The history book chapters about the end of cable will be donned with the logos of Versant and Discovery Global, the spinoff cable entities effectively euthanized by their media conglomerate parents at Comcast and Warner Bros. And the biggest victims of this strange last gasp for cable will be sports fans.
Each company’s leadership told us as much this week.
When Versant, the NBCUniversal “SpinCo” that includes MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network and Golf Channel, was announced, it was clear immediately that it would run afoul of existing NBC Sports broadcast deals. During the Olympics, for example, NBC frequently airs live midday qualifiers and less-popular events on CNBC and USA Network. The solution for most of these issues will be for NBC to pull these sports broadcasts onto Peacock, the streaming service that it retained in the split. With the company’s new NBA media deal for example, games will only air on NBC’s broadcast network and Peacock.
That won’t be the case for the WNBA, whose rights were stitched into the NBA’s in last year’s rights deals. From the initial press release announcing the WNBA side of the contract, NBC stated that regular season and postseason games would air on USA Network. This week, NBA VP of broadcast scheduling Gene Li acknowledged to Sports Media Watch that the league is “freshening up the deal terms” with NBC, presumably to include Versant and USA.
Reading between the lines of Li’s admission, WNBA games are still likely to air on USA Network. And based on the league’s schedule, that could include the Finals. Setting aside the frustrations the WNBA might feel from this arrangement, with premier Finals games appearing across multiple networks owned by separate companies, it also will suck for the fan. The spirit of the NBC deal with the NBA was that fans could watch games without cable. With a Peacock subscription, all the games would be in one place.
Because Comcast opted to separate NBC and USA into separate companies since that time, WNBA fans will pay the price. Beyond the effort required to keep up with where each game might be over the course of the postseason, they also now must have a cable subscription to watch it all.
A similar chord is being struck by Discovery Global. The Warner Bros. spinoff will include CNN, TNT and Discovery. What that means for sports fans is that TNT Sports broadcasts, which include the NHL’s Stanley Cup playoffs, the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, the MLB postseason, and the College Football Playoff, will no longer stream on HBO Max, as they have for the past several years. The spinoff’s CEO, Gunnar Wiedenfels, announced this week that it will launch its own streaming service.
Perhaps this simply means that sports fans will ditch HBO Max, but in actuality it further bolsters the need for cable. Big-time sports fans will need to pay for this new streaming service (which hardly has enough content to stand on its own) or go back to cable for TNT, TBS and truTV.
Meanwhile, other broadcasters are pushing sports fans away from cable. Plenty of major sports will air exclusively on Prime Video, Peacock, Paramount+ and Netflix in the coming years. For a while, it seemed as if fans could leave cable behind and still catch everything they wanted.
But Versant and Discovery Global still carry enough must-watch sports to matter. Ideally, they can find deals sooner than later to bundle their sports content with a bigger distributor or streamer. In the meantime, sports fans suffer. Coupled with the ability to authenticate a cable subscription with ESPN’s new app and Fox One, 2025 has seen legacy cable companies put up stronger defenses against the end of cable.
The decision to spin off cable networks from the more forward-looking assets at NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. is a signal in and of itself that cable is on its last legs. But these companies are not about to let the still-lucrative cable business die off quietly.
For the foreseeable future, fans will continue to pay the price for fragmentation in live sports.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.