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For Turner, the Team Stream option adds up

It’s easy to see why Turner Sports will use its all-encompassing Team Stream approach again this weekend. It makes business sense.

Turner reaches more viewers when it carries the Final Four and NCAA championship games across TBS, TNT and truTV, essentially creating a programming roadblock across three national networks.

After all, TBS, which will carry the NCAA championship game for the first time next week, is in 22.649 million fewer homes than CBS’s broadcast network, according to Nielsen. But Turner can make up that difference with its Team Stream approach, which spreads out its coverage.

Turner Sports used the three-channel concept for both of last year’s Final Four games.
It features TBS carrying the main telecast, TNT carrying a Team Stream game favoring one team, and truTV carrying a game favoring the other.

The combined viewership number from all three channels, which is all that advertisers really care about, should rival broadcast TV. Viewers across all three networks will see the same ads during the same breaks, which is the main reason Turner is rolling out the

three feeds.

This will be the third year of the dedicated Final Four team casts, but it marks the first time that Monday’s championship game will use the Team Stream. Not coincidentally, this year also marks the first time the championship game will not be available on broadcast TV.

The Team Stream garnered sizable audiences for Turner. Last year, for example, the Kentucky-Wisconsin Final Four game averaged 16.8 million viewers on TBS Saturday night, plus another 4.5 million viewers on the Kentucky Team Stream via TNT and another 1.3 million viewers on the Wisconsin Team Stream via truTV.

“There’s no difference in our mind between cable and broadcast,” Chris Simko, CBS senior vice president of sales and marketing, told my colleague Michael Smith last week. CBS, of course, sells the tournament ad time in conjunction with Turner. “In fact, we had a terrific ratings story for Final Four Saturday last year, and we continue to see growth in our audience numbers.”

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What makes Team Stream so unique, though, is that it has become more than a bottom line business play. It has created on-air stars and generated social media buzz. During the last two Final Fours, for example, I could not turn away from the telecast favoring Kentucky because former Wildcat Rex Chapman was so entertaining as he gleefully provided pro-Wildcat analysis for Turner and, on occasion, broke into the Kentucky fight song.

It’s not just Chapman. Former Florida football player James Bates stood out as a true Gator fan when he was a courtside reporter in 2014, reporting from the student section and in the middle of the cheerleader squad. Turner was happy with former Connecticut basketball player Swin Cash, who worked the sidelines for UConn’s Final Four game that same year.

“Philosophically, it’s important to create options for fans,” said Craig Barry, Turner Sports’ executive vice president of production and chief content officer. “It’s about creating an experience for people who are directly connected to the teams that are playing in the tournament. To be able to give a gateway of a higher degree of access and information to that particular team.”

The popularity of these alternative feeds represents one reason why Tara August was, perhaps, the country’s most popular sports media executive last week. As Turner Sports vice president of talent relations, she’s the one tapped to staff the Team Stream telecasts, with Barry and Turner senior staff giving the final sign-off.

Early last week, August laughed as she recounted the seemingly endless stream of text messages, emails and pitches she received from alums who still had teams playing in the tournament. When deciding on the type of talent that works, August looks for specific attributes (“Why are they relevant? Where are they now? Do they have an interesting story? Have they done television?”). But she also is receptive to pitches from die-hard alums, and she watches as much video of prospective broadcasters as she can.

“That’s the fun part,” August said. “We have a system. We tell people to send us their ideas to us — crazy or not — because we don’t want to forget about anybody, especially the smaller schools, where it’s a little bit harder to find alumni.”

August and her team spent the four days of the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight holed up in a viewing room at Turner Studios in Atlanta, texting and emailing prospective broadcasters, agents and schools’ sports information directors to lock in talent.

Going into the Sweet 16, August and her team had a big foam board filled with up to four broadcast possibilities for each team. As the week wore on and teams dropped out of the tournament, the board became less cluttered.

By Easter night, when the Final Four is set, August hoped to have each Team Stream broadcaster identified.

“It’s at the Elite Eight stage that we’re ready-set-go,” August said. “That’s when we say, here is our final list of who we want to be the Team Stream broadcasters. At that point, we’re making calls and getting everybody under contract or a verbal agreement, so that after the games on Sunday, we know exactly who we’re going to plug-and-play with for the Final Four.”

August was tight-lipped about who Turner is considering for specific teams. She had Chapman ready to go again if Kentucky made another run, but the Wildcats lost in the second round.

She also planned to reach out to Magic Johnson if Michigan State made it, but the Spartans suffered one of the biggest upsets in tourney history when they lost to Middle Tennessee State.

“My heart gets broken because I root for some schools,” August said. “Nothing would have been greater than to have MSU back and talk to Magic Johnson again.”

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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