Recent sports media news, including progress on Sinclair’s planned over-the-top sports streaming service, ESPN’s new Sunday Night Baseball team, The Athletic’s sale to the New York Times, and NBC’s Winter Olympics plans for Peacock.
Sinclair said to be close to NBA deal for OTT service
Bloomberg reported Friday that the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the formerly Fox-branded regional sports networks that are largely absent from streaming MVPDs, has obtained $600 million of financing to support the launch of an over-the-top streaming service it plans to launch this year. In addition, the company is said to be close to a deal to acquire the right to stream NBA games via said over-the-top service.
Now branded under the banner of “Bally Sports,” the former Fox RSNs are virtually impossible to watch for ‘cordcutters’ who have dropped traditional cable. Of the major streaming providers, only the most expensive — DirecTV Stream — carries the Bally RSNs. [Bloomberg 1.7]
ESPN makes baseball moves official
ESPN officially announced on Friday that it has named Karl Ravech, Eduardo Perez and YES Network’s David Cone the new team on Sunday Night Baseball, with Alex Rodriguez shifting to an eight-game package of alternate “Kay-Rod” broadcasts alongside Michael Kay. Kay and Rodriguez will also call a pair of traditional regular season games for ESPN, which will see its MLB schedule drastically reduced under its new rights deal.
Despite the new play-by-play role, Ravech will continue to host Baseball Tonight leading into Sunday night games. [ESPN PR]
NYT agrees to purchase The Athletic
The New York Times agreed last week to purchase subscription sports news site The Athletic for $550 million. The deal, which is expected to close in the coming months, would add The Athletic’s 1.2 million subscribers to the Times’ base of 8 million. The Athletic, which launched in 2016, is reportedly the second-biggest employer of sports journalists behind only ESPN. [NYT 1.6, NYT PR 1.6]
Peacock to stream all Olympics coverage
NBC said last week that the streaming service Peacock will carry all events in the scheduled Beijing Winter Olympics set to begin next month, including NBC’s primetime show, on its premium $5/month tier. During last year’s Summer Olympics, Peacock streamed select events but most of the coverage could only be streamed via NBCOlympics.com or the NBC Sports app. It is unclear whether those platforms will continue to stream events; last year, some events that viewers thought were exclusive to Peacock (ex. U.S. men’s basketball games) were also available for free on NBC’s other streaming platforms. [NBC Sports PR]
