sports

The National Football League and Facebook have signed a deal to bring NFL game recaps and highlights to the world’s largest social network, culminating years of talks, the NFL said today. The deal comes with both parties at strategic turning points, as Facebook seeks to add more video to attract viewers and the NFL tries to follow eyeballs from traditional television to social media.

The Sunday Night Football matchup between the Washington and Oakland delivered a one-sided game for viewers and a weakened ratings return for NBC. With Washington dominating throughout and ultimately winning 27-10, Sunday Night Football averaged an 11.6 rating in Nielsen’s metered-market household numbers. That’s down 11% from early numbers for the third week of the season last year.

Sunday morning, President Trump essentially called for a boycott of the NFL in response to players using the national anthem to protest police profiling of African-Americans. Should Trump’s supporters respond to that call, the medium-term effects could be serious for the NFL. But the impact would be at least as bad, and much more immediate, for the broadcasters who pay to air games.

How new concussion reports could bring down a multibillion-dollar American empire.

CBS Corp. intends to launch a streaming-video sports outlet that will be more newsy and less focused on commentary programs, the company’s CEO Leslie Moonves said Thursday, while taking pains to demonstrate CBS’s business acumen compared to that of rivals like Walt Disney, Comcast, Netflix and 21st Century Fox.

FuboTV announced today the launch of a new, national marketing endeavor that includes the company’s first TV commercials, premiering at the start of the new NFL season and introducing viewers to “Fubo […]

Sinclair Broadcast Group continues its expansion in the multicast network space with premium sports content.

On Monday night, Beth Mowins will call the Denver Broncos and San Diego Chargers in the second game of ESPN’s Monday Night Football doubleheader — the first woman in 30 years take the microphone in an NFL game, and the first for a national broadcast.

Don Ohlmeyer, a singular force whose creative vision and talents reshaped not only sports broadcasting but the entertainment side as well, has died at the age of 72. He began his career at ABC Sports and as a producer there transformed shows like Wide World of Sports and helped Monday Night Football set a template for big-time primetime productions.

Kristen Rodgers joins Fox-owned WTXF Philadelphia (DMA 4). She will anchor sports coverage for the station’s 5, 6, 10 and 11 p.m. newscasts and will host the weekend sports show, […]

Live streaming TV service Fubo.TV is adding more NFL programming in time for the kick-off of the 2017-18 season.  Through a new carriage agreement with NFL Media, NFL Network and NFL […]

The sports universe is heavily Balkanized online, meaning your best bet at comprehensive streaming of pro football will involve that old standby — a cable or satellite TV subscription — or cellphone service through Verizon. Otherwise, you’ll be limited to a few unrestricted games online, including Thursday’s night season opener between the Kansas City Chiefs and the New England Patriots. Here’s a stream-by-stream guide.

NFL’s key primetime series could rebound with higher viewership this season from the impact of negative factors in the early season and the presidential election in 2016, according to one media analyst. Michael Nathanson, senior research analyst of MoffettNathanson Research, expects a 5% gain for NBC’s Sunday Night Football — to hit 21.3 million viewers for the 2017 season — and an 11% increase for ESPN’s Monday Night Football to 12.7 million viewers.

NEW YORK (AP) — Football has been Ray Lewis’ passion since he was a child. One of his lasting memories is watching “Inside The NFL” when it was hosted by […]

The record bidding amount beat Sony Entertainment Television, which had held the Indian Premier League broadcast rights for 10 years since the popular cricket property was launched.

The new pact extends coverage of all Patriots pre-season games, Patriots All Access, Patriots GameDay and 5^th Quarter exclusively on the CBS O&O and co-owned WSBK.

Nielsen says last year’s regular-season NFL games declined 9% in viewership to an average 17.1 million viewers. This occurred as national TV advertising revenues have climbed — to $4.2 billion in the NFL regular-season games, up from $3.8 billion in 2015.

Grainy video, errors and buffering streams weren’t what fans paid $99 to see, according to the class-action lawsuit.

It appears the restraining order Showtime obtained earlier this month from a federal court against websites that had advertised they would make the pay-per-view Mayweather-McGregor bout available for free was effective. Legitimate video distributors charged $100 to buy the event in HD. But the far more widespread theft of Saturday night’s boxing match took place through the use of a software program and “add-on” apps that consumers worldwide are now using steal programming, channelsFlo and content of all kinds.

The main exhibition did not begin until after midnight on the east coast, and Floyd Mayweather said afterwards the combatants deliberately waited in their dressing rooms because of the widespread problems fans were having ordering the pay per-view program.

ESPN said it would make a new push into the boxing ring by striking a multi-year deal with Top Rank, one of the sport’s biggest promoters.

NBC Sports Group is putting the NBC brand on each of its regional sports networks starting Oct. 2. The move follows the April decision to rename two of its California RSNs to NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California.

Disney’s upcoming branded streaming service will likely be priced around $5 per month in order to drive wider adoption, according to MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson. He says that the new Disney streaming service and the upcoming ESPN services need clear distinctions. The ESPN service will likely test different prices as it prepares ESPN to be ready to go fully over-the-top, according to the report, but the Disney service is about building asset value instead of taking licensing money from SVOD deals.

Round-the-clock cable sports networks like ESPN and FS1 will soon have competition on over-the-air television in the form of a new joint venture spearheaded by Sinclair Broadcasting — Stadium — which launches Monday as a 24/7 digital offering before making its over-the-air debut Sept 6.

A roundtable of experts talks about the changing landscape of broadcast production. In part one, we focus solely on IP production and what that means for broadcast.

Turner Broadcasting System plans to launch a standalone sports streaming service for consumers in 2018, the Time Warner Inc unit said on Thursday. The service will offer access to UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League soccer matches as part of a three-year multi-platform rights agreement with the governing body of European football beginning with the 2018-19 season. Turner will add other content to the service as it becomes available, executives said. Pricing has yet to be determined.