Donald Sun has inked a new broadcasting deal with NBC Sports Group, ensuring his Costa Mesa-based Association of Volleyball Professionals with a significant chunk of revenue and exposure before players hit the sand next month for the 2015 tour opener in New Orleans.
The one-year deal, valued in the $1 million to $2 million range, replaces a two-year pact with CBS Sports Network and CBS Interactive that concluded after last year’s AVP Championships in Huntington Beach, which capped off the tour’s seven-event season.
The new deal will provide AVP 10 hours of coverage on the NBC broadcast network, seven hours on its NBC Sports Network cable channel, and live streaming video on NBC Sports Live Extra. The coverage will include the men’s and women’s finals of all seven regular-season tournaments scheduled for the season, as well as finals and early-round coverage of an AVP-run tournament on the Federation International de Volleyball Tour that will broadcast in the U.S.
Select telecasts will air on a delayed basis on Universal Sports Network, another unit of Comcast-NBCUniversal, which is based in Philadelphia.
“It’s a big exposure play for us,” said Sun, who purchased the league for $2 million in 2010 after it emerged from bankruptcy. “Based on historical agreements with the AVP, this is extremely advantageous.”
The deal, which could be extended during the year, clears a big hurdle for Sun and the 32-year-old brand, which has fought to regain the trust of big sponsors and its players after abruptly shutting down midseason more than four years ago. It comes less than two months before the AVP New Orleans Open on Memorial Day weekend.
NBC was the first network to televise AVP events 25 years ago.
Reaching a national audience has been a big challenge for the AVP since its glory days in the late 1980s when the sport inspired feature films. The league’s revenue peaked in the early 2000s, hitting about $25 million, but steadily declined with the growth of other niche sports and the recession.
The league had more than $2 million in revenue last year, according to Sun, with most of that coming from the CBS deal and various levels of sponsorship from the likes of the Smart USA unit of Mercedes-Benz USA, Wilson Sporting Goods, the Barefoot Cellars wine label, and Gatorade.
AVP offers purses as high as $200,000 for its tournaments, draws top talent, and attracts as many as 30,000 spectators for some events, including its annual visit to Huntington Beach, where general admission is free.
The league could get a boost this year, which will be a run-up of sorts to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where beach volleyball trails only soccer in popularity as a spectator sport. Kerri Walsh-Jennings, AVP’s most recognizable star, will seek to win an unprecedented fourth gold medal in the sport during the summer games.
“Volleyball is going to be the premier sporting event in Rio,” Sun said.
He told the Business Journal last year he was open to striking a one-year deal, or even individual broadcast deals on an event-by-event basis, as long as sponsors and advertisers were provided a clear idea of ratings and online viewers, figures that weren’t gathered under the previous deal.
“One of the issues we had was capturing more attention with partners and sponsorships,” Sun said. “This is going to be a huge step to openings doors.”
