In its first year televising the semifinals of the Final Four, Turner Sports plans to offer coverage tailored to each of the four participating teams.
Sports Business Journal reported Monday that Turner Sports will air the NCAA Tournament national semifinals on TBS, TNT and TruTV. The regular national telecast will air on TBS, while TNT and TruTV will televise coverage “with announcers and camera angles customized to each specific team” (SBJ, 11/18). Halftime coverage on TNT and TruTV will also be tailored to the participating teams.
CBS will offer only one version of the national championship game.
The move is unprecedented in sports TV. Other outlets have aired different versions of the same game — ESPN used to televise “Full Court” coverage of NBA and college basketball games, with the traditional telecast on one network and a special version on another — but no network has offered telecasts that have been tailored to the participating teams.
Such a decision should placate fans who invariably complain that the national announcers are biased against their team.
Airing coverage on three networks should also mitigate the decline in viewership associated with moving games from broadcast (CBS) to cable (TBS). Turner Sports has had success with multi-network telecasts before. In 2012, coverage of NASCAR’s Coke Zero 400 aired on both TNT and TruTV — attracting a larger audience (6.2M) than any other telecast of the race in the past five years.
Should Turner’s experiment become a success, it would not be surprising to see other networks offer similar coverage in the future. Especially in sports where fan passions run high (e.g., all of them), offering explicitly biased coverage could be a boon for the networks. As cable news has shown, television viewers like to be told what they want to hear.
(Monday’s news from Sports Business Journal)
