It looks like NBCSN’s original general sports studio programming will be limited to Sunday nights for the foreseeable future.
Awful Announcing has learned that the network has ended the television version of SportsDash, their midday sports show, after a little more than 10 months on air. The network released a statement to AA Thursday morning:
“Yahoo Sports and NBC Sports have agreed to redeploy resources to jointly produce SportsDash content that will run on our respective digital platforms. In addition, as we hit NFL season we wanted to add resources to our successful Fantasy Football Live franchise adding shows on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.”
The show was a partnership with Yahoo (officially titled SportsDash with Yahoo Sports) that featured a combination of the website and the network’s talent discussing sports on a daily basis. Carolyn Manno and Dave Briggs were the regular co-hosts. Talented Yahoo writers with sizable followings like Greg Wyshynski and Pat Forde were among the group of contributors.
I gave it a positive review when it premiered back in August (during the great deluge of sports programs premiering) and the general consensus around AA was that the show was fine (I personally think Carolyn Manno’s a talent the network should use more) but stuck in a timeslot where it wasn’t really going to ever gain traction. Episodes of SportsDash were drawing as many as 53,000 viewers but as few as 5,000 for any given show in the first half of the year. Since mid-June, the most recent 14 episodes had averaged a paltry 19,800 viewers. Months ago, the show had its time on air shortened from 60 minutes to a half hour.
You can argue NBCSN gave it almost a year to find traction, but it marks another original program on that network and Fox Sports 1 dying in less than a year. Perhaps the next time any network (including ESPN) launches something, the goal should be that it can last more than a year without hurting the network’s bottom line. That way we can find out when audiences truly aren’t catching onto them.
NBCSN won’t remain dormant on general sports studio programming for long, as the network will launch NBC Sunday Sports Report on August 17th.
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