sports

A day after announcing it would drop Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional sports networks, YouTube TV said last Friday night that it agreed to a temporary extension and that negotiations continue.

Baseball fans who also subscribe to YouTube TV got some bad news today when YouTube TV announced it will drop all Sinclair-owned Fox regional sports networks on Feb. 29. The announcement means fans in several markets — including New York, where the Yankees’ YES Network will be going away — will not be able to catch their favorite teams on YouTube TV. YouTube TV tweeted it was “unable to reach an agreement with Sinclair” to continue carrying Fox’s RSNs.

The XFL didn’t put up nearly as good a fight in its second round of games, with Vince McMahon’s NFL alternative losing more than 1 million viewers — per game — in Week 2. Once again, three games aired on broadcast and one on cable.

ESPN and Fox Sports had to come together if the heavyweight showdown between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury at the MGM Grand hotel this Saturday was to happen. And it’s also true that both networks are blanketing the airwaves this week like never before in an effort to get people to dig into their pockets for the $79.99 it will cost to watch the fight at home.

Nothing but net as advertisers snatch up the last of the tourney’s ad inventory a full month before tipoff.

AT&T’s auction to sell four regional sports networks appears to be faltering — the latest sign that the business of airing local sports is in trouble as Americans continue to cut their ties with cable. The wireless giant has received multiple bids for its group of four sports channels covering markets around Seattle, Denver, Pittsburgh and Houston — but all of them came in around or below $500 million for the lot, significantly short of expectations estimated to be around $1 billion.

The NFL has worked in recent years to take some commercials out of America’s favorite game. The XFL is experimenting with new ways to push them in. Anyone who watched the new league’s St. Louis BattleHawks triumph over the Dallas Renegades in its first week of official play might have noticed ads for Bud Light Seltzer affixed to the helmets of the Texas home team. It’s a placement two more established sports leagues — the National Football League and Major League Baseball — have avoided, at least up until this point.

Video streaming service Deltatre is nearing a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group to be the digital video provider for the 21 regional sports networks that the broadcaster bought last year from Walt Disney Co., according to two people familiar with the talks.

The NBA All-Star Game on TNT will include a commercial-free fourth quarter as part of a new format aimed at honoring the late Kobe Bryant. The sportscast will air on WarnerMedia’s TNT at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday, Feb. 16.

The football league delivered some of the biggest audiences for sports programming on Feb. 8 and 9, with three of its four games outdrawing every NBA and college basketball telecast in the previous week. The numbers are a far cry from what the NFL brings in — and from the opening game of the previous XFL incarnation 19 years ago — but put the league on steady footing at the outset.

Ratings may be down for the NBA this season, but ad sales for the league’s All-Star Game remain strong. According to Jon Diament, executive VP and chief revenue officer at Turner Sports, commercials for this year’s All-Star Weekend in Chicago sold out faster than ever before at prices that were “significantly higher” than in past years.

The National Football League is concerned that a revolution may be at hand with respect to the way that its games get televised to millions of fans. On Friday, pointing to how teams currently pool TV rights and then license packages to distributors, the league asked the Supreme Court to review an antitrust case with the potential of upsetting an arrangement that has served the league for more than a quarter century.

Advertisers have been slow to the table to support the newly-revived XFL league, which kicks off this weekend. Interest is finally stirring, according to ESPN and ABC, but uncertain audience engagement and the memory of past alternative pro-football league failures cast a shadow over its prospects.

Fox Sports‘ coverage of Super Bowl LIV included a new graphics package with an emphasis on stats and an illustrated twist.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said on Sunday that his organization is “very open to changing packages, very open to changing partners” when it comes to negotiating media contracts that will expire in the next few years.

NFL regular-season games — from September to November — witnessed a nearly 9% increase in 30-second commercial unit rates, according to Standard Media Index. In addition, the NFL overall had 10% higher TV advertising revenue during that period.

When CBS Sports closes out its NFL season with Sunday’s Tennessee Titans–Kansas City Chiefs AFC Championship matchup, it will mark the conclusion of one the network’s most technologically innovative campaigns. From the addition of Field Eye (Line-to-Gain camera technology) to an increase in high-speed cameras to more live aerial shots, the CBS Sports team has significantly boosted its NFL production complement this year and will lift equipment levels even higher for its largest production of the year on Sunday in Kansas City.

The audience for the game, in which LSU defeated the defending champion Clemson 42-21 to complete the team’s undefeated season, was up 3% from last year’s Alabama-Clemson CFP National Championship telecast, which drew 24.3 million viewers, according to ESPN.

Monday night wasn’t the best of nights for the ESPN app. The much anticipated National Championship game between Clemson and LSU was malfunctioning on ESPN streaming services for most of the first half. Numerous fans took to social media to complain that when they logged into both ESPN+ and the ESPN app to access the game, they were met with an error message.

After 40 years as the voice of college hoops on ESPN, Dick Vitale seems to be just getting started. “I want to do this until I’m 100!” he says.