sports

Amazon on Wednesday announced that it’s adding the MLB.TV streaming service to its Prime Video Channels lineup, giving users the ability to sign up for the service on Amazon’s platform.

CBS and the three Turner networks — TNT, TBS and TruTV — have sold 95% of the ad inventory in the 67 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship tournament games at a cost-per-thousand 5% to 6% higher than last year. Advertisers love the tournament and the nets love to offer it. While neither CBS nor Turner executives will comment on how much total advertising the three weeks of televised games brings in, it will likely top $1 billion.

The conference will focus on the business of sports and entertainment with C-suite executives from NPR, Univision, MGM, Entertainment Studios, Facebook and Ticketmaster, among others.

It remains unclear whether Manning is interested in pursuing a career as an analyst at this time.

NBC Sports Group and Sky Sports are set to announce on Monday that they are planning the most extensive television coverage ever of the Players Championship golf tournament, their biggest collaborative foray on sports coverage since Comcast took over Sky last fall.

The NFL and some of the media companies that broadcast some of its most-watched matches have considered the idea of shaking up the Sunday-afternoon packages that regularly air on CBS and Fox, according to two people familiar with the matter. Under one idea broached, the two networks could get to air packages that include games from both the NFC and AFC, as opposed to the current system, which keeps the NFC on Fox and the AFC on CBS. The talks are extremely preliminary, one of these people cautions, and may not come to fruition.

With February’s Daytona 500 ratings dipping slightly to a record low and the expectation that viewership for the rest of weekly races will also continue its downward trend, Fox and NBC are struggling to sell advertising this season, according to ad buyers.

For nearly four decades, Bob Costas was the face and voice of NBC Sports, covering nearly every major league and event. His time in the spotlight, from the early nineteen-eighties to this past year, coincided with the network’s glory years, when NBC’s Olympics package insured that Costas was the most recognizable face of those games. He talks about his long career at NBC, the terms of his departure, and the power of the NFL in dictating television content.

With viewer interest in college and NFL football surging, NBC Sports Group is adding a high-profile showcase for high school players to its portfolio, acquiring the All-American Bowl from All American Games LLC. NBC has broadcast the annual contest held at the Alamodome in San Antonio since 2004.

The way we watch TV shows and movies has been forever transformed by mobile devices and the video-on-demand industry. But another surprising consequence of these developments is that the way people consume sports content is also dramatically shifting. This change may raise concerns about the future of sports media, but it actually points to countless new opportunities to engage fans in new ways — and to create a more seamless viewer experience.

The sale of the nearly two dozen of the Fox regional sports networksOpens a New Window. hampered by lowball bids, confusion over the ownership of digital rights and overly optimistic expectations by bankers on the final sales price may now be further delayed as billionaire businessman Arturo “Arte” Moreno, the owner of the Los Angeles Angels, has indicated that he would like to purchase as many as four of the RSNs.

Fans of Liverpool and Manchester City are set to watch this season’s Premier League title race from “inside the game”, even through the eyes of players, thanks to the latest in broadcasting innovation. True View, used in TV coverage of Sunday’s Super Bowl and also to bring fans courtside in NBA, will allow 360-degree replays of all the key moments.

Liberty Media has joined the bidding for the regional sports networks that Disney is trying to sell to finalize a deal with Twenty-first Century Fox, sources told CNBC. Liberty and Major League Baseball have submitted bids in the auction. Disney is selling them in order to complete its $71 billion deal to acquire Fox’s movie production and television assets, which included the regional sports networks. That deal is expected to close within weeks.

According to industry sources close to the situation but who wished to remain anonymous, Disney-owned ESPN is actively in negotiations with Major League Baseball for an extension of its media rights to show live games. The deal would come on the heels of Fox reaching an extension that runs seven years and begins in 2022 for $5.1 billion. ESPN’s current agreement with MLB expires in 2021 and has a total value of $5.6 billion over an eight-year span.

As it has for the past two years, Yellow Tail will advertise nationally during the Super Bowl by buying local time on CBS stations across the country. The strategy has been a winner for the winery, but not a model that other national advertisers have followed.