Talking TV: Gray’s Peachtree Sports Makes A Statewide Play For Sports Fans

Spurred by the teetering regional sports network model, we’re now squarely in a new chapter of the sports/broadcasting relationship.

A number of station groups — E.W. Scripps, Gray and Nexstar in the front of the pack — have been making aggressive moves to win rights and recapture viewers with the drama of live sports — and any sports will do.

Peachtree Sports, launched on Oct. 1 by Gray Television’s WANF and WPCH in Atlanta, is the latest entrant into the sports race. It’s being positioned as a soon-to-be-statewide network running a decidedly mixed bag of Georgia sports ranging from the Ultimate Disc league to minor league hockey and a swath of college and high school games.

In this Talking TV conversation, Erik Schrader, the stations’ VP and GM, explains the impetus for the network, the bet it’s making to capture the sports-curious viewer and the evolutionary track he sees Peachtree Sports following.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: Ever since the dissembling of some major regional sports networks, broadcast TV has gotten a glimmer in its eye over the matter of sports rights. Local sports were, for decades, a mainstay of broadcast in a symbiotic relationship. Teams saw local TV as a tool to cultivate new fans. Local stations got a nice boost in the ratings as fans tuned in for the games.

Now, from the ashes of the RSNs those relationships are rising anew led by E.W. Scripps, Gray and Nexstar, the most vocal groups about expanding their sports content. Peachtree Sports Network is a new endeavor from Gray Television’s WANF and WPCH in Atlanta, Georgia, where the network launched on October 1st featuring live local sports programing. The channel will soon expand to Gray’s other markets in Georgia, including Augusta, Albany, Macon, Columbus and Savannah.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Today, my conversation is with Erik Schrader, WANF and WPCH’s VP and general manager. We’ll talk about the business model for this new local sports network, the perceived demand for it among advertisers and audiences and how they’re pulling it all together. We’ll be right back with that conversation.

Welcome, Erik Schrader to Talking TV.

Well, thanks for having me, Michael.

Erik, I have a lot of nuts-and-bolts questions for you, but first, a big one: What was the thinking behind this network?

You know, the things that broadcast television do best are really live events, live local news and live sports. And there are so many teams out there right now. And there’s been a fundamental change over the last few years where teams are able to put together their own, their own not broadcast, but their own production of their games. And we have an opportunity to then provide them with a much larger bullhorn and get it out across the state.

All right. So, give me a sense of what’s being included here. We’re talking about minor league teams, some professional teams, some college and then down even into the high school level?

It could be just about anyone. The teams that we have agreements with right now are mostly in sports that are not part of the Big Four or that are minor leagues. For example, we have the ECHL, which has two hockey teams in Georgia. It has the Atlanta Gladiators and the Savannah Ghost Pirates. We’ll be airing some of each of their games. But we’re also going to show high school sports. We are in talks with some different people about college sports. So, all those things are on the table. I mean, there is literally not a sports league that I wouldn’t consider airing on that because that’s what we want to be about is live sportscasts.

And you’ve got ultimate Frisbee in there, right?

We have the Ultimate Disc League.

Ultimate Disc League — different people, OK, sorry, sorry.

Well, I believe that Frisbee is one of those words is actually a proprietary name. So, the professional league, I have learned is the Ultimate Disc League, which think about Frisbee or disc meets football or soccer. It’s more of that. I know sometimes people think maybe it’s like golf, but it’s more of a soccer-type game. If you watch ESPN, sometimes it shows up in the top 10 plays of the week.

Yeah, I’m confused, but I’m intrigued because I have not seen this played. So, that’s interesting.

That makes you the target, Michael, you’re the target. You know what we want is people to learn about these leagues and sports that exist that they could become fans of. And so maybe just from my eloquent description of things or just your general curiosity, you’ll watch and maybe you’ll become a fan.

So, there’s a certain, ‘what the hell is this? I’m going to stay tuned to watch more’ kind of factor that might be a driver here for audiences?

I certainly think there’ll be a curiosity factor on some of the sports we carry. I think each of the sports comes with its own cachet and its own group of fans. But I think just like any sport and just like every sport had to do, somewhere along the way, you have to get new fans.

I mean, there’s no question we know where professional football was in the 30s and 40s as opposed to some of the other sports. And look where it is now. It’s the most popular sport in the country. And it got there almost exclusively because of broadcast television.

Sure, it was undoubtedly historically a very, very powerful tool in audience development. For most, or maybe all, of the things you’ve got now on this network, how many of those might one have found those elsewhere on television or on some sort of streaming channel beforehand?

Well, certainly they would have found them. They would have found the Atlanta College Station Skyhawks, which is the G-league team. And we would have found high school football both on Peachtree on WPCH. We were airing both of those already. I think almost all of these are streaming online someplace. But in terms of being available on broadcast television, I think those are the only two at that at this moment.

How much of an undertaking was it to secure all of these rights? How long of a process has that been so far?

You know, we’ve been talking for quite a while with some of them. I mean, the devil is definitely in the details, and we’re not done by any means. We’re still talking to other people. This is the group of teams that we were able to have secured when we were ready to make the announcement. But I will tell you this, every single team we have talked to has been really excited about this idea.

I would think so. Now, who is actually handling this? Did you bring somebody on staff to negotiate these rights or were you doing it?

No, I’m handling those. Yeah, I’m handling those. Michael.

Where are you literally putting this? Is this going on your D2? And if so, what diginet had to roll off in order to accommodate this network?

It’s going on 17.2, which is Peachtree’s dot 2. Right now, Court TV is on there. We’re in a situation here in Atlanta where I think Court TV is on multiple stations. So, we are moving Court TV out and we are putting Peachtree Sports Network on there. Gray owns broadcast stations in every single market in Georgia, and we will be on all of those. We’re not there yet. We are only going to be Atlanta on October 1st. But in addition to being available over the air, we will also be on Comcast and Spectrum from day one.

In those other Gray markets in Georgia, is it going to be Court TV that gets the push in each case, or is it a case by case…

It’ll be a different situation in every market.

1. And sorry, the streaming component is there as well?

No, we’re not going to stream it. We’re not looking to compete against all of these leagues, all of these teams have their own streaming situations already in place. So, we’re not going to compete in that round. This is this is solely broadcast.

Gotcha. Because Gray does have a very robust streaming operation at all of its stations. Conceivably, you could put this there with the VOD option.

Absolutely, we could do that. But again, we don’t want to interfere with the business model that already exists with these teams. I’m a big believer in broadcast, and I am 100% believer that to become a fan of a sports team, broadcast has to play a major role in that.

You know, my parents were not the biggest sports fans in the world when I was six and seven years old, but I became a hockey fan by watching games — NHL games in the afternoon on a broadcast television station.

And I think that’s how it is for almost all of us. I mean, maybe a few people have become fans over the radio, but almost everybody became a fan over broadcast television. And I know we have a lot of leagues going behind paywalls now, and I think that you can bring existing fans behind a paywall, but I don’t think you can grow new fans that way. And so, I think broadcast is just by far the best partnership for sports at all levels.

OK, now you’re billing this as live. Are all of these games going to be live or anything going to be recorded and shown into your “live” feed?

I mean, that’s a great question. The goal is to air as many of them live as possible. Now, with as many teams as we have, there are going to be conflicts. We’re going to have certain nights that two or three teams are playing and we’re going to have to make a decision about who gets aired live and who is aired on a delayed basis. I also think I see a world where we’re going to air some of these games multiple times, you know, obviously people on slot, but because we want to hit as much of an audience as possible. So, I think you could see a situation where the game runs live on Tuesday night at 8 p.m., but then Wednesday morning and maybe even Wednesday afternoon, we give it a couple extra plays.

From the jump from early October, what are the expectations for daily content right now? How many hours of original material are you going to be showing?

Well, I mean, we’re going to be a 24/7 network. We’re lucky to be Gray, and Gray has Raycom Sports and Tupelo Honey. We have a pretty big catalog of sports that airs already across the country. And we’re going to be able to tap into that. We’re working on a couple of other things I’m not ready to talk about just yet, but we’re going to be about sports. You’re not going to turn into this, tune into the station and see something that doesn’t match up with sports. That’s what it’s going to be.

Some of it’s going to roll in a wheel then, like if I missed the Ultimate Disc earlier, I might catch it at 2 or 3 in the morning potentially?

Like I said, I think we will try and do that. I’ve still got to work out some of those details with some of those teams and we just have to put it on its feet and see what the audience is receptive to. But yeah, that is definitely one of the original plans.

What kind of production operations did you have to spin up in order to make this happen? I mean, is that coming from the respective leagues and the teams or are you working with outside vendors to produce and commentate on these games?

Well, now, like I said, I mean, we very much want to keep the teams home commentators. They’re the ones who know their teams best. So, we wanted them to be a part of it. And like I said earlier, we’re really at a time in 2023 where people are doing their own productions and so we don’t have to, you know, bigfoot that a lot of these productions are very, very solid quality.

I mean, I have to laugh. I have friends who have sons and daughters in Little League baseball or softball, and we all will be out, and they’ll be like, oh, hold on, you know, they’ll [watch the] Little League team, which is being streamed somewhere. The ability to produce sports is something that a lot of people have at their fingertips now. So, we’re going to capitalize on that.

So, you’re just getting these feeds. You’re not having to set up any of your own cameras or have your own people on site in any of these scenarios, then?

No, we’re not having to do that. I mean, that would throw off the monetary model. I mean, the whole goal here is we want these teams to be able to get this audience. And so doing it this way is the way we can do that best.

You know, just spitballing this. I mean, I know there are some vendors, I’ve talked to them fairly recently, where you could they can put a camera into … if you’re talking about even expanding this further out and having more and more original [content], you could theoretically do this at any kind of game, at any level. Pop a camera in there, it’s powered by AI. It can draw highlights from that. It can even generate AI-driven commentary if you want. Is that a road that you would consider going down as this evolves?

I mean, I’ll be honest with you, I think that probably AI is so far away from that right now. I mean, you’ve seen some of the stories. There are there are people trying to use AI and it’s led to some pretty horrific news reporting along the way.

There were missteps, definitely.

Absolutely. Do I see that as being something that could happen? Maybe. Probably. But do I think it’s something that is going to happen in a short enough window that it’s going to impact us, you know, in the next five, 10 years? Probably not.

Let’s talk about the audience then. Why do you think you have a sufficient audience for this? What makes you believe there is a strong enough core of people across the state of Georgia, Atlanta first, and then ultimately across all of Georgia, who are going to find this interesting?

I think the one thing that we know is this country is a sports country. And again, to go back to one thing I said earlier, broadcast is at its best when it’s showing live events. I mean, live has drama, you know, be it live news or live sports. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

And all of us enjoy watching Friends and we enjoy watching Seinfeld and we will stream things all the time. But there is a drama in live that you just don’t get with other things. And I think there will be an audience just like every other sport. I think people will tune in one day and there will be one player who catches their fancy or one storyline that’s interesting and the next thing you know, they’ve watched 15 games.

So, I definitely think there is an audience. And I would say this too: We’re in a state right now that doesn’t have legalized gambling, so that is not a factor at all. But I would say, someday I think all 50 states will probably have legalized gambling. And if they do, I think that that even grows the sports audience dramatically.

Although that advertising does have a lifecycle. It kind of plateaus. And then lots of people in other markets, I’m sure Gray, can tell you how that goes.

Oh, I’m not talking I’m not talking about being providing a vehicle for advertising for gambling outlets. I’m talking about, you know, depending on what kind of fan base there is, almost any sport will eventually have a line and they will have opportunities for gambling to take place. I mean, again, we’re in a state that doesn’t do it. And I don’t know that that for us is going to be a factor any time in the near future. But I definitely think across the country that certainly that’s a factor. I think we’re seeing that all the time.

Well, speaking of advertisers, what kind of advertisers are you launching this with? Who wanted to come on board?

I mean, a lot of our traditional advertisers who advertise with this on broadcast are the advertisers we’re going to kick things off with. We only made the public announcement, you know, back in late September. So, right now, our sales team is talking to people about what they want to do. We’re very interested in seeing how that goes.

And you make a great point. I think we will get advertisers targeted towards the viewing audience of sports, which is a little bit demographically different from, you know, the overall broadcast lane. I think we will see some advertisers who dip their foot in who haven’t been with us traditionally.

For the male demographic…

The age I think we all we could conceivably appeal to [is] different than the traditional 25 to 54.

Well, it is certainly intriguing, and I’m interested to see how this develops, what kind of audience you end up attracting, who sticks around and what kind of advertisers lean into this as you as you get it going along. So, stay in touch about it, please.

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to hear from you when you watch your first Ultimate Disc League game and let me know how that turns out for you. I’m sure if the next time I see you, you’re wearing an Atlanta Hustle jersey, I’ll know that this all worked, Michael.

I’ve got to get my minor league hockey engine revved up and I would be totally on board to watch that, so. All right, Erik, thank you so much for coming on, talking about Gray’s new Peachtree Sports Network. Thanks to all of you for watching and listening. You can catch past episodes of Talking TV all in one place, at TVNewsCheck.com or on our YouTube channel. We are back most Fridays with a new episode. See you next time.