For the last three months, poker fans have expressed concern about the future of Poker TV, given the events that transpired on Black Friday. With a full season of poker playing between that time and now, we have a clearer picture of what will become of Poker TV. Full Tilt is currently down and no longer offering advertising (and likely won’t be advertizing in the US anymore, even if they do recover) and PokerStars has been forced out of the American market, to be followed by the voluntary withdrawal of other sites, such as Bodog Poker, who have simply decided that operating in the US is more trouble than it’s worth.
As we all know, the World Series of Poker continues to be aired on ESPN, and the station is currently showing highlight reels that they plan to air through November, when the final table returns to finish out the 2011 WSOP and crown a champion. ESPN doesn’t seem to have any intention of letting go of this cash cow, as plenty of people have tuned in to both the live play and the highlights. The World Poker Tour, which airs on Fox Sports Net will likely also stay on the air, due to high viewer volume (and no sponsorships from companies that are currently at odds with the US). The European Poker Tour and North American Poker Tour, however, have both been pulled from television. They were allegedly timebuy deals, and almost all the timebuys have been removed from network television.
Timebuys, also known as brokered television, are when a company buys a time slot outright, rather than trying to earn income either through the network or through advertising. These types of shows often don’t make enough money through ads to be worth trying to air the traditional way, so when the company paying to air the show no longer has any reason to air it, the show is taken off the air. When PokerStars was shut out of the US market, it no longer had any motivation for paying millions of dollars to keep televising the EPT and NAPT, as Americans now had no way of accessing the site, therefore removing the shows’ efficacy as an advertising tool. PokerStars therefore pulled the plug.
Several other shows that are still being aired, such as High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark are also running on timebuys, which means that they’re in serious jeopardy of being taken off the air after the current season, as the sponsor has no reason to keep funneling money into them (and in the case of Poker After Dark, the main sponsor was Full Tilt, which will probably not be sponsoring anything for a while). It’s anyone’s guess which shows will still be around a year– or even six months– from now.
Not all is lost, however. This fall, Epic Poker League will be coming to CBS and Velocity, a new network that was previously Discovery’s High-def Theater Network. Between the two networks, the latter of which won’t go live until early October of this year, 20 hours of programming will be aired. Because many of the other poker shows have gone under, Epic Poker League, led by poker legends Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack, stands to draw the professional players who will no longer be playing for other Poker TV shows. With a monopoly on the televised poker talent, Epic Poker League may well be what the foundering Poker TV has been looking for.