Sinclair Closes Private Offering Of Senior Secured Notes Sinclair Broadcast Group says that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Sinclair Television Group, has closed its previously announced private offering of $750 million aggregate […]
The former vice president of advanced technology at the National Association of Broadcasters, is tapped to be vice president for emerging technologies at the Sinclair Broadcast Group NextGen TV subsidiary.
Sinclair will receive warrants and options for a minority stake in Bally’s, while Bally’s gains media and marketing access across Sinclair’s linear and digital properties. The 21 Fox regional sports networks will be rebranded using the Bally name.
It will highlight the latest and most pressing news of the day in real time for viewers across the country and will be available across Sinclair broadcast, digital and over-the-top platforms.
“Project Baltimore” at Sinclair’s Baltimore flagship Fox affiliate WBFF, is a team focusing only on education, a perennial problem in the city’s well-funded but badly underperforming public schools. The Project Baltimore group works in a separate building, isolated from the newsroom, free of daily news obligations.
Sinclair Sees Post-COVID Return To Normal Advertising
Sinclair isn’t giving formal guidance for 2021 due to uncertainty about when COVID will cease to be a factor, but did provide some information on what to expect in the current quarter, as record-breaking political ad revenues move to the rear-view mirror. “Every month has picked up, which is encouraging,” said Robert Weisbord, president of local news and marketing services.
Exclusives
Sinclair 3Q Media Revenue Climbs 42%
Its purchase of 21 regional sports networks and political ad revenue push that total to $1.5 billion, while the company’s total revenue climbs 37% to $1.3 billion.
As CMO, Zeigler will drive marketing and brand strategy across Sinclair’s various assets.
Station group buyers and suppliers of syndicated content from Sinclair, Fox Owned Stations, Debmar-Mercury and Litton Entertainment said at a TV2025 panel that streaming’s accelerated growth has put more pressure on their content pipeline and that the ecosystem could use more — and bigger — players in the mix. Read the story and/or watch the full video above.
Big TV Groups March Toward IP, Cloud Platforms
Technology executives from Fox Corp., Hearst, Sinclair and Tegna have already virtualized many of their functions, replacing some aging infrastructures with IP routing and broadening their use of the cloud, they said at a TV2025 panel last week. Read the story and/or watch the full video above.
Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional sports business and its creditors are preparing for a possible restructuring of its roughly $8 billion debt load, a sign of the pressure on the sports industry from COVID-19, according to people familiar with the matter. Sinclair subsidiary Diamond Sports Group’s bondholders have hired legal and financial advisers as it deals with the dearth of live sports during the coronavirus pandemic and the loss of some carriage deals with pay TV distributors.
Veteran sports news executive David Morgan will lead Sinclair’s digital sports news strategy across 21 RSN brands and Stadium.
In the latest episode of Eric Bolling’s show from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, America This Week, the conservative broadcaster perpetuated misinformation about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and measures that help slow its spread. In an interview on Friday, after the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America raised concerns about the episode, Bolling said the segment was being edited to remove some of his statements before airing over the weekend on dozens of Sinclair stations.
Sinclair Broadcast Group announced Friday that the president would participate in an event on Oct. 21, to be moderated by Eric Bolling, the conservative political commentator and host of America This Week. The event will air on all of Sinclair’s CW and MNT stations in 55 markets, as well as on their websites. Trump will answer questions from Bolling and members of an audience.
In addition to traditional programming, Sinclair plans to use channel capacity from one of the stations to provide advanced “Broadcast Internet” services. “We now have a prime showcase for the amazing features of NextGen TV that members of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission can witness first-hand,” said Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s president-CEO.
ATSC 3.0 in smartphones took a big step forward this week with delivery of the first of hundreds of production sample phones to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a key part of the station group’s strategy to ensure that NextGen TV one day is an integral part of mobile phones and other devices. The ONE Media Mark One phone powered by Saankhya Labs is an Android smartphone with built-in Saankhya Labs SL4000 ATSC 3.0 receiver chip providing NextGen TV reception, tuning and demodulation.
It taps Jan Jeffcoat as main anchor and Cayle Thompson as live desk anchor for the broadcaster’s headline news service beginning in early 2021.
New remote production techniques, distributed workflows and onsite safety protocols have dramatically reshaped sports production. As COVID-19 continues to be a threat, sports producers can expect less travel, trucks staying in place and a slowdown of UHD production until the crisis abates.
OTT Ad Impressions Spike During COVID Crisis
Streaming executives from E.W. Scripps, NBCUniversal Owned Stations, CBC and Sinclair say the pandemic drove record numbers to their streaming sites, boosting ad impressions and creating more inroads to advertisers.
Pandemic Proves OTT Workflow Resiliency For News
Executives from CNN, Sinclair, Fox Television Stations and Gray Television say COVID-19 has tested the capacities of their streaming workflows and found them even more adaptable and robust than they imagined.
J.R. McCabe, a veteran content creation, sales and marketing and product development executive, is picked to fill the new position.
The television industry, which has walked the same technical path for the past 20 years with its OTA delivery of DTV, is on the cusp of a new era of innovation in fields as far flung as the delivery of wireless data to cars and premium video to homes.
Broadcasters such as Sinclair and Vice are increasingly shifting playout functions to cloud platforms, seeking more flexibility and agility there and testing the waters with disaster recovery strategies, OTT channels and diginets. “In the cloud, you can build up a whole separate system in parallel, test it, then cut over to it,” says one consultant.
Sinclair Broadcast Group has promoted Phillip Gharabegian to deputy general counsel and SVP business affairs for the company’s regional sports networks (RSNs). In his new role, he will continue to […]
Obsesh Media, a digital platform for outdoor sports top athletes and high-profile lifestyle personalities to connect with fans through original video, has a deal to bring its original premium programming […]
Sinclair Broadcast Group says it agreed to settle three derivative lawsuits that were brought by investors in connection with Sinclair’s efforts to gain regulatory approval for the acquisition of Tribune Media. Sinclair was unable to get approval for the $3.9 billion deal and Tribune was acquired by Nexstar Media.
Political, Retrans Growth Powering Sinclair
The broadcast group tells analysts it expects third quarter broadcasting revenues to be up 6%-10% pro forma to $777 million-$805 million.
Sinclair 2Q Media Revenue Hits $1.3B
Distribution and political revenue push that total up 75%, while the company’s total revenue climbs 66% to $1.3 billion.
Sinclair has repeatedly defended the independence and objectivity of the local news reporting that is carried on its many stations. But its nationally distributed news and commentary programs, produced in Washington has stayed largely faithful to President Trump’s pronouncements about the virus. Above, Sinclair TV hosts Sharyl Attkisson and Eric Bolling.
TVN Focus On Journalism | Local TV Plans Reduced Convention Presence
Station groups say they will send fewer correspondents to August’s largely virtualized political conventions and centralize their reporting resources. At the same time, they see local coverage opportunities of the conventions expanding, largely down to use of the remote production technology they’ve already been mastering for months during the pandemic.
Sinclair Broadcast Group will not air a report prepared for Eric Bolling’s America This Week that blames Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, for creating the COVID-19 pandemic. In a tweet late Monday, Sinclair said that given the nature of Judy Mikovits’ claims to Bolling, the segment was “not appropriate” to air, adding: “We also reiterate our appreciation for all that Dr. Fauci and his team have accomplished for the health and wellbeing of Americans and people worldwide.”
Sinclair Broadcast Group has reversed course and has “decided to delay” a scheduled episode of America This Week with Eric Bolling reporting a discredited conspiracy theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci was responsible for creating the coronavirus. It said in a tweet: “We will spend the coming days bringing together other viewpoints and provide additional context. All stations have been notified not to air this and will instead be re-airing last week’s episode in its place.”
Around 10 markets should be on-air with 3.0 broadcasts by the end of the third quarter and perhaps 20 by year’s end, according to representatives of Pearl TV and BitPath. Broadcasters are also exploring the full capabilities of the NextGen standard with several new initiatives this summer, including the launch of a NextGen-capable smartphone and a trial of advanced alerting capabilities in Washington, D.C. Above, one of the six 2020 LG OLED sets that have earned the NextGen TV logo from the Consumer Technology Association.
With the Major League Baseball season about to belatedly begin, analyst Steven Cahall of Wells Fargo calculates that regional sports networks will cost Sinclair Broadcast Group $130 million in cash when the baseball, hockey and basketball seasons end.
TVNewsCheck will consider how news organizations are turning remote production outposts into permanent at-home studios, while Sinclair will present episode two of a series on monetizing NextGen TV. SMPTE has two events this week, MFM continues a series of for-credit sessions for finance managers and SVG presents its annual Sports Content Management conference in virtual form. For more events, plus dates, times and registration links, visit TVNewsCheck’s Virtual Events Directory.
TVN To Present Second Webinar On Optimizing Spot TV In A Tough Year
Leading executives in the spot TV advertising ecosystem will talk about ways to entice a larger number of marketers to invest in local TV during a TVNewsCheck webinar on Aug. 6. The event, which will focus on short- and long-term issues facing the industry, will feature (top, l-r): Frank Friedman, E.W. Scripps; Jane Meyerson, ICON International; Joe Cerone, Zenith; (bottom, l-r): Rob Weisbord, Sinclair Broadcast Group; Mark Gorman, Matrix Solutions and Ted Kramer, ProvantageX. Register here.
Sinclair’s sharing system fosters a culture of collaboration. Every station group shares content in some fashion, but Sinclair has made it a priority and built an elaborate system to get the job done.
Media and entertainment veteran Steve Rosenberg will lead the company’s RSNs, Stadium and high school sports divisions. He succeeds the retiring Jeff Krolik.
The station group reups eight of its CBS affils plus another to which it provides services.
