The World Series of Poker continues to grow as an event, as this year there were 54,000 people registering to to participate in the 55 qualifying events leading to this year's finals. Of those registrants, 6,358 qualified to play the main event. The tournament has been going on since June, beginning at Harrah's Rio casino, to bring it down to this place.
At this time, nine players remain to compete for the $8 million plus top prize in the final table on Tuesday afternoon.
What's important about the World Series of Poker is the aspect of "cool" it brings to the casinos, television and advertisers. There are a ton of residual businesses and revenue streams that come from the base product. Things like mobile deals, sponsorships, rights fees and licensing businesses.
Disney (DIS) through its ESPN property has the rights to broadcast the tournament through at least 2010. While the ratings on television aren't huge, they are consistent, and draw an average household rating of 1 million households. They are able to hold those numbers even though the big sporting events are being broadcast at the same time, like NFL games, Nascar and the Major League Baseball World Series.
The actual tournament is winding down, but at that time ESPN will being its editing process which takes a little over a month to complete.
ESPN will at that time, sometime in August, start the 32 hours of coverage they plan on airing of the 2007 World Series of Poker.
The unique view that ESPN has given viewers with their "card cam," has been offered as one of the big big reasons poker has been so popular in the recent years. It gives fans a look as if they're sitting at table level and able to see the hidden cards of the players; an extremely popular service.
Adding another revenue stream to the network, ESPN will also give fans an opportunity to watch a live view of the final table for $19.95 on pay-per-view.
Scott Hanley, ESPN's senior director of programming and acquisitions, said, "The sponsors love the property with its loyal fan base and great time slot ... a good business model for us, a perfect entity for what we are doing with multiplatform programming."
Comment Preview