Gray Television, which will air a package of five Cleveland Cavalier basketball games on two Ohio stations this season, said it made deals with Nexstar Media Group, Cox Media Group and Tegna to put the games on additional stations in Ohio.
Mortensen announced in 2016 that he he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Even while undergoing treatment, he was the first to confirm the retirement of Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning.
“This is a very important process. We are sticking to our principles, to our guns,” David Gandler told analysts Friday.
Top station group executives see deeper fragmentation and more strain on the network-affiliate relationship as upshots of a new joint venture sports streaming service announced earlier this month by Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney. This story is available to TVNewsCheck Plus subscribers only. Become a subscriber here.
The NFL isn’t just the most popular sports league in the U.S., it’s also the most valuable with the highest-rated programming and the priciest ad time. In 2021 the league signed an estimated $110 billion worth of media deals covering 11 years, which reportedly was nearly double the value of its previous contracts. With tech giants Alphabet and Amazon, along with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, snapping up digital rights to NFL games, and with the announcement this week that Disney’s ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery are launching a streaming service tailored to sports fans, it’s clear that streaming is poised to be the NFL’s next frontier, despite some backlash from fans.
Weigel & Morgan Murphy’s WISC To Bring Milwaukee Bucks Games Back To Free Over-The-Air TV In Madison
Ten games will be available on WISC’s 3.1 and 3.2 channels beginning Feb. 23.
Exclusives
Local broadcast station groups plummeted in value this week after Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox announced they will be launching a new joint venture focused on sports fans. However, according to EW Scripps CEO Adam Symson, says Wall Street is overestimating the new product’s popularity, saying investors appear to be pricing in that local ABC and Fox affiliates wouldn’t be part of the new skinnier bundle. They will be included, he said, citing assurances he’s been given in conversations with Disney executives. “Affiliates are going to be compensated for being carried along,” Symson said.
Dismissing Bally Sports’ big Amazon-fueled restructuring plan, Manfred told MLB owners this week that all he needs are the digital rights to 14 teams to make it happen.
One of the biggest moments for advertisers interested in the Super Bowl isn’t actually in the Super Bowl itself. FanDuel and YouTube are trying to make a big splash in the moments just before the Big Game, hoping that commercials in the last break before kick-off will help them make a marketing point before consumers get deluged with 30-second spots — along with celebrity cameos and pop-song surprises – once the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers start their struggling in earnest.
Ten games will be available on WQAD’s 8.3 subchannel beginning Feb. 23.
Florida Panthers, the NHL team based in the Greater Miami area, has transformed its production workflows with the adoption of storage systems and management tools from EditShare. The new system […]
NAGRAVISION, the digital TV division of the Kudelski Group, and the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media organizations, today announced a partnership to deliver and operate Eurovision Sport, a […]
Less than a month after Nick Saban retired from his post at Alabama, ESPN announced Wednesday the legendary football coach will be joining the network’s College GameDay cast as an analyst. He will also contribute to the company’s NFL Draft coverage and make appearances on SEC Network. (Kyusung Gong/AP)
Professional sports leagues including the National Football League and National Basketball Association were kept in the dark about the new sports-centric streaming service being launched by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, people familiar with the matter said. The companies involved in the effort are media partners of both leagues. Pro basketball and football programming will be among the significant drivers of the new service.
Disney says the sports giant is targeting a fall 2025 launch for the platform.
Wall Street analysts break down the plan by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox to launch a joint streaming venture that has rights to the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and NCAA March Madness basketball.
The announcement that ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery were forming a new sports streaming venture sent shares of sports-oriented Fubo spiraling downward. Fubo stock was down 25% to $1.88 a share in Wednesday morning trading.
The broadcaster’s Diamond Sports Group got tripped up by cord cutting, COVID and battles with MLB over streaming, leaving an opening for the tech giant.
The three companies will each share one-third ownership in the joint venture. A name for the service and pricing will be announced later. The platform will include games from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, NASCAR and college sports, including the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament, as well as golf, tennis and the FIFA World Cup.
Americans Will Lose If Streamers Monopolize Live Sports
Emily Barr: Yesterday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on the future of sports media in the streaming era. This conversation could hardly be more urgent, coming just a few weeks after Comcast/NBC took the unprecedented step of putting an NFL playoff game behind a paywall on Peacock, its streaming platform.
The move into college-level and progressional sports is as part of a larger strategy shift for CW under owner Nexstar Media Group. The agreement calls for Range Sports, a unit of management-production startup Range Media Partners, to work with CW Sports and Nexstar brass on new sports-related programs and branded content as well as to advise on rights deals on the national level and in local markets for CW affiliates.
Fox’s Sunday broadcast is its biggest for the conference title matchup in more than a decade. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Ten games during the remainder of 2023-24 season will air on WMLW with the debut scheduled for February.
NBCUniversal‘s Peacock deal to exclusively stream the NFL‘s AFC Wild Card matchup between the Kansas City Chief and the Miami Dolphins delivered an end-zone spiking TD for the streamer, according to new data. NBCU already claimed the Jan. 13 playoff game was the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history — delivering an average audience of 23 million viewers. While NBCU didn’t quantify the lift in Peacock subscriptions the game yielded, a new report from research firm Antenna puts a number on it: Peacock saw a total of 2.8 million sign-ups over NFL Wild Card Game weekend. According to Antenna, that makes the Chiefs-Dolphins game the single biggest subscriber acquisition event it has ever measured.
ESPN faces an existential crisis as it seeks to secure a streaming future while the cable TV bundle is in terminal decline. Its solution: Ask sports leagues if they want to buy a stake in the network. Among a bevy of conflict of interest questions, the “worldwide leader in sports” being partially owned by a major professional sports league would shatter any wall between business and editorial.
Combined with the Mavericks games already slated to air as part of the NBA on ABC between now and the end of the season, Mavericks’ fans across Dallas-Fort Worth will now have access to 13 free over-the-air games in the span of 11 weeks.
The cuts are arriving after Arena Group Holdings failed to make a licensing payment to Authentic Brands Group, according to a securities filing.
Warner Bros. Discovery has rebranded its U.S. sports division, which has rights to the NBA, NHL and MLB, as well as March Madness basketball.
The 2023 Pacific Games in the Solomon Islands were successfully broadcast live to viewers in numerous participating countries and beyond using LiveU’s IP-video EcoSystem. LiveU says its technology was selected […]
Walt Disney Co. and the National Football League are said to be in earnest talks, according to two people familiar with the matter, that could have the league take a stake in ESPN while putting its NFL Media unit, which the sports body has been trying to monetize in better fashion, under the media company’s control. Such a move would further align Disney with the NFL, making it difficult for the company to lose valuable sports rights to show top-rated football games, and could put such NFL assets as the NFL Network and RedZone under Disney’s aegis.
The first exclusively streaming playoff game boosts the debut of the Ted series on NBCUniversal’s streamer.
New York governor Kathy Hochul announced Saturday that Sunday’s Pittsburgh Steelers-Buffalo Bills playoff game schedulled for 1 p.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+ will be rescheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET on Monday, thanks to the massive winter storm hitting the area. The game had originally been scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Sunday.
The tech giant is betting that new sports, new products and new audiences can grow its live sports ad biz.
Saturday night’s game will be shown on Peacock after NBCUniversal won the rights last May. The game will be broadcast on the NBC affiliates in Kansas City and Miami, following the NFL’s protocol for Thursday night games streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Everyone else will have to pay for a Peacock subscription — plans start at $5.99 per month — to watch the game, and some fans are less than thrilled about the NFL putting a playoff game behind a paywall for the first time.
Since at least 2010, ESPN inserted fake names in Emmy entries, then took the awards won by some of those imaginary individuals, had them re-engraved and gave them to on-air personalities. There is no evidence that the on-air individuals were aware the Emmys given to them were improperly obtained.
