When Comcast decided to spin off its cable channels into a new standalone venture in November (working title: SpinCo), it added some extra spin of its own: The new company — built around channels like USA, MSNBC, CNBC, E! And Golf Channel — would have “leading sports properties” like the Olympics, PGA Tour, Premier League soccer and the WWE.
Those sports would be a key driver for the new company as it seeks to navigate the uncharted waters outside of NBCUniversal … and separated from the rest of NBC Sports.
The details of the split remain hazy. NBC Sports president Rick Cordella, speaking at a Sports Business Journal conference Nov 20, said, “I can’t speak about all the logistics of how all this will happen, but from a sports perspective, the partners that we have on cable assets like Golf Channel and USA, we’re going to fulfill every obligation, every promise we made to them.”
A source says that the company is figuring out how to divide the sports rights between the companies, with each likely to cut sublicensing deals with the other.
And they add that that Mark Lazarus, the SpinCo CEO who previously led NBC Sports, is eager to see what other opportunities there are in the sports space once the spinoff is complete.
The spinoff underscores a fast-growing trend in the world of cable TV: Suddenly it seems like every cable channel is a sports channel.
FX is best known for its high-concept dramas like The Bear and Shogun but on Nov. 16 it also televised the preliminary bouts for UFC 309, bringing the MMA promotion to its 67 million U.S. homes (making it the most widely-distributed cable channel in the Disney portfolio).
FX has occasionally televised sports before (it last had UFC prelims back in 2019 when there was a similar college football scheduling conflict, and it was one of the TV homes for the rebooted XFL), but the UFC bouts show that in 2024, any cable channel can become a sports channel, when rights contracts demand it, or when a corporate entity wants to beef up a channel to avoid being dropped or expand its purview.
Perhaps the best example in the latter category is Warner Bros. Discovery‘s TruTV.
While TruTV can trace its origins to Court TV, in the last few years it has operated as Warner Bros. Discovery’s home for unscripted comedy, anchored by the prank show Impractical Jokers. That is until earlier this year, when WBD announced plans to launch a primetime sports programming block.
The block, branded as TNT Sports, includes live games, alternative broadcasts, studio shows, and even originals like the sports newsmagzine Above the Fold led by former ESPNer Jemele Hill.
TruTV will join WBD’s other cable channels – including the sports-heavy TNT and TBS – in a new division announced by the company Dec. 12, a deal that will separate the company’s lucrative but declining cable channels from its growing streaming business. Sports, in this case, is meant to help slow linear’s decline, even as it is leaned on to try and boost streaming.
The new linear division will be anchored by sports and news, led by CNN, with the company’s entertainment focus remaining at HBO and on Max.
And at NBCUniversal’s cable channels (most going to SpinCo), Olympics events like boxing, cycling and soccer were frequently front and center on the likes of USA and CNBC. Golf, of course, lived on Golf Channel.
Or consider Nickelodeon. The quintessential kids cable channel, Nickelodeon is part of the Paramount portfolio. And while the company has sports rights, its hoards them for CBS and Paramount+, leaving the cable channels high and dry.
That is until the NFL expressed a desire to have its games appeal to younger kids and families. The result was a Nickelodeon-branded NFL altcast, a new annual tradition that seems to get bigger and bigger every season, and has the added benefit of bringing live NFL games to Nickelodeon.
Even as companies like WBD and Peacock lean into streaming (WBD streams most of its sports on Max via a simulcast, as does NBC with Peacock), the bread and butter for sports remains tethered to the pay-TV bundle, so the more sports companies can cram onto their channels, the better.
“We cannot get away from the fact that the sports rights are still extremely important to our linear channels, and we’re absolutely going to respect that,” said WBD chief revenue and strategy officer Bruce Campbell Nov. 13 during a discussion at the Paley Center for Media in New York.
But the move to bolster cable channels with live sports also clashes with the stated ambitions of the leagues and sports owners, all of whom have watched the erosion of cable TV with fear and concern for their own futures.
Leagues want rights fees to keep growing, and they want their fan bases to expand, not shrink. And so increasingly, sports rights owner are seeking the reach of broadcast TV, paired with the younger-skewing audiences of streaming platforms.
Just look at the NBA’s new rights deals, which kick in next year.
“We’re going from 15 broadcast exposures to 75,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said at the Paley Center Nov. 14. “What’s interesting in our new deals is that every single national game will be available on a streaming service, and that’s a very small percentage of our games now. 10 years ago, when we did our last set of television deals, cable slash satellite was 100 million plus homes. Now, in terms of pure cable, it’s probably something like 50 million. I mean, there’s the virtual MVPDs, so it extends beyond that, but there’s a large swath of the United States who currently can’t get our games based on the technology out there.”
The NFL is similarly laser-focused on broadcast reach and streaming depth, hence its deal for Christmas Day games on Netflix this year.
But for owners of cable channels – particularly cable channels that don’t have a long history of sports programming – live sports, whatever they can get, are one way to remain as relevant as possible in an ecosystem in distress and with rich new streaming bidders for sports.
“As the old pay TV bundle shrinks, new bidders — the streamers — have emerged,” says Jon Miller, CEO of Integrated Media Co. “This is leading to a have and have not world; entertainment plus sports vs. entertainment only. The big dollars that the streamers spent over the last decade for entertainment only is now going to both entertainment and sports. The legacy networks have to take a greater portion of their content spend and shift it to sports to defend their rights deals. More sports dollars equals less entertainment spending.”
For those lucky channels that have long played in the sports space, streaming is the next frontier. ESPN is hard at work on a “flagship” streaming service set to launch next August … though pay-TV subscribers will likely get access with their bundles.
“It’s all part of our ESPN strategy to serve sports fans of all kinds, new or established, casual or die hard, wherever they want to watch, read or listen to sports,” says John Lasker, senior VP of ESPN+.
Or as Cordella explained, the deal for Comcast to spin out its cable channels was “probably just a microcosm of our larger industry.”
“When NBCU was first purchased by Comcast, [the cable channels] were the crown jewel, and now we’re looking at things a bit differently in this fragmented media world that we’re in,” he added.
The end result is sports propping up what’s left of a shrinking cable bundle, while simultaneously forging into streaming to gain a foothold on the next frontier.