sports

Sean McManus, chairman of CBS Sports and the division’s 27-year leader (left), will retire next April and hand the reins to David Berson (right), who has been president of CBS Sports for more than 10 years. The leadership change was announced today by George Cheeks, president and CEO of CBS, and chief content officer of news and sports at Paramount+.

NBCUniversal has promoted veteran executive Rick Cordella to president of NBC Sports, reporting to Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group. Cordella, who has served in a number of leadership roles at NBCU, will now lead all aspects of NBC Sports’ brands and platforms including NBC Sports, NBC Olympics, Golf Channel, NBC Sports Digital and transactional businesses GolfNow and SportsEngine. He’ll work with NBC Local on regional sports network strategy and continue to oversee sports on streamer Peacock.

The company is launching the CBS Sports Creator Studio, hoping to pair influencers with talent, or give them behind-the-scenes access in support of deals.

Post-pandemic normalcy returned to Amsterdam as broadcasters and vendors convened, but a palpable sense of economy and efficiency blanketed the International Broadcasting Convention.

A baseball writer received a strange text seeking information. It turned out to be a writer from a betting website.

Pro football leagues XFL and USFL are in advanced talks to merge, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios. Combining the two may be the smartest path forward for the leagues given the challenges and the history of failure for NFL alternatives. The merger would be structured as a merger of equals and would require regulatory approval, one of the sources said. The leagues hope to combine before the 2024 seasons.

Making good on years of promises by the corporate overseers of Turner Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery is adding a live sports tier to Max. The streaming add-on, which will carry the Bleacher Report brand now that the Turner name has faded away, will launch Oct. 5 at $10 a month. No charge will be assessed to existing Max subscribers until next Feb. 29. Unlike the long-defunct streaming service B/R Live, which was a stand-alone, the new offering will only be available as part of a Max subscription.

The broadcast network, which had several NFL matchups on its slate already for the fall, will simulcast the remaining portion of the MNF schedule (10 games’ worth) with ESPN. The move will likely increase Monday Night Football’s overall audience over games that are only on ESPN — the Sept. 11 season opener on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 drew the biggest audience since the franchise’s move to cable — and will also complete what had been a rather fluid ABC schedule for the fall, as it and other networks try to program a full week while writers and actors remain on strike.

Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment executives decided to name their new publicly traded company TKO to honor the companies’ expertise in fighting, but they have broader aspirations than just owning combat sports.

Catching a game now often means navigating a multitude of services and apps. “Cord-cutting was supposed to be simple.”

Fall’s upfront would have been a lot worse were it not for leveraging NFL packages with advertisers, and the league continues to pull them in in all sizes.

The streamer is hoping younger, more affluent viewer demos and ad customization will give it an edge on the field against its broadcast competition.

Preseason National Football League games dominated the list of most watched live sports events during the last full week of August. Three games from the final week of the NFL preseason landed among the top 10 most-viewed events during the week of August 21-27, including Fox’s  August 27 Houston Texans-New Orleans Saints game, which averaged 4.22 million to lead all sports events, according to Nielsen numbers published by SportsMedia Watch. CBS’s August 25 Detroit Lions- Carolina Panthers telecast finished third with 3.43 million viewers, and ESPN’s August 21 Baltimore Ravens-Washington Commanders game pulled in 2.87 million viewers to place seventh.

As the NBA approaches a new season, releasing its 2023-24 schedule earlier this month and rolling out the matchups to watch over the next year, a nettlesome issue continues to hover over the league and half of its teams. Diamond Sports Group, the company that operates 19 Bally Sports regional sports networks across the United States and owns the local television rights for 15 NBA teams, including the Mavericks, Clippers, Cavaliers and Spurs, among others, continues to have its future linger in bankruptcy court. That has caused some uncertainty about how those teams will broadcast their games locally during the upcoming season.

The Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), representing television networks, asked Nielsen not to go forward with its plan to incorporate viewing data from Amazon when coming up with the audience estimates advertisers will use to determine how much they pay for commercials on Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video.

It has been an anxious summer in Burbank, Bristol and the rest of the Disney-ESPN empire thanks to ongoing cutbacks, movie box office disappointments and strategic uncertainties. Disney stock recently sank to a nine-year low. Help is on the way, though, as the U.S. Open Tennis Championships kick off Monday and college football and the NFL also deliver their annual fall injections of must-see live events.

Amazon has had early talks with Disney about working on the streaming version of ESPN it is developing, said people familiar with the matter. The tech giant could offer the service through one of its streaming offerings, helping to expand its distribution, while possibly also taking a minority stake in ESPN. Such an arrangement could shore up ESPN’s status as the biggest force in sports media, even as declining TV viewership and advertising, combined with rising sports programming costs, have squeezed the sports channel and Disney, its majority owner. It could also reposition the tech behemoth, which has been trying to make a dent in sports streaming, as more friend than foe to ESPN. And it could weaken the sports leagues’ bargaining power.

Disney Advertising said that commercial inventory on the U.S. Open tennis tournament is sold out. The event, televised on ABC, ESPN and ESPN Plus, has more than 20 sponsors and nearly 150 advertisers. Presenting sponsors include American Express, Cadillac, Evian, Fidelity Investments, Heineken Silver and IBM.

The football season hasn’t officially started yet, and Amazon.com is already on the verge of scoring a touchdown. Nielsen is planning to incorporate viewing data from streaming services for live programming, a move that will likely boost the ratings for Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football package and allow it to charge more for commercials. This is the first time Nielsen has agreed to use a company’s own data along with its independent research to publicly report ratings. It only applies for live programming on streaming services and is open to other streamers as well.