The latest machinations of the corporate media giants could result in the end of one of sports broadcasting’s great brands. So began an article on this site nearly 12 years ago. Now, the end of the sports division known currently as TNT Sports is no longer a hypothetical.
Yes, it is possible that Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery could get tripped up in the regulatory process. While it is assumed (and probably correct), that the federal government will rubber stamp the deal, state attorneys general at least have the option to challenge it — and the deal also needs to pass regulatory muster overseas.
And there is recent history for the regulatory process altering the sports component of a broader deal. Disney’s acquisition of most 21st Century Fox assets was supposed to include the Fox Sports-branded regional sports networks, but the company was forced by federal regulators to divest them. The RSNs were sold to Sinclair Broadcasting instead, setting them on the path to bankruptcy and a now-imminent shutdown.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. combination has been described in many corners as creating a sports broadcasting colossus, but Paramount CEO David Ellison said Monday that he is not concerned about it triggering regulatory scrutiny. There have been no regulatory concerns expressed as yet, he told reporters in a conference call. “And I think if you look at peers like ESPN and others, you won’t see anything that’s obviously further consolidated or out of line with other industry leaders in the space.”
Ellison is right, though it is unlikely he would publicly agree with the following interpretation. The size and durability of the Paramount-WBD sports portfolio is overstated, primarily because WBD in the Zaslav era prioritized acquiring rights in bits and pieces, often via sublicense. Those deals are short-term and largely consist of lower-wattage inventory; it is no coincidence that all four of TNT Sports’ College Football Playoff games thus far have aired opposite the NFL.
TNT’s CFP inventory should improve dramatically this season, as it will now include two quarterfinals and one semifinal, but even so, the sublicensing agreement with ESPN lasts only through the 2028 season. TNT’s deals with Major League Baseball and the NHL — fully-owned packages negotiated prior to the Zaslav era — also end in 2028. Renewing these properties is no sure thing given the amount of money Paramount will presumably have to reserve for a likely NFL rights renegotiation. (It is also worth questioning how many of those rights deals even allow for games to be distributed by platforms beyond the ones initially intended. Surely, ESPN reached a sublicensing deal with TNT, rather than its direct college football competitors CBS and FOX, for a reason.)
Paramount itself argued that TNT Sports had a less impressive sports portfolio than Versant, a claim that, to be clear, was dubious. But TNT Sports is undoubtedly closer to Versant than to its larger rivals. And so while Paramount’s sports portfolio will undoubtedly grow with the addition of TNT’s rights, it is not exactly an arrangement that is built to last. The TNT Sports portfolio under Zaslav has been a house of cards built on a foundation of expiring deals, temporary arrangements, and modest ambitions.
Of course, the above also means that TNT Sports was doomed in any scenario. The choices were to be absorbed into CBS Sports or to be spun off into a new entity with an uncertain future. The Versant experience is indicative. Versant just finished airing the Olympic Games, as big an event as there is in sports television. But that was because of its longstanding association with NBCUniversal and a desire by both companies to maintain as much of the status quo as possible for viewers.
Will that continue indefinitely? At some point, Versant will have to compete entirely on its own, rather than benefiting from a link to NBCU that will fade further and further into the rearview mirror. Of the fully independent deals Versant has signed thus far — and fully independent means zero affiliation at any point of the process with NBCU — neither the Pac-12 nor League One Volleyball are particularly consequential.
What is lost with the looming end of TNT Sports is not a collection of rights, but a sensibility. At this point, it should be fairly obvious that the greatest contribution TNT Sports has made to the industry is not through game production — though it did a quality job on that front for 40 years of NBA coverage — but the studio side. One would think that the studio would be the easiest aspect to replicate, but no other company has come close to the kind of ‘house style’ of TNT: conversational, authentic and authoritative. (Amazon might be the closest, but it has only been producing live sportscasts for four years, not 40.) There is a “certain DNA that is unique to TNT Sports,” as chief content officer Craig Barry put it last year.
Every time TNT takes over a property, the reaction at least on social media seems to be recognition that the event has never been covered quite that way before. TNT aired one French Open and almost immediately ESPN began overhauling its staid tennis roster. TNT aired Big 12 football for one season (and not exactly good games either) and team officials were not just effusive, but in the words of Kansas athletic director Travis Goff, “obviously incredibly grateful” for the depth of coverage. And that is for a sublicensing deal TNT only obtained because it agreed to continued producing its “Inside the NBA” studio show for ESPN.
Perhaps Paramount will continue to operate TNT Sports out of Techwood Drive in Atlanta. Perhaps it will keep the staffers and executives who have made TNT Sports what it is. But given the massive amount of debt Paramount-WBD will create and the surely massive layoffs that many expect to ensue, the idea of Paramount operating two sports divisions out of two states defies belief.
Had Netflix won out, TNT Sports would at least have had the opportunity to give it the proverbial college try. That is essentially what it has been doing since losing NBA rights two years ago, putting forth its best effort and highest production values on early season college basketball blowouts and fledgling ventures like Unrivaled. Perhaps that would be doomed to failure, but a bit like Versant, at least there would be some creativity on the way down.
Instead, that ‘TNT DNA’ now seems to be on its last legs.
It all could have been different. Returning to the subject of regulatory review, it is worth remembering that under the same leadership it has now, the federal government aggressively sought to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2017. That deal had to be approved by a federal judge over the government’s objections. But it was a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one, with AT&T spinning off the networks less than five years later into a combination with Zaslav’s Discovery. Whatever reasons the government had for trying to block the deal, there is little doubt that everyone involved — save for the soon-to-be-enriched Zaslav — would have been better off it failed.
That is the thing about these massive media mergers. Some of them work, like Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal. But perhaps more often, they fail miserably, and the industry, its workers, and its consumers are all worse off for the effort.
One wonders what Ted Turner, now 87 and no longer in public life after announcing a dementia diagnosis in 2018, might have thought of all this. It was Turner’s 1995 decision to sell his creation Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner that began a 30-year run of instability — ultimately culminating in the looming destruction of everything he built.
But that is simply the way these deals go. The ones that get made might be the ones you regret, and the ones you don’t make might be the ones you regret even more. A decade before he sold his broadcasting business to Time Warner, Turner made a run at an acquisition of his own — of a Connecticut-based upstart named ESPN.
ABC, which had already owned a minority stake in ESPN, won that battle. And the same year Time Warner acquired Turner Broadcasting, ABC and ESPN were acquired by Disney in a deal where ESPN was the main attraction.
It was a decade after that when Disney and ESPN decided it made little sense to run two separate sports divisions at the same time. And the ABC Sports of Roone Arledge and Jim McKay, of “The Thrill of Victory” and “The Agony of Defeat,” was consigned to sports media history.
Soon enough, TNT Sports will be as well.
