Latest in TV Sports

ESPN Classic will go dark on January 1, ending a nearly three-decade run of nostalgic pay-TV sports programming. The network was founded as Classic Sports Network in 1995 and was acquired by ESPN in 1997. The decision to shut it down follows several years of declining distribution. Several major providers had dropped…

UPDATED with ViacomCBS response. ViacomCBS joined the chorus of TV networks objecting to Nielsen’s plan to delay plans to include out-of-home viewing in overall ratings reports. "Nielsen's abrupt delay of the long-planned integration of OOH viewing into the national TV currency less than two months before it was…

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, according to a new report. Sports programming, once thought to be unassailable, declined 6% last year even when the Rio Olympics are taken out of the year-to-year…

Research firm SNL Kagan has discouraging news for sports networks, pay TV distributors, and subscribers who don’t watch sports, in a new deep-dive study of the market. Sports programming costs consumed 24.1% of the revenue distributors typically collected from each subscriber last year, up nearly a percentage point…

EXCLUSIVE: Media execs who’ve invested heavily in sports will find some reassuring, and some worrisome, data today in the first study of sports fans from USC Annenberg’s Center for the Digital Future and digital sports media company ThePostGame. The encouraging news? About 86% of the population (92% of men and 80% of…

Demonstrating its continued appetite for diverse content, Li Ruigang's China Media Capital is to pay a record $1.3B for broadcast rights to Chinese Super League soccer, the Financial Times reports. The five-year deal is a massive increase from the roughly $8M per year that is currently being paid. This is a…

It took a while, but the FCC today finally voted — unanimously — to end its sports blackout rules, following up on the rulemaking notice it issued in December. They were adopted in 1975 primarily to help broadcasters and the NFL by barring cable and satellite services from offering games in the teams’ markets if the…

Sports execs had better pray that pay TV’s programming bundles stay intact. Rights payments from television networks and other media will grow 37.8% from 2013 to $17.1B in 2017, according to a study out today from PwC. That makes it the fastest growing source of revenues ahead of gate receipts (+10.9% to $19.1B)…

The FCC enacted the rules in 1975 to help broadcasters and the NFL: Regulators say that if a sports league requires a TV station to black out a game — usually a football match that isn’t sold out — then cable and satellite distributors can’t offer it in the community either. But that may not serve the public interest…

This could come as a helmet to the ribs of the uber-lucrative NFL broadcasting-streaming game and the notion of sponsorship vs. rights deals. Not to mention possibly expanding the broader sports world's ever-growing "TV everywhere" game plan. Verizon today finalized a $1B extension of its deal with America's dominant…

Pay TV subscribers who don’t watch sports likely will have to cut the cord if they want to escape the rocketing costs for programming rights and new channels. At least that’s one of the conclusions I take away from RBC Capital Markets’ David Bank’s smart, 91-page report this morning about the state of sports media. He…

BREAKING… Another new TV sports season, yet another labor squabble. The National Hockey League locked out players one minute after their union pact expired at midnight ET time, the AP reported. The clock struck midnight, and the NHL turned into another sports league closed for business. So much for NBC last year…