sports

The All-Star Game picks that will remain private this time around may be televised as soon as next year, according to Golden State Warriors star and resident captain Stephen Curry. “Yeah, we’ve had a lot of discussion around that, and obviously there’s a lot of people in favor of watching [the selections] live, and there’s also people that understand the reasoning behind why it’s not this year.” Yet while NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been the spokesman on this issue, the reality is that the decision to keep the picks private was driven by the players.

Olympics veterans Bruce Beck, Brian Curtis, Katie Kim, JC Monahan, Kevin Nathan, Eun Yang and news anchors/reporters from 10 markets travel to South Korea to cover the XXIII Winter Olympics and deliver unique content across all station platforms including television, digital and social.

Michaels is set to join Pat Summerall as the only play-by-play announcers to call at least 10 Super Bowls when he works next weekend’s game in Minneapolis between New England and Philadelphia on NBC. The 73-year-old Michaels is in no hurry to give up the microphone on NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, which is on target to be television’s highest-rated show for a record seventh straight year, passing the mark set by American Idol.

Showtime has promoted Stephen Espinoza to president of its sports and event programming group. Espinoza has led the pay-TV channel to its current position as champion of the (televised) boxing world.

NBC is banking heavily on the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics since traditional TV ratings have slumped in recent years. Live sports are marquee TV events that draw most of the largest TV audiences, but even those ratings have declined. More Americans are dumping their cable packages — Comcast lost 33,000 video customers in the fourth quarter and 151,000 for all of 2017 — and advertisers are following consumers to their phones.

The 2018 NFC Championship game on Fox-owned WTXF Philadelphia (DMA 4) on Sunday outperformed the 2017 Super Bowl by an average of 3% among households and 6% among adults 25-54, […]

Marking another technological advancement for NBC Olympics, NBCUniversal’s comprehensive coverage of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea, will include the availability of 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR) to cable, satellite, telco providers, and other partners.

Surprisingly, only three TV networks — CBS, Fox and NBC — submitted formal bids for the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package, suggesting that the TV home for the much-criticized package could change next season.

CNN is shooting down reports that its president Jeff Zucker is a candidate to run the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN. Disney has been looking for a new top executive to run the beleaguered sports media giant since the sudden departure of John Skipper, who left the company Dec. 18 to deal with a drug addiction.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a string of announcements from nontraditional TV distributors highlighting their ambitions to capitalize on the shift from traditional TV to over-the-top distribution. Meanwhile, even the supposed “killer app” of traditional TV, the NFL, saw a second straight season of declining ratings. Taken together, these developments raise the question: What would it take for the NFL to follow in Disney’s footsteps and go direct-to-consumer?

Rates for a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl have climbed 87% since 2008 despite a significant uptick in the number of spots and the length of ad pods, according to an analysis by Kantar Media. Brands paid an average of $2.8 million for an ad in 2008, but last year that number exceeded $5 million.

For the first time, NBC will stream the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics live. While NBC has been quick to embrace online streaming in its coverage of Olympics sporting events, it has held back its coverage of the popular opening ceremonies, preferring instead to air them on a delay in prime time with commentary explaining the action.

Fox Sports Australia has added a second Calrec Artemis digital audio console at its Sydney headquarters, replacing a Calrec Zeta console that has delivered audio output since 2008. The Artemis […]

Verizon and the NBA have set an expanded, multi-year partnership that will allow U.S. fans to buy and stream live, out-of-market games via NBA League Pass on Yahoo Sports and other Verizon media platforms.

ABC will reportedly be among the networks submitting bids for Thursday Night Football television rights during the 2018 season. ABC could go up against CBS and NBC for the rights which, along with ESPN’s current Monday Night Football deal, would give parent company Disney a substantial stake in NFL distribution.

The overrun of the NFL matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints powered Fox’s Sunday lineup to substantial gains. The final portion of the game drew a 10.5 rating and 34.5 million viewers to Fox. Pending updates, each of Fox’s Sunday shows hit season highs. They are as follows: The Simpsons (3.5, 8.6 million), Bob’s Burgers (2.2, 5.1 million), Family Guy (1.7, 3.9 million) and The Last Man on Earth (1.3, 3.7 million). (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

He died Friday and no cause was given in a statement Saturday by ESPN. Jackson’s longtime employer was ABC Sports. Jackson covered many sports, but he was best known for college football. His signature phrases like “Whoa, Nelly!” gave his game calls a familiar feel.

NBC will present more than 50 hours of virtual-reality coverage from the 2018 Winter Olympics next month in South Korea — available live to viewers in the U.S. It will mark the first time that Olympic programming in VR will be delivered live in the U.S on a wide range of devices and platforms, and the first time that any Winter Olympics has been in VR.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that The decline in TV ratings for National Football League games accelerated in the recently completed 2017 regular season, though NFL games remain among the most-watched programming on television. The average audience for a game was 14.9 million this season, down 9.7% compared with 16.5 million viewers for the 2016 regular season, according to Nielsen. That is a steeper decline than the 8% viewership erosion last year. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.

DTC Domo Broadcast and VideoSys Broadcast teamed up to provide Arena TV with the first ultra-low delay wireless 4K camera transmitter system to be used for a live broadcast.   […]

Obsession with politics propelled news viewing, already a sizable portion of live and same-day TV universe, to a 12% gain in 2017 compared with 2016. Sports programming, once thought to be impervious, declined 6% last year even when the Rio Olympics are taken out of the year-to-year comparison. The findings are contained in a new report by Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

John Skipper cited “substance addiction” as the reason for abruptly stepping down in December, but both his actions before the announcement and Disney’s incentives to push him out suggest a different narrative, writes the author of an oral history of ESPN.

NFL continues to show signs of recovery, at least according to national TV advertising revenue. Through 15 weeks of the regular season to date, NFL programming has pulled in $3.7 billion for its TV networks: CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and the NFL Network, according to iSpot.tv.

The regular season’s final Sunday Night Football telecast has been scrapped, after the NFL shuffled the Dec. 31 schedule to, simply said, keep that NBC late game from possibly being meaningless.

Enberg got his big break with UCLA basketball and went on to call Super Bowls, Olympics, Final Fours and Angels and Padres baseball games as well as Rams football games. He retired from his TV job with the Padres in October 2016, capping a six-decade career punctuated with countless calls of “Oh my!” in describing big plays. He was 82.

Fox-owned KMSP Minneapolis (DMA 15) and the University of Minnesota have collaborated to produce The Richard Pitino Show, set to debut on Jan. 4. It will broadcast live on Thursday […]