sports

Tubi, Fox’s free, ad-supported streamer, has partnered with British streaming service DAZN to add new channels featuring live and recorded women’s football, or soccer, as its known in the U.S., as well as boxing and MMA.

The agreement would give the tech company worldwide rights for a monthlong World Cup-style competition between top teams set to take place next year.

The Indianapolis NBC-MeTV affils will air select Fever games following the Fever’s historic 2024 draft of Caitlin Clark.

A preliminary injunction hearing for Fubo’s legal battle against Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery’s sports streaming joint venture has been set for Aug. 7 at 9:30 a.m. by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The hearing will continue on Aug. 8 and Aug. 9, if necessary.

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.

The college basketball season may be over, but Caitlin Clark helped lead ESPN to one more audience record before going pro. The Iowa Hawkeyes superstar was the No. 1 pick in the WNBA Draft on Monday, and 2.45 million viewers tuned in to ESPN to watch her be selected by the Indiana Fever, according to Nielsen. This is a record-smashing audience for the WNBA draft, marking the first time that the event has ever tallied over a million viewers. The former record holder was the 2004 draft, which this year’s beat by 304%. Pictured: Clark with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert (Adam Hunger/AP).

In a letter sent Tuesday to the CEOs of the three companies, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) requested answers about the competitive implications of the proposed sports streaming JV. “As programmers, your companies exert tremendous influence over pricing across the live sports TV ecosystem,” Nadler and Castro wrote in the letter to Disney’s Bob Iger, Fox’s Lachlan Murdoch and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose 300th numbered pay-per-view fight card was last weekend, was once effectively banned on television because of its violence.

McManus, who turned 69 in February, started to consider retirement two years ago. With CBS carrying the Super Bowl this year along with the NCAA Tournament and the Masters, McManus and CBS President-CEO George Cheeks agreed the timing was right. David Berson, president of CBS Sports for over 10 years, is McManus’ hand-picked successor.

The run of season-ending races will start September 20 in the Xfinity Series Championship from Phoenix Raceway on Saturday, Nov. 9. NBC Sports will handle production, with Rick Allen serving as lead race announcer alongside analysts Jeff Burton and Steve Letarte, and NBC Sports VP of Motorsports Jeff Behnke in charge of production.

CBS will feature some high-profile soccer matches, with Barcelona playing Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) Tuesday, April 16, and Manchester City taking on Real Madrid Wednesday, April 17. Both matches are UEFA Champions League quarterfinals and will air on CBS and Paramount Plus at 2 p.m. ET on their respective days. Both matches will have the UEFA Champions League Today show on before, starting at 1:30 p.m. on CBS Sports Golazo Network, and 2 p.m. on CBS and Paramount Plus.

The Indiana Fever, which will most likely draft Clark with the No. 1 pick on Monday, appear on Disney networks eight times this season.

If TV is all about football these days, so are the Sports Emmys. The New York-based National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences revealed the nominations for its 45th annual Sports Emmy Awards, and the NFL Network’s NFL 360 led the pack with 11 nods — followed closely by the CBS and Nickelodeon coverage of this year’s Super Bowl, with 10. Also in the hunt: ESPN’s E60 doc series and Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football, with nine each.

NBCUniversal said it has sold $1.2 billion worth of advertising in the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, putting it on track to be the gold medal winner for most ad revenue ever generated by an Olympics Games. The revenue total includes about $350 million from new advertisers. Digital ad revenue has already set a record, the company said.

Tennis Channel’s Petko Unfiltered will be translated into Spanish using AI tech. Sinclair commits to responsible and transparent AI practices, joins authenticity and provenance organizations CAI and C2PA.

South Carolina defeated Iowa in front of a record-breaking national audience on Sunday. The NCAA Women’s Championship delivered 18.7M viewers across ABC and ESPN, which marks an 89% increase in viewership year-over-year. Not only is that the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record, the matchup is also the second most-watched non-Olympic women’s sporting event ever on U.S. television. It comes in behind only the 2015 Women’s World Cup Final, according to Nielsen data. Pictured: South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley cuts down the net after her team’s 87-75 victory. (Morry Gash/AP)

It’s a good time to be in the women’s sports business, and during the upcoming upfront, the E.W. Scripps Co. will be pushing its WNBA and NWSL franchise nights as a way to get more advertisers spending more money on Ion and its other television properties.

Stations have snapped up professional sports rights from struggling RSNs, but could find themselves edged out by direct-to-consumer streamers.

Whether it’s players’ and coaches’ wireless mics or BOLT6 LIDAR, technology pulls viewers in.

The Amazon-owned streaming service will televise 21 games, including the Championship Game of the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup.

The trimming at NFL Network continues as on-air personalities Melissa Stark, Andrew Siciliano, James Palmer and Will Selva are all out, according to an executive with direct knowledge of the moves.

ESPN‘s planned streaming product will be part of the Disney bundle when it launches in 2025. CEO Bob Iger said during recorded remarks at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting that the stand-alone ESPN streamer will be available through Disney+ for subscribers who bundle their Disney streaming services. He compared the ESPN integration into Disney+ to that of Hulu, which formally launched a week ago.

Preparing to complete what had seemed just last fall to be a highly unlikely successful bankruptcy restructuring, Diamond Sports Group on Wednesday announced a multiyear carriage renewal deal with what is now the largest pay TV operator in the U.S., Charter Communications.

The outsized audience for this week’s highly-watched women’s NCAA basketball match between Iowa and LSU may also have noticed that many of the commercials seen during the game belonged to AT&T, State Farm, Home Depot and Gatorade. There was good reason: Optimum Sports.

Uecker was back at the ballpark Tuesday handling play-by-play on the radio broadcast of Milwaukee’s game with the Minnesota Twins as team officials remained circumspect about the 90-year-old’s workload for the rest of the year. This will be Uecker’s 54th season broadcasting Brewers baseball, though he has limited himself to home games for the last several years. Pictured: Uecker acknowledges the crowd before the second inning of a baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Minnesota Twins Tuesday, April 2, in Milwaukee. (Morry Gash/AP)

Amid much commentary about the negative impact high-valued sports streaming initiatives could have on local TV stations and MVPDs there’s another much more optimistic view emerging from the ranks of several publicly traded station groups. In sharp contrast to those who feel threatened by sports rights owners’ surging embrace of streaming, these station owners contend they are making significant headway with opportunistic adjustments to the new reality.

The city of Oakland plans to present MLB‘s Athletics ownership with an offer to extend the team’s lease for five years, with an opt-out after three. The Athletics have announced plans to move the franchise to Las Vegas, where a proposed stadium is scheduled to be completed by 2028. The current Athletics lease in Oakland ends this season, leaving a substantial gap in their home schedule.

Fierce media rivals like ESPN and Fox Sports aren’t often eager to see the other do well. But the competitors may be cheering one another this weekend. Fox and ESPN will this weekend each broadcast two games from the new — depending on how one looks at it — UFL, a league that has been built out of the former USFL and its rival, the XFL.