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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.

When the Longhorn Network launched in 2011, the 20-year, $300 million partnership with ESPN set up Texas with its own 24-hour television showcase that sent shockwaves across college sports some say can still be felt today. Twelve years after the studio lights flickered on, the network will soon go dark: LHN will be folded into the SEC Network when Texas joins the Southeastern Conference next summer.

The 2023 Women’s World Cup has managed record-breaking viewership across the globe. In the U.S., Fox’s coverage was up slightly from 2019, despite several challenges, including frustrating time zone differences and an unexpected early elimination for the USWNT. The average audience for the team U.S. group stage games was the highest it’s ever been at 4.3M viewers (including one overnight game). Even without the USA in the competition, Fox still reported strong audiences throughout the rest of the tournament.

The women’s World Cup soccer tournament attracted 22% more advertisers than four year ago, according to a report from iSpot TV. Despite the early exit of the U.S. team, losing to Sweden in the knockout stage, the World Cup has generated 1.05 billion ad impressions so far for the 294 advertisers. Games the U.S. played in generated 18.8% of all of the TV ad impressions.

Why we may soon find out.

Cord cutting is taking a chunk out of Big Shield. As recently reported, NFL Network has a current distribution of 51.1 million homes. That’s a steep drop from its all-time high of 72.5 million in October 2013. It’s not specific to NFL Network. More and more people are dumping cable, and more and more people are relying on streaming services. It explains the recent effort to push audiences to NFL+, the league’s in-house non-linear product.

The sports-media giant talks to potential strategic partners, as it lays plans to stream its channel and scopes out a role in local broadcasting.

The Pac-12 conference is considering an offer from Apple for streaming rights that would kick in when its current TV contract ends. But it may be too little, too late.

The sports juggernaut continues to earn billions of dollars for Disney, but profits are down and opportunities for growth have dwindled.

CBS and Nickelodeon team up for NFL’s biggest game, marking the first time the Super Bowl has had an alternate telecast on another network.

Add Mark Jackson to the list of ESPN reporters and commentators who have been laid off over the past five weeks. Jackson was let go on Monday with two years remaining on his contract. With Jeff Van Gundy also being laid off in late June, ESPN is expected to replace them with Doris Burke and Doc Rivers, two people close to the move told The Associated Press.

Samsung Electronics said it added the FIFA Plus channel to Samsung TV Plus, its free, ad-supported streaming service. The FIFA Plus channel is being added as the Women’s World Cup is being played in Australia and New Zealand. The channel features a collection of original programming and highlights from men’s and women’s soccer.

Fox Sports is betting big on MLB analyst Alex Rodriguez. The 14-time MLB all star and World Series champion is closing in on a contract extension with Fox Sports, a deal that if completed will keep him working big MLB games for Fox for years to come.

The network will broadcast all NASCAR Xfinity Series races starting in 2025: 33 race weekends per year.

The game on Thursday afternoon in Wellington, New Zealand, which kicked off at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday night, averaged 6,429,000 viewers on Fox, making it the most-watched group stage telecast since Fox started covering it in 2015. Fox and Nielsen said the audience peaked at 8.45 million for the final 15 minutes.