The New York State Court of Appeals confirmed the fair market value of the Washington Nationals’ television rights Tuesday, a step that will help the team collect tens of millions of dollars in missing rights fees. New York’s highest court found the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, which is controlled by the Orioles, has no right to take the dispute over $100 million in missing rights fee payments from 2012-16 to an independent arbitrator, which they had been seeking. The court did not compel a payment of the money immediately, and the two sides must continue negotiating over the amount of money to be paid to the Nationals.
The new deal includes Tegna stations in Seattle, Portland and Spokane and streaming on Prime Video across Washington, Oregon and Alaska.
The Indianapolis NBC-MeTV affils will air select Fever games following the Fever’s historic 2024 draft of Caitlin Clark.
Both Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are actively in talks with the NBA, and those discussions will continue past April 22, when the exclusive window expires.
Amazon, NBCUniversal, Netflix, YouTube TV and Apple have all expressed preliminary interest in talks with the NBA about potentially buying a package of games as a new partner.
Warner Bros. Discovery has acquired television rights to the Bellator Championship Series mixed martial arts franchise, adding to its lineup of live sports content. Max will stream Bellator’s first event under the new deal on March 22 from Belfast, one of eight Bellator Championship Series events taking place during the year, according to WBD. Each event will take place from various locations around the world and highlight the best fighters from each region.
Financial terms were not announced Tuesday, but as previously reported the new six-year agreement will pay the CFP and participating conferences $1.3 billion annually. An agreement in principle between the CFP and ESPN was reached weeks ago, but first the college conferences that participate in the playoff had to sign a deal to continue their partnership for another six years. That agreement and a new revenue-sharing plan was finalized last week.
Exclusives
The racing league and streaming tech company aim to grow the sport by, in part, pointing to other’s outlets broadcasting the events.
All Friday night games during the remainder of the 2023-24 regular season will be available for free, over the air via Griffin stations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa as well as other regional stations.
The agreement, which was contained in a court filing made Wednesday, is subject to court approval. Diamond Sports has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of Texas since it filed for protection in March. The company said in a financial filing last year that it had debt of $8.67 billion.
The new media rights deal is worth $7.7 billion when the previously announced $1.1 billion agreement with The CW is included. NASCAR did not reveal monetary figures at the news conference held at the Music City Center one day before its season-ending awards ceremony.
Clark will report to Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive vice president of media and business development. The 40-year-old will oversee distribution agreements for local media, the MLB Network, MLB.TV and the Extra Innings cable package.
While Major League Baseball’s owners stole the headlines this week when they voted to approve the Oakland Athletics’ move to Las Vegas, the cogs behind another potentially transformative development for the sport churned away in a Houston courtroom. Judge Christopher Lopez of the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas approved a deal between Diamond Sports and the NBA teams whose games it is under contract to broadcast on its Bally Sports networks. In the process of petitioning the judge to approve that pact, a lawyer for bankrupt Diamond Sports suggested the company hopes to come to a similar agreement with the 12 MLB teams whose games it is still contractually obligated to broadcast. But lawyers for both Diamond Sports’s parent company, Sinclair, and MLB raised concerns with the NBA deal, centered on its effect on the company’s ability to pay for its baseball obligations, even through next season.
The new distribution will provide NWSL fans viewing across linear and streaming each weekend. The four-year partnerships total a 40x multiple from NWSL’s previous deal.
The agreement, which was contained in a court filing made Monday, is subject to court approval. Diamond Sports has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of Texas since it filed for protection in March. While there will be a reduction in rights payments for some teams, the local rights for 15 franchises will revert back to those teams and the league at the end of this season. The NBA is also on the verge of beginning negotiations for national rights, which expire after the 2024-25 season.
The Rip City Remix of the NBA G League have announced Gray Television’s MNT affiliate KPDX Portland, Ore. (Fox 12 Plus) as its official broadcast partner, making all Remix home games accessible to fans for […]
The league’s longtime television partners, including ESPN and Turner, are undergoing major changes, which could alter how games are watched.
Numerous franchises are expected to overhaul their local media deals, returning games to free networks. The transition is underway in Arizona.
Scripps will televise all locally broadcast Coyotes games over the air to residents of Arizona and surrounding states within the team’s broadcast territory.
Bankrupt broadcaster Diamond Sports, the nation’s largest regional sports network, has made a take-it-or-leave-it offer to cut rights fees to the NHL and NBA in a last-ditch bid to avoid liquidation. Diamond proposed cutting the fees to both leagues by up to 20% ahead of a bankruptcy court-imposed Sept. 30 deadline, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said Thursday.
Amazon.com Inc. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. are competing to broadcast a new package of Nascar races, with the league trying to boost its overall revenue by bringing in more media partners. The companies are vying with a third broadcaster for a package of between six and eight races during the summer months, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations.
The Pac-12 conference is considering an offer from Apple for streaming rights that would kick in when its current TV contract ends. But it may be too little, too late.
The network will broadcast all NASCAR Xfinity Series races starting in 2025: 33 race weekends per year.
Sinclair’s bankrupt regional sports networks subsidiary Diamond Sports Group has rendered a payment to the Cleveland Guardians, ensuing that the Major League Baseball team will remain on Bally Sports Great Lakes through July. The payment, first reported by Crain’s Cleveland Business, only temporarily suspends the drama surrounding the local TV rights for a handful of MLB teams.
The Jazz announced Tuesday that they will air games on KJZZ Salt Lake City starting in the upcoming 2023-24 season. The independent station owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group will broadcast all non-nationally televised Jazz games for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the team will establish a new media arm called SEG Media that will sell subscriptions to a direct-to-consumer streaming service for fans to watch games over the internet, which also promises to deliver “unprecedented access” to the team with “behind-the-scenes” footage.
Judge Christopher Lopez made the ruling on Thursday in Houston. Diamond Sports, which owns 19 networks under the Bally Sports banner, has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of Texas since it filed in March. Diamond said in a financial filing last fall it had debt of $8.67 billion.
Diamond Sports, the owner of the 19 Bally Sports regional sports networks, next week could forego its broadcast rights to the San Diego Padres by failing to deliver its regular rights payment to the team. A Texas bankruptcy court judge has set a May 31 hearing to rule on Diamond’s motion to reduce its payments to the teams.
The Texas bankruptcy court overseeing Diamond Sports Group’s restructuring says the NBA franchise must first try to negotiate a new deal with Sinclair’s regional sports network subsidiary.
Scripps will air NHL Golden Knights games on its KMCC Las Vegas station, which is currently airing programming from Ion, Scripps’ national entertainment network. A rebranded KMCC will broadcast local and national news, local sports and additional entertainment programming.
Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group subsidiary has paid the Cincinnati Reds the initial payment for the team’s 2023 local TV rights, within a mandated 15-day grace period after the April 17 due date, keeping the MLB club on regional sports network Bally Sports Ohio.
Diamond Sports Group, which runs the Bally Sports regional sports networks, said that the agreement the NBA’s Phoenix Suns announced today to have games broadcast on TV stations owned by Gray Television breaches its contract with the team and violates bankruptcy law.
The “transformative rights deal” will bring every game free, over-the-air with statewide distribution.
Executives from the Las Vegas Golden Knights NHL franchise, Scripps Sports and leading sports rights analysts will weigh in on the leagues’ TV future in a highly fluid rights environment in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 16. Register here.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The long-running fight between the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals over television rights fees reached New York’s highest court Tuesday when a lawyer for the Orioles […]
Looking at the trouble regional sports networks are having getting distributors to pay for local sports and at CBS affiliates pulling their local feeds from vMVPD FuboTV, Lightshed partners analyst Rich Greenfield is questioning whether the retransmission gravy train for TV broadcasters has left the station.
The sports streaming market is poised for continued growth in 2023, with SVOD services expected to spend $8.5 billion globally on sports rights, according to new data from Ampere Analysis. The rise in spend — a 64% increase from $5.2 billion in 2022 — is indicative of more general entertainment services leveraging live sports to stand out from other streaming competitors. The NFL’s multi-year deals with Amazon and YouTube arguably shifted the tide for sports streaming, Ampere noted, as both agreements represent the largest signed sports streaming deals to-date.
