Commentary
Live TV Sports: Everyone Wants A Piece Of The Action -- No Matter How Small
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, April 25, 2023
Perhaps we should factor in the stuff that stirs even the most timid: It's live TV programming.
E.W. Scripps made good on its effort to move into the sports arena (regardless of the goings on at Sinclair/Bally Sports) in signing on to deal to grab the WNBA basketball for its over-the-air TV channel, the ION network for a Friday night series.
The league has been around since 1996, and has been getting a viewership boost of late -- and then was helped along by the sharp increase in the recent NCAA College Women's Basketball event in March.
The CW -- now in the hands of big TV station group Nexstar Media Group -- has moved along with Golf, a wannabe competitor to PGA Golf, taking on a series of 14 events this year, as part of a multi-year deal.
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Across the first two broadcasts in early March -- Saturday and Sunday -- viewership on the CW averaged 288,500 viewers. Nexstar claims overall viewers totaled 1.4 million across the broadcast network, and the CW app from Friday to Sunday.
Some may still complain that these sports -- spun off from other successful basketball and golf interactions -- may never realize the big or even moderate potential of other sports under the big four sports franchises.
But if they can find growth -- a la women's basketball, for example -- you have a good deal.
Think about all those other sports that have been on the air for years. Perhaps the best might be Formula 1 (FI) racing, which pulled in a decent number --1.21 million viewers per race across ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC.
Farther down the list is the WNBA. Last season it averaged 379,000 on ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC.
Major League Lacrosse had 157,000 viewers last season on ESPN, while the Tour de France had roughly 375,000 daily viewers for the live airings of its three-week race mostly on USA Network, as well other NBCU channels, including Peacock.
TV stations and networks must now consider that live sports needs a better position on the schedule. And advertisers, who heretofore had no interest in sports, now must consider all that.
For sure, in the past they might have shied away from buying sports. But as we all well know, they should not buy programming -- they should really be buying an audience.
If 94 of the top 100 TV network shows by 2022 were all sports-related, and linear TV continues to offer up the best reach when it comes to TV concrete overall, all this needs to be part of the equation going forward.
Time to play ball. Take a swing. Launch that shot. Sprint to the line.
Your metaphor fits here.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
You've pointed out the so-called advantages for advertisers and stations, but what of the audience, broadcast TV's ultimate customers? Isn't what really is happening is audiences are fleeing weekend broadcast TV so fast in droves that even the most fringe of sports looks like it has appeal by comparison to say, back-to-back-to-back, paid programming or weak, almost unwatchable weekend syndicated filler-fare? But this does not address the root issue of the shrinking audience. Saudi Arabia's Liv Golf has maybe 400K viewers at any one time watching at its peak on live TV. A weekend syndicated show I produce 100% independently for a tiny fraction of Liv's budget, "Raw Travel" has almost twice that national viewership and very soundly beats LIV Golf head to head in most majored metered markets. Add in the fact that we didn't have to chop up any journalist or imprison and torture any women in the making of our content, it seems that, at least, theoretically should count for something.