In case you were demanding more pickleball in your life, the Tennis Channel and the Professional Pickleball Association have you covered.
On Thursday, the two parties announced the launch of Pickleballtv (or PBTV), a 24-hour network airing “30 top-level live PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball (MLP) team events, original programming and a weekly studio news show.”
Here are more details on the content featured on PBTV.
Making its debut during the PPA Tour National Championships in Dallas this week, Pickleballtv will most often show live or encore match coverage featuring the best professional players in the world battling at the most important events in the sport. Interspersed with this competition are Getting to Know You features on the men and women who make up the PPA Tour and MLP, stars like Ben Johns, Anna Leigh Waters and Catherine Parenteau. There will also be instructional programs that help amateurs understand and improve their own on-court capabilities, with episodes on serve strategy, dinking, volley drills, midcourt play, backhands, shifting and overheads, among others. A celebrity pickleball show is in the works, as is a weekly studio news show.
PBTV is now available on both Fubo and Amazon Freevee.
Incredibly, this is the *second* free ad-supported television (FAST) network focusing on pickleball. Back in April, a network called PickleTV launched. It’s available on Freevee, Fubo, and Sling, and was created in partnership between SPACEMOB and Championship Court.
In recent years, various networks have tried to make pickleball the latest thing to swallow up viewers, often citing the sport’s growing participation. Despite enthusiasm for televised pickleball in those circles, it hasn’t particularly translated to the viewing audience. Over the summer, the New York Times explored the chasm between pickleball’s playing audience and the audience watching, noting that April’s Pickleball Slam “borrowed its stars from another sport.” Viewership for this week’s Celebrity Pickleball Showdown on ESPN was much smaller, and actually had a smaller audience than the broadcasts airing both before and after the event.
Tennis Channel launching a FAST network, rather than a traditional cable network, focusing on pickleball is probably a wise move, especially as cable bills continue to climb and carriage battles become longer running and more bitter. It’s also probably far cheaper to launch and maintain, and if the network flames out, winding it down would likely be far cheaper and less time-consuming. And hey, if PickleballTV is a smash hit, that could potentially encourage networks to invest more in pickleball in the future.
