CABLEFAX DAILY notes Tennis Channel teamed with distribution partners Verizon FiOS and NCTC to "launch its 1st" TV Everywhere app yesterday, the opening day of the U.S. Open. The Tennis Channel Everywhere app, "free to all Apple and Android users regardless of whether they currently subscribe to the net, will have a new authentication feature that allows subs of distribution partners to access the net's linear stream." The net expects to "expand the feature to additional distributors in a few months" (CABLEFAX DAILY, 8/27).
BAD NEWS BEAR? In Chicago, Rick Morrissey writes of former NFLer Brian Urlacher becoming an analyst for FS1, "I thought I must have heard wrong. ... I never got the feeling he would have reached for a bucket if a reporter's hair were on fire." Morrissey: "Maybe he will be great on TV." When he was "in a good mood with the local media, which wasn't often, he could be entertaining and illuminating." But most of the time he "grunted one-word answers." As time goes on, "very few people will recall how Urlacher treated the media in Chicago" (CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, 8/27).
FINDING A NICHE: In Chicago, Danny Ecker cited a source as saying that Silver Chalice Ventures, though "not profitable, is on pace to generate" $100M in revenue this year. The company was formed in '09 to help clients such as the ACC, Mountain West and others "monetize a small but growing part of their media business: digital rights." Silver Chalice has "pursued a different model apart from the television set: producing part of a conference's sports content for the Web only, then selling ads for it and distributing it to smartphones, tablets, laptops and anywhere else that mobile users might watch or read a story." Silver Chalice "signs contracts with conferences to share sponsorship revenue" (CHICAGOBUSINESS.com, 8/26).
HARD KNOCK LIFE: THE MMQB's Peter King wrote, "I think I'm just not feeling Hard Knocks: Return to Bengaldom this year. No buzz. No real excitement. I do like the inside stuff, and the control I see Marvin Lewis showing over his team, but there's not a story that tugs at me" (MMQB.SI.com, 8/26).
