Fans of major NBC sports franchises, such as the NHL and the Premier League, will have to follow them to a new home.
NBCUniversal will close its NBCSN sports network and move some of its major sporting properties to the U.S. network in a move that executives believe will boost the general entertainment channel’s economy at a time when new video streaming hubs are underway. attracting a larger audience. The company told its distributors that it plans to shut down NBCSN in late 2021, according to a person familiar with the matter.
NBCU’s main sporting properties include Nascar racing, National Hockey League competitions and English Premier League football. The United States is not going to become an all-sports network, he warned, but it may function more like WarnerMedia’s TNT, which has built a durable franchise with its rights to broadcast National Basketball Association games to this media company. It was not clear whether the change would affect NBC Sports employees; the division recently underwent staff cuts as part of a restructuring of NBCUniversal, as it faces the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The US has been one of the top five cable entertainment brands for over twenty years, constantly expanding our list and finding ways to excite our viewers through engaging stories and iconic personalities,” said Frances Berwick, president of entertainment networks NBCU, in a statement provided after the change was known. “We remain committed to the original entertainment programming and believe that top-notch live sports will complement the broad, premium US, unscripted and WWE script, allowing us to engage our passion, crossing the audience more deeply and with greater urgency.
The United States has always had a sporting lineage. In its early days, when it was launched by entrepreneur Kay Koplovitz and subsequently jointly owned by MCA and Viacom, the network had rights deals at various times with Major League Baseball, the NHL and the NBA, and its nightly schedule was often dominated sports programs. The US has held boxing matches on Tuesday nights for more than a decade. But in 2004, most of its sporting operations were merged into NBC Sports, when NBC bought Vivendi Universal.
In a new era, sports may be more essential to maintaining the health of a traditional medium of general entertainment like the United States. Cable networks have suffered from the shift from audiences to streaming video hubs to the type of high-caliber script series that has long been a staple of the cable. While putting more emphasis on their own streaming hubs, major media outlets like NBCUniversal, Disney and others need to keep the large live audiences that cable and satellite advertisers and distributors want. Sports and news programming continues to attract these crowds.
More to come …