Hi, I'm Robbie Weinstein. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about sports licensing. So, how it works is leagues, teams, even universities negotiate deals with brands like Nike, Adidas, maybe Under Armour, they do it to increase brand awareness, and affiliations to discover new market. These sports brands then license products like names and trademarks, logos. So, brands pay royalties to the partners as part of the deal. This is important because companies get better control over brand consistency, like Northwestern's license gear is all made by Under Armour. They know what they're going to get and revenue is a big part of this as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and such pay teams or schools for their rights. So, this also serves as promotion for teams and helps with brand awareness. Some of the big licensing deals right now, the NBA for instance, has an eight year one billion dollar deal with Nike, University of Michigan has a 15 years $174 million deal with Nike and Jordan brand. So, right now, we're going to look a little bit more at licensing as a revenue model. So, first entities may license to businesses, selling a company the right to sell your product, and these could include patents and trademarks, copyrights, designs as well. Licensing for consumers is another strategy as you sell retail stores the right to sell your product. Each time the company uses or displays the product, you receive royalties in exchange for the usage rights. So, here's an example. With MLB, a shirt costs five dollars to Nike, and including the licensing fee of three dollars, that then goes MLB, the total cost is eight. But it wholesales for $22, and then retails for $30 at Dick's Sporting Goods. Nike pays licensing fee percentage to MLB for each shirt Dick's sells, and then they get to promote their brand through high-quality athletic wear while controlling the consistency, and then they collect all those royalties as well. There are some problems in the industry however. Counterfeiting is one of those. It's companies that don't have these deals with an MLB, with Northwestern for instance, they decide to make unapproved jerseys or gear, and it's also easier to pirate photos and create other unlicensed products. Overseas firms in particular can offer jerseys for less money that are 90 percent similar to the real thing. The poor quality of the counterfeit merchandise at times can potentially have a damaging effect on the reputation of the teams products. Another major issue is that it's not so easy to project return on investment of these projects, because you don't really know what team success is going to look like 100 percent. If a typically successful team suddenly suffers a few down seasons after you've signed the deal with Nike, fan interests could weigh in less eyeballs on the team's games, and then maybe there are lest merchandise sales. So, another issue is that streaming causes issues for companies with broadcasting license agreements. So, the big four American leagues in the US, also European soccer in particular, it's pretty easy to find high-quality illegal streams that don't cost any money. So, many consumers feel, because of that, that there's no real reason to buy access to games, get cable or anything like that. Meaning networks can't capture all possible gains, and then maybe the contracts they signed is not entirely worth it. A lot of these streams originate from outside the United States, so it's hard to crack down on them. I would want to shut down often more just to sprout up, there's really no clear way to police this at this point. So, that's all I've got for today, but hopefully you learned a few new things about sports licensing. I'm Robbie Weinstein for MEDILL..