ESPN, Versus Pull Big Hoops Viewership

Saturday night was a big TV night for college basketball on ESPN, which recorded a season high 3.291 million viewers for its Big East Tournament final between Connecticut and Louisville and 2.351 million viewers for its Big 12 Tournament final between Kansas and Texas. The Big East final was up 14.6 ...

DirecTV Launching truTV HD For Tournament

DirecTV will carry truTV's NCAA men's basketball tournament games in HD under the terms of a deal the satellite operator finalized with Turner Sports yesterday. Sources said DirecTV has committed to launch the HD version of the channel later this year, but is committed to carrying all the ...

Tags: Media, DirecTV

ESPN Execs To Meet With IOC About Rights

Top ESPN production execs are meeting the Olympic broadcasting execs in Madrid tomorrow, the latest signal that ESPN is interested in bidding for the '14 Sochi and '16 Rio de Janeiro Games. ESPN VP/Int'l Development Rob Simmelkjaer, the net's point person on the Olympic bid, Senior VP/Content M ...

Tags: Media, ESPN, IOC

NBC Putting Sports Content On Versus

NBC is putting its programming on Versus for the first time next week, when the cable channel re-runs three Notre Dame football games on St. Patrick's Day, from 5:00-11:00pm ET. The channel also plans to carry Notre Dame's spring football game, marking the first time the game will be televised natio ...

Judge Overturns NFL Media Fee Decision

U.S. District Court Judge David Doty late yesterday overturned a decision that would have allowed the NFL to use $4B in media fees during a potential lockout later this year. He said he planned to hold hearings to set damages. Doty's decision comes as the NFL and NFLPA are engaged in federally o ...

FSN Paying Tribute To John Wooden

FSN plans to honor late UCLA men's basketball coach John Wooden during its two Pac-10 telecasts this weekend – Arizona-UCLA on Saturday and Washington State-Washington on Sunday. The network has produced a series of vignettes that will run through the course of the game. Attendees at Pauley Pavili ...

Versus Airing March 3 UFC Event In 3D

Versus plans to produce its March 3 UFC event in 3D, making it the first time a UFC match will be presented in that format. The telecast, which will be sponsored by Comcast Xfinity, will be shot from the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville at 9:00pm ET. The 3D telecast will have a completely differ ...

Tags: Media, UFC

Bill Simmons Details New Web Project

It still does not have a name and it has not hired a top editor, but Bill Simmons unveiled details of his new project, which will be a website that will be 70% sports and 30% pop culture. It is expected to launch in late April or mid-May. And while it will be fully owned by ESPN, its eventual name w ...

Tags: Media, ESPN

Bill Simmons To Launch New Site

It still does not have a name and it has not hired a top editor, but Bill Simmons unveiled details of his new project, which will be a new website that will be 70% sports and 30% pop culture. It will launch later this spring. And while it will be fully owned by ESPN, it will not carry the ESPN bra ...

Flood Impacting NHL Coverage On NBC, Versus

Last Thursday, less than two weeks after Sam Flood became Exec Producer of NBC Sports and Versus, he hosted a conference call with everyone who works on NHL games for the two networks. Flood's purpose was to outline his philosophy for how the games should look on television and start to develop comm ...

Tags: Media, NHL, NBC, Versus