The Ivy League has pulled most of its games back from ONE World Sports

ONE World Sports has lost some more future programming. We wrote in November about how the network furloughed many employees and was in a sale process, with some ominous signs on the horizon despite their CEO’s insistence that “the network has an extremely bright future.” Now, the Ivy League has pulled back most of their men’s basketball inventory that was set to air on OWS. The current official Ivy League schedule has just one game set for OWS, Brown-Columbia on Feb. 4, and that game is also going to be broadcast on the Ivy League Digital Network. That’s a big step down from the 10 initially set for OWS, and maybe that one game will move as well. At the moment, OWS appears to be mostly airing reruns from earlier in the year, and often at times that don’t match their listings.

Where have those games gone to? Well, many of them are now streaming-only, on the Ivy League Digital Network, ESPN3, or both. American Sports Network has the rights to three Ivy League games in February, and it’s possible that they could pick up more, but for now, the Ivy League is going to have a lot less games shown on traditional TV. Of course, OWS wasn’t available on many providers either, so this may actually increase visibility for some who have access to ESPN3 but not OWS. However, the lessened TV appearances may still be a negative for the Ivy League.

This raises yet further questions about OWS. There’s been very little on them since our end-of-November report, and their website and programming schedule haven’t been updated since then. The listed programming schedule is for the “week of Nov. 28,” while their last posted story is an Asian Champions League piece from Nov. 24. Their Twitter account (20,500 followers!) also hasn’t tweeted since Nov. 24, and their Facebook page (172,333 likes!) hasn’t been updated since Nov. 22. (It is full of unaddressed comments about their programming schedule not lining up with what’s actually being aired, though.) Abandoned social media accounts and old stories? That sure sounds familiar. Perhaps the sale process is still ongoing, and perhaps someone will step in, buy them, and get things back to normalcy. For the moment, though, they seem to have mostly disappeared.