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Home Team Sports gives digital side a chance to grow

The Fox Sports-owned Home Team Sports has built a nice business selling national advertising schedules for all of the country’s regional sports networks. RSNs handle all the local ad inventory, and HTS sells the national spots.

Now, the group is looking to expand into the digital arena and is setting up a group called HTS Interactive that will focus only on digital sales.

HTS is hiring six senior-level account executives who will be based on both coasts (Los Angeles and New York) as it tries to increase its digital ad sales, which make up a low-single-digit percentage of HTS sales. The group will sell around RSNs’ digital video offerings. HTS also has signed digital-only companies Campus Insiders and Sporting News Media as clients and is in discussions to rep SendtoNews.

HTS executives say they want to increase digital ad sales to the high single digits and believe that setting up HTS Interactive is a way to do it.

“Digital has not grown on the same track as television because we’ve really done digital as a television-plus-digital one-off as part of our sales effort,” said Kyle Sherman, HTS executive vice president. “The interactive division will give us the chance to grow the digital side the way the television side grows.”

That effort will be helped by the continued rollout of in-market streaming. The NBA is set to start its second season with local streams in a couple of months. MLB is close to signing a deal with Fox Sports that would take effect for the 2016 season.

“The decision to start up is independent of any future streaming deals that could occur,” Sherman said. “Our business plan basically looks at all the digital assets we currently have through our representation agreements. We already have a business plan afoot before you even consider streaming.”

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