sports

If Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group doesn’t pay Cincinnati’s MLB team by Friday, the club is set to broadcast its own games starting Saturday vs. the White Sox on a new channel. The Reds have handshake agreements with Charter Communications, the dominant cable TV supplier in the Cincinnati DMA, as well as DirecTV.

Comcast subscribers aren’t able to view NFL Network after the cable company pulled the channel when its carriage agreement expired.

The move comes two days after the conclusion of the NFL draft.

Trying to forecast when ESPN will go entirely online is one of the great guessing games of the media industry.

The regional sports network model failed for Sinclair Broadcast Group, with a nearly $10 billion investment by the company evaporating in less than four years. But in proof of the adage Wall Street is always looking forward, not backward, the company’s shares are surging, driven in part by enthusiasm over strides the company has made in distribution of its Tennis Channel and sister network T2. With a 30% gain last month, Sinclair stock led all components of the Sportico Sports Stock Index. Overall, the index, which tracks 40 U.S.-traded stocks to gauge the state of the sports business, barely moved in April, closing down one point to finish at 1,165. While that lags the 1.5% gain of the S&P 500 Index last month, sports stocks are still up 11% in 2023, besting the 9% gain of the broader market index.

The “transformative rights deal” will bring every game free, over-the-air with statewide distribution.

After landing a deal to broadcast WNBA games Friday nights nationally on Ion, the E.W. Scripps Co. is looking for more sports leagues and teams to put on its national networks and local stations. “If we found another league that was the right fit and intersected so well with the demographics that we have on Ion, there’s room for more,” Scripps CEO Adam Symson says. And Scripps is also monitoring the regional sports networks situation.

For the last two years, LIV Golf has rivaled the PGA Tour. It started during the inaugural season, where LIV Golf spent over $800 million to lure some of golf’s biggest names like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, and more to the Saudi-backed league. Since then LIV Golf has tried to run its own league with a different setup and format than the PGA Tour. The format has guaranteed fields, no cuts, only 54 holes (three rounds), lucrative purses, team play, and more. While LIV Golf has definitely made some noise, it’s struggled with viewership numbers.

E.W. Scripps has scored the first rights deal for its nascent sports division with the women’s basketball league, where Friday night games will begin airing on its Ion stations on May 26. Pictured: WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Scripps CEO Adam Symson.

Ted Leonsis, owner of three Washington-based professional sports franchises, offered more than $2 billion to buy the Washington Nationals from the Lerner family late last year, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. It’s not clear whether the Lerners rejected the offer or simply did not respond to it, though one person with direct knowledge of the process said the parties have remained in touch.

ESPN will begin layoffs early next week as part of parent company Disney’s cost cutting efforts, according to people familiar with the matter. Cuts will include some on-air talent and management, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. The number of layoffs at ESPN is unclear and the decision process is still fluid.

Dan Snyder is nearing a $6 billion sale to a group that includes private equity founder Josh Harris, billionaire titan Mitchell Rales plus NBA legend Magic Johnson, according to multiple reports. The finalization of a sale would mark the end of a beleaguered tenure for Snyder, who purchased the team in 1999, and has presided over a franchise that in aggregate performed poorly on the field and had one scandal after another within the organization.

The $20 million round was led by venture firm Sapphire Sport. New athlete investors include tennis player Nick Kyrgios, football player Myles Garrett and basketball star Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures. It brings the company’s total funding to more than $44 million.

Major League Baseball has asked a federal court overseeing the bankruptcy case involving Sinclair Inc.’s Diamond Sports Group to terminate the broadcaster’s rights to games played by the Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins if it does not make an immediate payment connected to licensing rights.

YouTube revealed the highly anticipated details of its new streaming plan for NFL Sunday Ticket on Tuesday, providing a win for fans who were shut out of the programming when it was aired by DirectTV by making the service available to anyone with web access. But it’s a win that comes at a hefty cost: The price for the out-of-market football game service is rising, the Google-owned YouTube said in a blog post. Fast-acting fans can get a $100 discount if they sign up for the service before June 6.

The Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins appear to be the latest Major League Baseball teams forsaken by Bally Sports, as the bankrupt regional sports network owner restructures and seeks to walk away from its most unprofitable TV contracts with pro sports teams.

The field at this season’s first PGA major is already being reshaped by the tumult in the golf world — and it foreshadows more drastic effects to come.

DirecTV for Business has reached an agreement with Amazon Prime Video to distribute 20 Yankees games to bars, restaurants and other commercial venues across the baseball team’s home footprint. The Yankees’ home regional territory covers New York state, Connecticut, north and central New Jersey, and northeast Pennsylvania. DirecTV for Business customers will get access to the games for the 2023 season via their existing satellite equipment. DirecTV said it will make the games, which were previously exclusively available only on Prime Video, available to “thousands of sports bars, restaurants and other public places” without disclosing a specific number.

Even in an uncertain national TV marketplace, NBCUniversal says its advertising sales for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics are outpacing the previous Tokyo Summer Games. During a press conference on Tuesday, Dan Lovinger, president of Olympics/LA 2028 ad and sponsorship sales for NBCUniversal, said: “While still very early, I can report we are pacing well ahead at the same point in time of the recent summer games in Tokyo [which aired in the summer of 2023].”

The regional sports network home of the Yankees and Nets can now be streamed for as little as $16.66 a month without a pay TV subscription.

National Football League owners were unable to approve a plan to “flex” games to create better matchups for Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football and tabled discussions until May. The league and Amazon want to prevent poor matchups in primetime and a proposal would have allowed games to be moved from Sunday to Thursday with 15 days notice.

Bryant Gumbel’s career has spanned more than 50 years on NBC, CBS and HBO. He has hosted Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO since 1995. It has received 36 Sports Emmys. “It’s very humbling. I’ve been a fortunate, lucky guy,” said Gumbel, who is the first Black journalist to receive the award. “It makes you stop and take stock. You take a look at the guys who I admire a great deal who received this award, people like Vin Scully, Jim McKay and Howard Cosell. You never want to put yourself in their company, but it’s heady stuff.”

With the integration of the DTC service, Fubo is aggressively marketing its virtual pay TV service as the destination for live baseball ahead of Opening Day.