sports

The National Basketball Association is having what it terms “exploratory conversations” with the Walt Disney Co. about resuming its postponed season. The league issued a statement Saturday on its Twitter account. If the talks bear fruit, the season would resume in late July at Disney’s ESPN complex in Orlando, Fla., as a “single site for an NBA campus for games, practices, and housing,” the statement said.

After a towering rating success on the Michael Jordan 10-part documentary The Last Dance, ESPN is working with Tom Brady and Religion of Sports on Man In The Arena, a nine-episode multi-platform series coming in 2021. It will be Brady’s first-hand account of the most iconic moments of his NFL career.

As the bankrupt XFL looks for a buyer, the buyer could be its founder. XFL creditors “seem to believe” McMahon is positioning to buy the league out of bankruptcy. Separately, XFL President Jeffrey Pollack has contacted stadiums in Seattle and St. Louis about reinstating the league’s lease agreements.

Network executives knew the first weekend with multiple live events would draw good numbers but for the most part they exceeded expectations. The Bundesliga’s return drew record numbers on Fox Sports 1, Saturday night’s UFC card on ESPN was one of the top shows on cable television and Sunday’s NASCAR race on Fox was the most-viewed non-Daytona race in three years.

ESPN shot up a documentary that it believed would score big with audiences. How did it work out? In the words of ESPN NBA announcer Mike Breen: “Bang!” The Last Dance — ESPN’s 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls — was a smashing success for the network. It was critically acclaimed, generally adored by sports fans if Twitter is the judge and a ratings success. The original airings of all 10 episodes averaged 5.6 million viewers, making The Last Dance the most-watched documentary ever on ESPN.

In the early moments of the annual game to lure advertisers to the Super Bowl, ViacomCBS is first and long.

Signing 60 to 70 automakers, snack manufacturers and tech marketers to sponsor the biggest TV event of the year is never an easy task. But doing so will be tougher for the newly-merged media conglomerate, owing to a coronavirus pandemic that has thrown the sports business into disarray and forced advertisers to tighten their purse strings. ViacomCBS, which has the rights to broadcast the extravaganza in 2021, will have to reassure would-be Big Game sponsors about the NFL’s ability to mount a new season even as it tries to get the best prices possible.

The first live sports events on network TV in more than two months delivered strong ratings Sunday. Fox’s telecast of a NASCAR race in Darlington, S.C., delivered 6.32 million viewers, a 38 percent jump over the previous race on March 8. Like other major pro sports leagues, NASCAR shut down in mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic. NBC also brought back live sports Sunday with a golf event, TaylorMade Driving Relief. Numbers for the four-man skins match, featuring Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff, weren’t available at publication time.

Synamedia is helping pay TV operators, telcos, and media companies change how they deliver, protect and monetize their content. In this interview, the company’s broadcast solutions manager, Mark Myslinski, highlights how NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) will be a game changer for the consumption of live sports, in particular with stand-out video quality, immersive audio, and uncontested broadband broadcast.

“I can’t think of a single player move ever that adjusted requests and turned the process upside down as much as this,” said Fox Sports SVP Michael Mulvihill about Brady signing with Tampa Bay. “I think the league treated everyone well with Tampa Bay because they knew how great everyone’s interest was. It was a significant curveball.”

The NFL released its 2020 schedule on Thursday, which came with a massive asterisk due to the uncertainty surrounding live sports amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs will tentatively kick off the season on Thursday, Sept. 10, against the Houston Texans.

The NFL canceled its international games for the upcoming season, announcing Monday that it intends to play all games in the United States. The league made the change as it continues to plan for the 2020 season amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. The NFL said it made the switch “in order for the entire season to be played in NFL teams’ stadia under consistent protocols focused on the well-being of players, personnel and fans.”

The Walt Disney-owned sports-media giant, scrambling to fill its programming grid as most major U.S. sports leagues have suspended play, said it had struck a deal with Eclat Media Group to show six live 2020 regular-season games per week from the KBO League, South Korea’s baseball organization. One game will air each day, Tuesday through Sunday, generally on ESPN2 and on the ESPN App — but the telecasts will air in wee-morning hours, owing to the time difference between the U.S. and South Korean.

Tens of millions of people are paying for basketball, hockey and baseball that isn’t being played. The Attorney General of New York this week demanded cable and satellite operators stop charging customers for live sports programs. Many of those companies, including Charter and Comcast, have said they would love to provide a refund. There’s just one problem: they are still paying for sports too.

The NFL and Amazon have inked a multi-year extension to their Thursday Night Football deal, which sees the digital giant stream 11 games throughout the season. First signed back in 2017 and extended in 2018, the agreement sees Amazon show the games on digital via Prime Video and Twitch, with Fox retaining broadcast (plus showing in Spanish on Fox Deportes) and NFL Network handling cable.

Each day attracted record audiences. Thursday’s first round averaged 15.6 million, Friday’s second and third rounds 8.2 million and Saturday’s final four rounds 4.2 million. ESPN and NFL Network had a combined production all three days while ABC had separate telecasts Thursday and Friday before simulcasting the ESPN/NFL Network feed Saturday. ESPN Deportes also had a separate broadcast.

Many of Fox Sports’ on-air anchors and analysts will take a temporary pay cut, largely in tandem with compensation decreases among top executives at parent company Fox Corp.,  which is, like many other media conglomerates, grappling with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on operations.

Demand for advertising space during the NFL draft broadcast has reached unprecedented levels due to the growing popularity of the event and a lack of other live sports opportunities, Disney Advertising Sales said this week. The COVID-19 pandemic has wiped out most of the U.S. sports calendar, but the three-day draft will go forward in a “virtual” format, with players participating from home, and be broadcast on Disney-owned ABC and ESPN starting on Thursday.

The shutdown of sports due to the coronavirus pandemic is propelling a historic decline in U.S. TV advertising: Sales could be down by as much as $10 billion in the first half of the year. The projection, released Monday in a new report by digital research firm EMarketer, illustrates the financial pain facing U.S. broadcasters, particularly ESPN, CBS, Turner and NBC, which rely on live sports to boost their ratings and advertising hauls.

Sports rights are expected to go higher in the next three years despite pressure from COVID-19, possibly driving increased retransmission-consent fees and pushing poorer homes out of the pay TV bundle.

Horse racing is one of the few sports ongoing, albeit in a limited capacity at a handful of empty tracks, but its TV presence has expanded because of the dearth of other options. The New York Racing Association helps produce America’s Day at the Races on Fox Sports, TVG has partnered with NBC Sports for a dozen hours of coverage each week and the hope is the struggling industry can stay afloat and gain more exposure during these trying times.

While there are no more live sports, the genre’s most die-hard audiences haven’t abandoned television, according to new Nielsen data. Instead, they are spending more time than ever watching TV, branching into several other genres — and still keeping a regular diet of sports content as well.

Costs are inhibiting a flood of 4K sports production, but 1080p HDR offers numerous practical advantages, among them that the improvement in picture quality is more readily apparent to consumers than the gain from 4K resolution. Above, Sony tested an 8K camera at the Sony Open in Hawaii last year, but doesn’t expect 8K to be used for regular sports production for several years.

The rapid postponement or cancellation of most sports due to the coronavirus pandemic means technicians who were booked for events through the spring and summer now have an open calendar. Besides audio technicians, those affected include camera operators, stage managers and producers.

The April 23-25 draft was originally scheduled to be in Las Vegas but has been moved due to the coronavirus pandemic. It will now originate from ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn. Draft hosts and a limited number of commentators will be in-studio but will adhere to social distancing guidelines.