Over the last year or so, The CW has emerged as an unexpected player in the live sports marketplace. And if comments made this week are any indication, the network won’t be slowing down on adding more rights any time soon.
On Thursday, The CW president Dennis Miller said that the company is looking to bolster its schedule of sports content even further. Specifically, Sunday afternoon content is something being caught, per Deadline.
Sundays are programmed with LIV tournaments part of the year, but Miller said that day is under consideration for a more regular sports component. “We’d like to fill in Sunday afternoons with quality, highly viewed kinds of sports,” he said. “We can’t compete, obviously, for the NFL as it’s been announced this week [by Netflix] or NBA, we won’t be in those conversations to date. But we’d like to find something for Sunday and we’d like to find a nice companion piece to Inside the NFL.”
And while there may not be properties out there searching for a new home, Miller said that The CW is “in active discussions with ESPN and other companies” about sublicensing linear rights to games.
While exclusive rights deals are always being considered, Miller said execs are in active discussions with ESPN and other companies about potentially grabbing linear broadcast rights to properties that live elsewhere. A template for that has emerged with sports like the MLS, which created a new streaming venture with Apple but then cut a linear deal with Fox. Miller said those arrangements could be game-changers for The CW and its affiliates, which had subsisted on a diet of 10 to 12 hours of originals every week.
“A lot of the other players in sports have too much sports than they can actually play in broadcast,” Miller said. “There’s this tension between, ‘I could get a huge check from a streamer, but no one will be able to find it anywhere’ and you get full reach, everyone in the country, for your college or your particular sport or league here.” CW execs have been proposing to ESPN and others, “Hey, why don’t we carve off a set of games and events here that we can put on and give the full reach of broadcast TV. You’re going to see more partnerships like that.”
With respect to ESPN’s portfolio of rights, college sports seem like the most likely that the company would be willing to sublicense. Through its deals with various conferences, ESPN airs thousands of live college events across many sports and simply can’t air them all at the same time.
Sublicensing some events on Sundays in the fall to counterprogram the NFL makes plenty of sense for The CW. Last fall, networks experimented with airing non-NFL live sports programming in “NFL-adjacent windows” to some degree of success. Since The CW is boxed out of the NFL, why not try to sublicense some of those live rights that would normally be relegated to a lower-tier cable network or shuffled onto a streaming platform?
The CW has added the rights to LIV Golf, Inside the NFL, a package of Raycom-produced ACC football and basketball games, NASCAR’s Xfinity Series, and WWE NXT over the last year-plus. Just this week, it agreed to a deal for 11 of 13 Oregon State and Washington State home football games this fall.
[Deadline]
