ABC

“ABC gets exclusive rights to Monday Night Football for a new deal, new product, 8.5 million dollars per season.”

“And that was before the league had played a single game.”

“The first Monday Night Football game that airs that season is watched by sixty million U.S. Households.”

“What you want to be paying for is the smallest amount of content possible that gets distributed to the widest audience possible. So you actually should be willing to pay up to twenty million as long as the aggregate number of viewers that you get on that day i…”

“So ABC signs a league-wide five-year TV rights deal with the American Football League for eight and a half million dollars over five years. It was by far, far the single biggest sports rights TV deal in history at the time.”

“So it quickly becomes the second most popular show on television after I Love Lucy, and it's the first ABC program to crack the top 25 shows Ever. Like, it was all NBC and CBS until Disneyland.”

“We've got this, like, joint venture called Disneyland Inc. It's got 500,000 dollars from Walt Disney Productions. It's got 500,000 dollars from ABC. It's got 200,000 dollars from Western Publishing, who distributed their books. And then Walt himself put in 250…”

“ABC negotiated to have the right to all the profits from Disneyland's food and beverage for the first decade.”

“In addition to this 500,000 and the 4.5 million, ABC is also going to pay five million dollars per year to Walt Disney Productions to make the show that they're going to put on the air. And it was ABC's to air for seven years, which made it the largest TV prog…”

“It was the world's largest live telecast ever. Eighty-three million people tuned in to watch from home. Which means that nearly half of America watched this broadcast.”

“ABC ends up investing 500,000 dollars in equity in Disneyland Inc., same terms and amount as Disney Productions. In addition, though, they also guarantee four and a half million dollars in bank loans.”

“ABC, though, Ben, as you were saying, they're the newest of the networks, and they're struggling to catch on. They need something like Disney and Disneyland to break out. So they say, yes, Walt's line on this was that ABC needed the show so badly that they bou…”

“In 1960, when the company actually had enough cash to do it, that's when Roy negotiated, hey, we'll pay you seven and a half million dollars to buy out your stake. So by 1960, the publicly traded company, Walt Disney Productions, did own all of Disneyland, Inc…”