Sinclair Broadcast Group

EVP-CFO Lucy Rutishauser: “Compared to fourth quarter pro forma 2019, media revenues [are trending to be] up 7% to 9%. Excluding the impact of political ad revenue, fourth quarter core advertising is expected to be up a low double-digit percent versus Q4 of last year and up by a low single-digit percent versus Q4 of 2019.”

That’s tagged to the absence of political advertising. Core revenues grew 11% to $434 million.

A week after suffering a major cyberattack over the weekend, Sinclair Broadcast Group said it is still working to restore disrupted systems. “A  large portion of other programming has and is airing as scheduled, and all our news stations are providing news programming to our viewers,” the company said.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest TV station operators in the US, said Monday that a ransomware incident is disrupting some of its office and operational networks. The disturbance impeded the production of local newscasts throughout the day on Sunday and again on Monday, according to staffers at some TV stations.

The company said it started investigating the security incident on Saturday and on Sunday it and found that certain office and operational networks were disrupted. It is still working to determine what information the data contained. No ransomware groups immediately took credit for the incident.

TV operations at several Sinclair-owned stations went down on Sunday in what the stations have described as technical issues, but which sources say is a ransomware attack. The incident occurred in the early hours of the day and took down the Sinclair internal corporate network, email servers, phone services and the broadcasting systems of TV stations.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is not a fan of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $250 million plan to parlay its 19 regional sports networks into a streaming service. For one thing, Manfred doesn’t believe Sinclair has enough digital rights from the 14 MLB clubs it has licensing agreements with to pull off such an enterprise.

Being the in-house agency for broadcast giant Sinclair Broadcast Group wasn‘t ambitious enough for Compulse. As media companies and advertisers look to dive deeper into advanced advertising, Compulse has been working to become a marketing technology company that services the industry, not just Sinclair.

Executives from WarnerMedia, CBS Owned Stations, Hearst Television and Sinclair told attendees of TVNewsCheck’s TV2020 virtual conference last week that their migration of workflows to cloud technology continues apace since the pandemic. However, concerns over the crucial “last mile” of their networks remain.

Sinclair’s The National Desk joins the nighttime news wars, the latest example of a fast-growing trend: local station groups creating national programs and even whole channels to amortize resources, populate new platforms and replace generic syndicated fare with original content.

Dish and Sinclair Broadcast Group have reportedly agreed to an extension that will keep the broadcaster’s signals on Dish — for now. The two companies have been at odds over a new carriage agreement, that has threatened to take Sinclair-owned CBS, Fox, NBC and ABC affiliates and Tennis Channel dark on Dish. The two sides had come to a temporary extension agreement in mid-August while negotiations over a long-term carriage pact continued. The reported new extension is through the middle of September.

Sinclair moves him from sales director at its Columbus, Ohio, duopoly to lead operations at the Fox and CW stations in Nebraska.

He succeeds the retiring Dan Mellon in overseeing the company’s data and technology integration into the sales process.

On Monday, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Dish Network agreed to a short-term extension of their carriage agreement hours before it was set to expire. David Gibber, Sinclair SVP and general counsel, said: “We have agreed to a short-term extension with Dish to continue conversations. We will continue to update our viewers as this develops. Sinclair stands willing to continue to negotiate in good faith and to enter into a longer extension to allow for the continued carriage of our channels to Dish subscribers.”

More than 140 Sinclair-owned stations are set to go dark today because of a carriage dispute between Sinclair and Dish Network. The latest disagreement over retransmission fees will affect 3.5 million Dish subscribers in 38% of the country.

Education tech company SpectraRep is teaming with Sinclair Broadcast Group’s One Media 3.0 and its WIAV-CD Washington, D.C., to deliver EduCast, a broadcast Internet solution to meet the needs of K-12 and college learners without access to sufficient broadband Internet services in their homes.

Sinclair promotes Bell from director, senior corporate counsel, to oversee both distribution of the company’s content portfolio and Sinclair’s network affiliations.

Ongoing carriage friction between Dish Network and Sinclair Broadcast Group could soon intensify, with Sinclair warning that 112 of its local TV stations could soon go dark on the pay-TV provider. In an earnings conference call with Wall Street analysts, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen was asked about the source of the dispute with Sinclair. “At the end of the day, it’s about money,” he said. “It’s about economics.”

Although direct-to-consumer offerings are the latest rage, much of Sinclair’s future in the space could be determined by its retrans talks with Dish Network.

CFO Lucy Rutishauser: “Solid growth in our largest category, services, as well as strength in the sports betting and pharmaceutical categories offset much” of the auto decrease.

It attributes the increase to $1.6 billion to the general recovery of the advertising market from the pandemic and the resumption of professional sports games compared with none being played in the prior year quarter. Core revenues totaled $466 million, an increase of 109%.

The FCC has officially imposed the maximum per-violation fine of $512,228 each for all but one of the stations it had identified in a September 2020 notice of apparent liability as violating the FCC’s requirement of good faith retransmission consent negotiations. The 18 stations had been the target of a complaint by AT&T and its DirecTV DBS service alleging they had unreasonably delayed those negotiations including failing to respond to AT&T proposals.

With the release of Compulse 360 software for digital media, Compulse, Sinclair’s digital arm, offers purpose-built tech, expert managed services and transparent pricing designed to let clients run local campaigns at scale.

Meagan O’Halloran returns to Sinclair as main anchor of The National Desk late news. Eugene Ramirez Joins as live desk anchor weeknights at 10 p.m. ET beginning Sept. 27.

Over-the-top advertising has become a surprisingly important business for companies that have been stockpiling television stations. Streaming revenue is letting broadcasters, including Cox Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group and the NBC and Fox O&Os, claim a foothold in the technology field and create advanced advertising products for clients enamored of digital and social media.

The sports channels still lack YouTube TV, Hulu, fuboTV carriage. Dish negotiations are expected in August.

The Sinclair-owned streamer features local news from more than 275 TV stations, giving consumers access to live and on-demand local newscasts and local news clips from 165-plus markets covering more than 75% of the U.S.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, already the nation’s dominant owner of regional sports networks, has made an offer to acquire NBCUniversal’s seven regional sports networks. If Sinclair succeeds in buying the RSNs, it would add dozens of popular National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball teams to its already vast collection of sports broadcast rights. The deal would also give Sinclair an 8% stake in SportsNet New York, which broadcasts Mets games.

The latest advance in television broadcasting, with features such as mobile reception, ultra-high-definition video and movie-theater-quality sound, should reach markets covering about half of U.S. households by the end of the year, said CEO Christopher Ripley during the broadcaster’s annual meeting this week. “With Next Gen TV-enabled television sets beginning to come to market, we now anticipate that consumer interest in this technology will drive its nationwide adoption,” he said.

Analyst Alan Wolk: While the entertainment offerings on streaming today easily surpass the offerings on cable in terms of both quality and quantity, the same cannot be said for news and sports.

Sinclair is working on a direct-to-consumer streaming service for its Bally Sports regional sports networks and it has disclosed to potential lenders how big it believes the opportunity could be. In an 8K filing with the SEC, Sinclair included a presentation outlining the potential upside of launching an RSN DTC service, which it predicted could eventually attract approximately 4.4 million subscribers and generate around $2 billion in annual revenue.

Adam Ware, VP of national networks and platforms for Sinclair Broadcast Group, says the company’s STIRR network of local streaming channels is seeing robust revenue growth in spinning up bespoke channels and “long-form” advertising content for local advertisers. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.