Media Notes
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NBA Partners With Tom.com To Offer
Content On Sites In China, Hong Kong, Taiwan |
The NBA has inked a multi-year deal with Tom.com to launch interactive features and video programs on its localized Web sites in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The sites will include online webcasts that allow viewers to watch live games and Chinese-language talk shows daily, as well as gaming and fantasy basketball options and networking capabilities. Through the partnership with Tom, the NBA also will link its basketball sites with Tom-Skype to further circulate content among users (NBA).
OFF THE MATS: In N.Y., Bill Carter reports the CW Network "seems to have developed both a brand identity and some promising ratings in the first two months of the television season." The CW until this year "had turned over its Friday to professional wrestling, a proven audience-getter -- though one not especially made up of teenage girls." CW President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff said giving up wrestling this year was a "very hard decision," as the programming was "popular." But Ostroff added, "Wrestling had not been beneficial in bringing the viewers we wanted into our schedule, and vice versa." Carter notes WWE wrestling "has moved on to the even smaller MyNetwork TV" (N.Y. TIMES, 10/25).
BEER BAN: In Indianapolis, Robert King noted college football games on the Big Ten Network are "televised without commercials for beer." But when "games featuring [Big Ten] teams go national -- on ESPN, ABC or other networks -- the beer ads flow freely." Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said that conference reps "haven't pressed for a national beer ban, despite a decision to start its Big Ten Network -- without beer ads -- in 2007." Delany: "You might say that is inconsistent. But that is OK. It is a position that has evolved over time" (INDIANAPOLIS STAR, 10/26).
WHO'S NUMBER ONE? NEW YORK magazine's Leitch & DeLessio wrote under the header, "ESPN Pretty Much Making Its Policies Up As It Goes Along." ESPN in April pulled a scheduled podcast between columnist Bill Simmons and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, but ESPN's Rick Reilly last week wrote a column about drafting a fantasy football team with Obama. Leitch & DeLessio wrote, "This whole Obama/Reilly/Simmons business brings up the question, again, of who the top dog is over there. Simmons is easily the site’s most popular columnist, but Reilly is the 'name' to people who watch a LOT of golf on television, and those are the people who bring the advertisers. (And Reilly’s salary.) And considering how dismissive Reilly has been in the past toward Simmons and 'other bloggers,' one wonders if, at some point, a blowup will have to come" (NYMAG.com, 10/24).
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