coronavirus

Questions and answers about the coming National Football League season in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

NBC has set fall premiere dates for some of it scripted series, with This Is Us and all three Chicago series to return in November. NBC, like many of the other broadcast networks, will kick off its fall season with an unscripted- and import-heavy schedule next month as scripted series begin get back into production after delays caused by the pandemic. Though previously announced for a fall premiere, the Christopher Meloni-led SVU spinoff Law & Order: Organized Crime will be held until 2021

Broadcasters won’t be hampered by remote working conditions for election night 2020, and they have a bevy of new graphics and augmented reality tools to help them tell the story. Above, Broadcasters can make complex data easy for viewers to grasp through augmented reality objects generated by Brainstorm graphics using real-time data from different sources. A Punt, a regional channel in Spain, covered municipal elections, and this interactive map shows the winning party in each town, with detailed results for the seats won in each town are shown on the chart of the left side. The bars on the bottom show a rundown of all the cities, in alphabetical order, with the results in real time.

A growing number of analysts and insiders are reaching a startling conclusion: While the NFL and its sky-high viewership may be critical to networks as marketers look to unleash their budgets on holiday shoppers, the scrapping of the college Division I football season actually might come with as many silver linings as drawbacks — maybe even more. Why? Because buying the rights to college games has become so expensive that sometimes networks are better off if the games aren’t played at all.

Shares of Roku Inc. surged over 11% on Wednesday after Citi initiated coverage of the streaming video company with a “buy” rating, while Netflix also rallied more than 11%. Roku and Netflix are among several technology-related companies that have benefited as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, with people around the world spending more time at home.

Advertising and cable subscriptions have been the twin engines driving the growth of media companies for decades. Now both are faltering, and there can be only one conclusion: the traditional TV business will never recover.

TV stations and networks are learning that to take full advantage of the cloud, they need to overhaul the way they produce news rather than try to replicate hardware-based workflows on a cloud platform.

The erosion of U.S. ad spending continues to moderate, falling at its lowest rate of decline in July since the economic effects of the pandemic began manifesting earlier this year. U.S. ad volume declined 13.9% vs. July 2019, according to the just-updated U.S. Ad Market Tracker. That compares with a 17% decline in June, a 31% decrease in May, a 35% drop in April and an 11% slide in March, the first month of 2020 to go into an ad recession.

Producers of the Tony Awards said Friday that the 74th annual ceremony to honor the best on Broadway will be presented digitally this year sometime in the fall, with a date and a platform to be announced soon. The event had been scheduled for June 7 at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall with its usual live broadcast on CBS, but the coronavirus shutdown of Broadway as COVID-19 gripped New York City and the world made it impossible to go forward.

An outbreak of COVID-19 has been reported at Television City, the studio where The Bold and the Beautiful and other shows are produced. Three staffers have come down with the virus at the studio formerly known as CBS Television City, at 7800 Beverly Blvd. in Los Angeles.

The pay cuts spurred on by the novel coronavirus pandemic are beginning to wind down. Fox Corp. told employees in April that everyone at the VP level or above would see their pay cut by 15% through the end of July. In an email to staff last month, Fox chief legal and policy officer Viet Dinh wrote to staff confirming that pay would be returned to normal effective Aug. 1.

A balky online connection is among the pitfalls that may face next month’s primetime Emmy Awards, forced into socially distanced safety by the coronavirus pandemic. Whether ABC and the ceremony’s producers decide to gamble on mixing live and taped elements remains to be seen, with planning for the Sept. 20 event hosted by Jimmy Kimmel under wraps.

With no fans in the stands, colorful language is getting extra play on the field and on air.

One year after NBC assumed the rights from longtime broadcaster ABC, the network is preparing to bring one of the iconic events in sports to a potentially record-setting television audience Sunday. The reasons are many, but the biggest are these: There remain far fewer live events than normal because of the COVID-19 pandemic, none of the 300,000 fans that turn out each year will be there in person, and the event itself still stirs a certain sense of Americana among race fans.

TV audiences for hockey and golf are surging, and baseball is bringing in younger viewers, as people look for a break from streaming.

What’s worse than being unprepared for The Big Story? Thinking you are prepared — and finding out you were terribly wrong. Maybe a quick quiz is the best way to assess your newsroom readiness. How many of these elements are staples of your well-worn “election playbook”?

Broadcast TV series are very slowly and cautiously heading back to production amid the coronavirus pandemic. CBS drama stalwart NCIS and spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles have been assigned tentative dates to start production on their upcoming seasons under strict COVID-19 protocols — Sept. 9 for the mothership series and Sept. 3 for NCIS: L.A. Both series, produced by CBS TV Studios, film in Los Angeles.

NCAA President Mark Emmert said Thursday there won’t be fall NCAA championships because there are not enough schools participating due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a decision that affects 22 championships.

No crowd scenes. Few locations. Limited romance. Hollywood entertainment is about to get really strange.

Sports leagues’ COVID-19 shutdowns cost networks more than $3 billion in advertising, but savings from rights fees and production costs reduced that to less than $1 billion. Meanwhile sales for the forthcoming NFL season, including the Super Bowl, are trending down, hampered by COVID uncertainty.

When television production shut down in the spring, a few showrunners began working on pandemic-themed series that could be shot mostly from afar. But will viewers even want more shut-in stories? Above, Dan Levy stars in the socially distanced HBO special Coastal Elites, which was originally written to be a filmed three-night live event. Plans changed.

The Big 12 Conference on Wednesday announced that its fall sports season would go on, one day after the Big Ten and Pac-12 Conferences called off their 2020 plans amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The college football season is the latest (partial) casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States — and another blow for media companies who will now be without hundreds of hours of live programming, and the ad revenue that comes with it, in the fall. As of publication time, 52 of the 120 schools that play at the top level of college football — more than 40% of the total — have decided to cancel or postpone their fall sports seasons. The Big Ten and Pac-12, two of the so-called “power five” conferences, announced their decision Tuesday, following similar moves by two smaller leagues, the Mountain West and Mid-American conferences, and unilateral decisions by the University of Connecticut and Old Dominion University in Virginia.

Political is bolstering a comeback for TV advertising, but as COVID-19’s uncertainties continue to loom, Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy says managing in a climate of fear continues to be challenging.

The charity launches a plea for donations to counter losses from multiple fundraising events that had to be scrapped due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A Tuesday afternoon meeting with conference presidents and chancellors led to the Pac-12 deciding to cancel its fall 2020 college football season and postpone all fall sports through the calendar year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The move comes after the Big 10 elected to cancel its fall season earlier on Tuesday. Both conferences hope to play the season in spring 2021 but have not announced any specific plans.

The Big 10 Conference has postponed the 2020 football season because of safety concerns stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, the league announced Tuesday. The Big 10 is the first of college football’s elite Power Five conferences to decide against playing football this fall.

The Big Ten is on the verge of not playing football this fall, three people with knowledge of the decision confirmed to the Detroit Free Press. The people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the decision. A formal announcement is expected Tuesday, the people said.

ABC game show The $100,000 Pyramid is returning to the studio in the last week of August. The Michael Strahan-hosted series shoots in New York and it is thought that it is one of the first major non-scripted entertainment shows to return to the studio in New York, where Strahan shoots Good Morning America.

While a handful of scripted shows have remotely filmed single episodes set during Covid-19, HBO is upping the ante, scheduling the first scripted series shot and set entirely during the pandemic. Coastal Elites, initially planned as a theater project, will debut Sept. 12. HBO has lined up an all-star cast for the series, most of whom shot their scenes from their own homes. Among them are (l-r) Bette Midler, Dan Levy, Issa Rae, Kaitlyn Dever and Sarah Paulson.