising partnerships.
In the mid-2000s, [Leonard] Asper was the most powerful media executive in the country as CEO of Canwest, the conglomerate his father, Izzy Asper, founded in Winnipeg in the 1970s. That was before the 2008 financial crisis set off a terrible chain of events: creditor protection, boardroom fights and a court challenge that saw the Aspers lose control of the company. After an ordeal like that, it’s easy to envision Asper as a defeated man, an impression he’s eager to counter. “Enough with the maudlin Len Asper stories,” he writes to me in a later e-mail.
There are other things he’d rather talk about, such as what’s playing on the television mounted on his office wall: the Fantasy Sports Network (FNTSY), which is the latest channel from Anthem. “I’m really happy with the product,” he says, “even though right now we’ve got a podcast on.” The program, Dear Mr. Fantasy, a talk-radio-style show for fantasy baseball fans with a dedicated online following, shows only an undulating sound wave onscreen.
Fantasy sports may sound bizarre to the uninitiated, but businesses are beginning to realize all the time people spend on their hockey and baseball pools is a big market opportunity, as much as US$3.5 billion a year. The goal with the network, the only 24-hour station dedicated to the subject, is to create the CNBC of fantasy sports. Asper envisions fantasy league players trading athletes based on what they learn from the channel in the same way investors trade stocks while watching cable news. “This thing, I hope, will be on in trading rooms around the country. It will be in doctors’ offices and in beer stores,” he says. The channel, which launched in March, is just part of Asper’s ultimate plan to put together a suite of niche television, online and mobile channels targeting male viewers. Advertisers have a hard time reaching men, and by creating a dedicated venue for testosterone-infused programming, he plans to serve up this demographic on a silver platter.
For Asper, the new venture also represents a chance to build a business of his own. His dad laid the groundwork for Canwest, and the business was mature when Asper took it over. At Canwest, the corporate environment made it difficult to truly flex entrepreneurial muscle. He can do that every day now. Should Anthem succeed, he might just lay waste to that “maudlin Len Asper” image, too.
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There’s already an entire universe of fantasy sports content online, and to establish a foothold, Asper talked with the owners of RotoExperts.com, a popular fantasy sports website based in New York. Louis Maione, who founded the site while working on Wall Street, had been thinking about expanding into video. “I hear about this guy Len Asper, and I start reading about him,” Maione says. “This is a real TV guy. He’s going to be competition.” Asper had only intended to discuss content sharing, but Anthem ended up buying RotoExperts and hiring Maione.
FNTSY debuted with roughly five hours of original programming per day. That included a one-hour news show filmed in Toronto with anchor Laura Diakun and another focused on prop betting (oddball wagers like the first player to score in a game) hosted by a gruff jock named Gabriel Morency, who seems incapable of speaking without shouting. Like most sports programs, the shows feature people yakking around tables. But fantasy players are more concerned about the individual performances of athletes, so both broadcasts dive deep into players’ abilities, shortcomings and injury reports.
The material is useful for hard-core fantasy players, but it’s not the most visually compelling stuff. “We need our Jim Cramer,” Asper says. Celebrity tie-ins are another option. “Jay Z runs a big musician’s league, and Geddy Lee is a huge fantasy baseball player. I think we can bring in a lot of celebrities.” Reality fantasy content (despite the oxymoron) holds promise, and Asper envisions following high-stakes players who participate in pools with entry fees in the thousands of dollars. There are even fantasy leagues for TV shows like The Bachelor. “You could fantasy-ize a lot of subjects,” he says.
FNTSY is getting a boost from Bloomberg Sports. In May, Anthem announced a partnership with the financial information giant, which started its own sports analytics division in 2010. Beginning in June, Bloomberg will produce a program from its studio in New York City that will air exclusively on FNTSY. The show will use Bloomberg’s proprietary data tools to analyze athletes and predict how they’ll perform, just as Bloomberg’s financial data helps investors decide which securities to buy. As part of the agreement, users of Bloomberg terminals (there are more than 315,000 in financial institutions around the world) can punch in “FNTSY” to access the network’s content.
So far, the network is only available to MTS cable subscribers in Manitoba (which amounts to around 100,000 households) and free to stream online everywhere else. Viewer feedback has been encouraging, and Asper says “several thousand” people have signed up online. Other indicators show adoption has been slow. Fewer than 2,000 people follow the network’s Twitter account, and its YouTube channel has only 161 subscribers. That said, it’s still early, and the network has yet to begin marketing itself.
Asper is working to secure more distribution agreements, and FNTSY will be available to eight million Roku users in the U.S. this month. But it’s unclear whether cable companies really need any more help reaching this underserved demographic. “Other, bigger options in the market can effectively deliver what advertisers want in terms of reaching the sports fan,” says Michael Neale, chief investment officer at media buying agency MediaCom. Live sports will still be the biggest draw for advertisers and command the highest prices. “I believe fantasy sports would offer high duplication with little incremental reach,” Neale says.
The network ran spots from Toyota and Budweiser at launch, but other advertisers have held off until Asper secures more distribution agreements. He maintains the sports fan’s desire for content is “virtually insatiable,” and the goal with any Anthem channel is not to muscle out behemoths like TSN. “It’s based on getting 10% of any market, not 80%,” he says. The company can pull that off because it’s a low-cost operation. Even the lobby couch at Anthem’s headquarters doubles as on-set furniture for guests.
Photography: Daniel Ehrenworth
This story originally appeared in Canadian Business
