In a move to strengthen its sports offerings,\u00a0Warner Bros. Discovery\u00a0has signed a five-year sublicensing deal with Disney\u2019s\u00a0ESPN to broadcast first-round and quarterfinal College Football Playoff games.<\/p>\n
Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s TNT will carry two first-round games this year and next year and will add two additional quarterfinals games starting in 2026. Disney also has an option to sublicense a semifinals game to Warner Bros. Discovery starting with the third year of the deal if it chooses, according to people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n
Disney will keep exclusivity on the championship game throughout the terms of the contract, which runs through 2031, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are private. Disney\u00a0is paying\u00a0about $1.3 billion per year for rights to the entire College Football Playoffs.<\/p>\n
The new 12-team College Football Playoff slate debuts in December, replacing a four-team tournament that began in 2014. Under the new format, the top four teams get byes while teams seeded No. 5 through No. 12 play first-round games at the home stadium of the higher-ranked team.<\/p>\n
ESPN will produce the games and primarily use ESPN talent for the broadcasts, which will be TNT branded, said the people familiar. As part of the sublicensing agreement, Warner Bros. Discovery is paying ESPN an average of \u201chundreds of millions\u201d per year for the games over the course of five years, though less in years one and two when it only has two games per year, said the people.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is exciting to add TNT Sports, another highly respected broadcaster, to the College Football Playoff family,\u201d said Bill Hancock, executive director of the College Football Playoff, in a statement. \u201cSports fans across the country are intimately familiar with their work across a wide variety of sports properties over the past two decades, and we look forward to seeing what new and innovative ideas they bring to the promotion and delivery of these games.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s first round of the CFP will take place on Dec. 20 and 21.<\/p>\n
Warner Bros. Discovery plans to add the games to its Max sports tier. The company is bulking up on live sports while in the middle of a difficult negotiation with the National Basketball Association for a package of live games.<\/p>\n
TNT has been a partner to the NBA for nearly 40 years but risks losing the games to\u00a0Comcast-owned NBCUniversal and\u00a0Amazon\u00a0if Warner Bros. Discovery\u00a0decides to forgo\u00a0its matching rights, or, potentially, if the league opts to ignore those rights. (NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News.)<\/p>\n
College football is one of the most popular programs on television. Michigan\u2019s semifinals victory over Alabama last year drew an average audience of 27.2 million viewers \u2014 the most watched non-NFL sporting event since 2018.<\/p>\n
Even if Warner Bros. Discovery loses the NBA, it will now have both CFP and the NBA until mid-2025, in addition to several weeks of games for the NCAA men\u2019s basketball March Madness tournament, men\u2019s and women\u2019s\u00a0soccer,\u00a0NASCAR,\u00a0Major League Baseball\u00a0and the\u00a0National Hockey League. That should help the company in its upcoming carriage renewal deals for TNT and its other cable networks.<\/p>\n
ESPN sublicensing to Warner Bros. Discovery also keeps all of the CFP games on\u00a0Venu Sports, the new sports streaming service\u00a0that\u2019s being developed\u00a0by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery and is expected to launch in the fall.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In a move to strengthen its sports offerings,\u00a0Warner Bros. Discovery\u00a0has signed a five-year sublicensing deal with Disney\u2019s\u00a0ESPN to broadcast first-round and quarterfinal College Football Playoff games. Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s TNT will carry two first-round games this year and next year and will add two additional quarterfinals games starting in 2026. Disney also has an option […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}