Programming

It’s tricky being an indie in TV these days: On the one hand, there are a growing number of outlets, particularly in the streaming space, hungry for premium content and anxious to grow their volume, fast. But those streamers are increasingly looking in-house for their fare: Either they’re paying top dollar to grab A-list producers or intellectual property, rebooting popular titles already in their library, or relying on their sister studios to keep everything in the family.

ABC’s Academy Awards telecast may not draw as many viewers as it has in the past, but it will still air a full suite of commercials. The network has sold out all of its available advertising inventory for the annual awards event, Jerry Daniello, SVP, entertainment brand solutions, for Disney Advertising Sales, said in an interview. The company finalized its sales earlier this week, he said.

A start-up men’s basketball league, with plans to pay college students up to $150,000 and compete with the NCAA, has inked a media rights deal, setting the stage for its debut later this year. The Professional Collegiate League reached a pact with Next Level, a network owned by a former Obama administration official, that will air its games both on linear TV and streaming platforms.

Even in a TV landscape strewn with new streaming services, media is still all about the bundle. The rise of mighty new platforms bolstered with high-wattage content has been heralded as evidence of the great un-bundling in the pay TV sector, a trend that does not bode well for Hollywood’s balance sheets. But as the TV marketplace has expanded over the past year, most of the major players are focused on using their marquee content to assemble their own proprietary bundles.

Nielsen said it launched Nielsen Streaming Video Ratings, a syndicated service that measures total viewership and advanced audience demographic insights by streaming platforms along side traditional linear TV ratings. At launch the Streaming Video Ratings will cover 10 top streaming platforms plus seven categories of apps. Some are of the services being measured, subscription based, others are ad supported, network, social, gaming, MVPDs and vMVPDs.

ABC’s The Conners on Wednesday drew 2.8 million total viewers and a 0.4 demo rating, down 29% and 33% from last week to mark series lows. On NBC, Chicago Med (6.9M/0.9) ticked up and copped Wednesday’s biggest audience, while Fox’s two-hour The Masked Singer averaged 4.9M/1.2, steady week-to-week.

HBO Max and HBO have reached 44.2 million U.S. subscribers, AT&T revealed in its first-quarter 2021 earnings report Thursday. That’s up from the 41 million combined subs the company reported at the end of 2020, a tally that beat the company’s initial projection by two years.

Jeopardy today announced the final guest hosts for Season 37: George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton and David Faber. As previously announced, Joe Buck is also part of this final batch.

Days of Our Lives‘ renewals over the past several years have contained as much drama as the daytime staple itself. This year is not an exception. Negotiations between NBC and Sony Pictures Television have been ongoing. The two sides are not commenting but, according to sources, there hasn’t been any cause for alarm and insiders have been optimistic that Days of Our Lives will be renewed for a record 57th season.

Fox’s The Resident drew 3.3 million total viewers and a 0.5 rating, holding steady week-to-week to land in a four-way tie for the Tuesday demo win.

Major League Baseball is considering a rule change that cord cutters can cheer. After years of relying on traditional distribution of local games via cable and satellite (plus, to a limited extent, over-the-top streaming), MLB is now urging its regional sports networks to explore direct-to-customer possibilities for local fans.

NFL Media and Hulu announced a new multi-year carriage agreement to bring the NFL Network and NFL RedZone to Hulu’s live TV subscription streaming service Hulu + Live TV. The NFL Network and NFL RedZone will be available to Hulu + Live TV subscribers by Aug. 1, just in time for the 2021 NFL season. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Tottenham throughout Tuesday evening deserted the proposal to launch a largely-closed midweek competition amid an escalating backlash from their supporters and warnings from the British government that legislation could be introduced to thwart it.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association board said in an email Tuesday that Phil Berk is no longer a member of the organization. The decision comes hours after NBC — which telecasts the Globes — condemned a Berk email that called Black Lives Matter a “hate movement” and called for his “immediate expulsion.”

CBS averaged 4.45 million viewers last week, followed by ABC with 3.6 million. NBC had 3.1 million, Fox had 2 million, Univision had 1.4 million, Telemundo had 1.07 million, Ion had 1.05 million and The CW had 710,000. Fox News Channel led the cable networks, averaging 2.23 million viewers in primetime. MSNBC had 1.48 million, HGTV had 1.36 million, CNN had 1.05 million and TBS had 947,000.

The Super League may not yet be a stone cold reality, but the proposal to band together 20 of the top European soccer clubs could generate billions of dollars in rights fees for football clubs across the pond, potentially attracting several major cable networks and broadcasters to compete for TV rights to the games.

In addition to live channels that feature national news, superstar talent and marquee content partners, Local Now’s state-of-the-art streaming platform now also delivers original local news, weather and information, customized by market.

In the session ending April 11, the game show climbed 14% from a week earlier to a 5.6 live-plus-same-day national Nielsen rating, its best performance in a month.