Competition among NFL pregame shows will ramp up this fall as Fox plans to start its broadcast coverage an hour earlier. The Fox NFL Kickoff studio show will move from Fox Sports 1 to Fox, where it will lead into the network’s highly rated Fox NFL Sunday. Fox affiliates have been asked to clear an extra hour on Sunday mornings so that Fox’s NFL programming can start at 11 a.m. ET.
Bars and restaurants across America could be lining up to take a chunk out of the $12 billion deal the NFL has with DirecTV. A proposed class action filed Monday on behalf of San Francisco pub The Mucky Duck wants to free such establishments from what they see as the exorbitant prices they are paying to the league to show out-of-market games via the satellite provider’s Sunday Ticket package.
Hyundai has replaced General Motors as an official sponsor of the NFL, giving it a platform at some of the most viewed events in the U.S., such as the Super Bowl and playoffs.
KMSP Now Home Of The Minnesota Vikings
Former WB and Microsoft executive Jordan Levin is chosen for a new post at the league, leading development and implementation of content across the NFL Network, NFL Digital Media, NFL Films and external media partnerships, networks and platforms.
Exclusives
The company said that it had struck a deal with the National Football League to host the first free, live global webcast of a regular-season game, which will be played in London on Oct. 25.
The National Football League on Tuesday decided to give up the tax-exempt status for its league office, agreeing to the demands of lawmakers who denounced it as an unconscionable giveaway. Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, essentially told NFL owners in a memo that the tax incentive wasn’t worth what had become a years-long public relations hassle. But the move also offers the league new ways to shield information — including Goodell’s $44 million salary in 2012 — from public view.
With the 2015 NFL regular season matchups now set, the rights-holding networks have revealed their schedules. The NFL season kicks off on Thursday, Sept. 10, with the Pittsburgh Steelers at the New England Patriots on NBC.
No NFL games will be blocked from local television next season, the league said Monday at the owners’ meetings. The teams voted for a one-year suspension of the long-standing blackout policy for the preseason and regular season. There were no blackouts last season, because the minimum number of tickets, by NFL sellout standards, was sold for every game, and the league had only two blackouts in 2013.
The NFL announced a grand experiment on Monday, saying it would put a mid-season football game on a national digital platform, not on national television — opening up an important new door for the sports media industry. The league acknowledged that the trial effort is designed to understand the market for digital rights.
The NFL has protected its video as fiercely as any league, pushing most users to its website or to its broadcast partners. Today, the league and YouTube announced a partnership between two of the most powerful brands in the marketplace, creating an official NFL channel on the video website. Clips will also be directly viewable through simple Google searches.
Weeks after rumors began swirling that Today co-host Matt Lauer had landed the first interview with former Ravens running back Ray Rice and his wife, Janay, NBC has confirmed that Today will air its interview with the couple in two parts today and Tuesday, Dec. 1 and 2.
The NFL runs dozens of computers for 24 hours a day for 12 weeks to evaluate its millions of possible schedule combinations. Each team’s opponents are set at the end […]
NFL Doesn’t Want You To Watch Games On TV
Even as the “blackout” rule has been repealed, the league is trying to squeeze money from fans, broadcasters and sponsors.
A record number of women are watching NFL games across all networks so far this season despite the domestic violence and child abuse issues that engulfed the league two months ago. TV executives and sports marketers have been paying close attention to female viewership trends all season, concerned that the ugly off-field controversies involving Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson would erode league interest among women. But more than halfway through the season, that hasn’t happened.
TVB’s just-released NFL 2014: A Local Success analysis of the recently concluded Thursday Night Football partnership between CBS and the NFL Network reveals broadcast television as the driving force of live NFL viewership.
WISH, Indianapolis Colts’ Honor Military Personnel
CBS affiliate WISH Indianapolis (DMA 27) is teaming up with the Indianapolis Colts to dedicate the Sunday, Nov. 16, game against the New England Patriots as “Salute to Service,” honoring U.S. […]
CBS has gotten a nice boost this fall from Thursday Night Football, which posted big gains over the network’s usual Thursday lineup and helped balance out declines by a handful of aging shows. But with the NFL program’s seven-week run now over, the question is whether CBS can maintain that momentum without its No. 2 show.
NFL Now, a mobile video service, provides game highlights, updates and news reports directly to fans and competes with TV and cable networks.
The league said Monday that the Oct. 26 game at Carolina will be on CBS instead of Fox, which owns the NFC package. The “cross-flexing” policy change in the current TV rights agreement aims to gain bigger audiences for appealing games. CBS owns the AFC package.
The National Football League and DirecTV have extended the satcaster’s exclusive rights to carry NFL Sunday Ticket and its package of every Sunday afternoon out-of-market games through a new multi-year agreement worth an estimated $1.5 billion annually over eight years.
Nets, Affils, NFL And The Ownership Cap
The FCC’s 39% cap may be all that is preventing Fox and CBS from acquiring more affiliates and converting them to O&Os. Consider what CBS CEO Les Moonves is saying and Fox is doing in Seattle. Fortunately for network-wary affliates, the current Democratic majority at the FCC is not inclined to loosen the cap and it is under little pressure to do so.
TV’s costliest shows this season are the ones that have a preponderance of live viewership. Football continues to dominate as the most expensive programming for advertisers, with NBC’s Sunday Night Football and CBS’s Thursday Night Football coming in No. 1 and No. 2 in broadcast, respectively, on Ad Age’s annual pricing survey.
Fox Poised To Pull Seattle Affiliation Over NFL
Fox is said to be set to yank Tribune Media’s Fox affiliation at KCPQ Seattle. Tribune won’t be left empty-handed, said one person familiar with conversations. Tribune would receive an MNT affiliation in Chicago in exchange. However, one person counselled that talks about the swap were continuing and that Tribune hadn’t completely signed off on the transaction. It’s not clear which Seattle station would end up with Fox.
Dawn Hudson, who rose though the Pepsi ranks to become chief executive of the beverage giant’s North American beverage operations, will become the chief marketing officer of the National Football League.
With the addition of eight Thursday-night games this season on CBS, there are now four principal time periods each week in which to watch the NFL on a national network: Thursday evening, Sunday afternoon on CBS and Fox, Sunday night on NBC and Monday night on ESPN. But it’s in primetime on both Thursday and Sunday — when CBS and NBC, respectively, air games with no other game being played anywhere else — that the NFL packs its most powerful punch.
NEW YORK (AP) — At least six television networks said Thursday they plan to stop or minimize airings of video showing Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice striking his then-fiancee […]
Now that the NFL is investigating how its executives handled Baltimore Raven running back Ray Rice’s domestic violence case, sponsors are forced to balance the exposure NFL games can offer with the risk of alienating customers. “Obviously all the sponsors are incredibly worried, but it’s hard for a sponsor to disconnect from the entire NFL. It’s so important to business,” says marketing consultant Laura Ries.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The debut of CBS’ “Thursday Night Football” broadcast was revised because of controversy surrounding the video of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious, CBS Sports Chairman […]
When it comes to delivering a Twitter audience, the NFL beats the rest of the primetime schedule and it’s pretty much a blowout. Last Thursday’s premiere NFL game of the 2014 season, between the Green Bay Packers and Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, generated close to 950,000 tweets. And those tweets were seen by over 8 million fans, according to the latest Nielsen Twitter TV Rankings report.
With the start of the NFL regular season, television gets back its biggest audience. But don’t expect to see any live games online, without having to pay for cable or satellite, anytime soon. Even as traditional television adapts to the Internet, the NFL doesn’t feel the rush. It doesn’t have to: its biggest audience is on broadcast, cable and satellite TV, and it is making around $9 billion each year to license the rights to broadcast its games. Still, NFL executives are trying to figure out how to grow their digital business.
It’s not too bold a prediction to say that tonight’s game between the Green Bay Packers and defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, kicking off at 8:30 p.m. on NBC, will be the most-watched program on television since March’s Academy Awards. Last year’s kickoff game scored 25.1 million total viewers. Nothing since March has drawn more than 16 million viewers.
The NFL is on the verge of a deal with DirecTV for its Sunday Ticket package that will see its average annual rights fee increase to between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion over the next decade. Though several issues still need to be ironed out, a broad agreement has been reached on the price and length of a deal, according to multiple sources.
WOIO Adds Browns Legend Bernie Kosar
Raycom-owned CBS affiliate WOIO Cleveland (DMA 19) has signed Cleveland Browns legend Bernie Kosar for its Serpentini Tailgate 19 pregame show. A round table of revolving talent will offer perspectives […]
CBS is allowing its announcers to decide on their own whether to call the team the Redskins. So is Fox, which handles the NFC and will televise most of Washington’s games. Both Phil Simms at CBS and NBC’s Tony Dungy say they’ll likely refer to the team as just “Washington.”
Just in time for kickoff, the National Football League is pushing federal regulators to keep a rule on the books that forces cable and satellite companies to black out some games. In the weeks ahead of yesterday’s preseason opener, the league has rushed the FCC with meetings and letters, even bringing out former Steelers star Lynn Swann to aid the public relations push.
