Weekly Roundup – February 27th, 2024

"Earlier this month Walt Disney’s ESPN, FOX, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced they were forming a joint venture to create a new sports-centric streaming service that would bundle together the three media giant’s content. Today, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed that this new service will be bundled with Max. Disney has already confirmed that you will be able to subscribe to this new streaming service through services like Hulu and ESPN+.
The joint venture will have its own leadership, and the three companies will each one a one-third stake in the business, which hasn’t gotten off the ground. But the streaming service will bundle together their cable channels like ESPN, FOX, Fox Sports, TNT, and TBS, as well as select other streaming content."

"Prop betting on individual college players was removed Friday from the list of legal sports bets in Ohio.
In January 2023, University of Dayton basketball coach Anthony Grant spoke about online threats his players had received from gamblers.
“These young men, we’re asking them to sacrifice quite a bit for us to be able to do what we do and enjoy what we enjoy. So I’m just asking all the Flyer fans just to understand that we’re dealing with 18-, 21-, 22-year-olds, and it’s about them. This is about them.
“When we have people that make it about themselves and attack kids because of their own agenda … it sickens me,” Grant told reporters.
Gov. Mike DeWine cited these threats when encouraging a change in colleges sports betting in Ohio."

"For sports fans, the golden age of content is now. ESPN reported that multiple talk show programs set new viewership records last month. Athletes are producing podcasts and documentaries to give audiences entree behind the scenes. A Deloitte survey shows that around half of Gen Z sports fans use social media to expand their communities while watching live events.
But even with all this new content, traditional sports journalism is slowly disappearing. The New York Times dissolved its sports desk. The Los Angeles Times laid off several sports reporters and stopped day-to-day coverage. Even Sports Illustrated announced mass layoffs, prompting questions about its future.
...
Kai Ryssdal: There is an incongruity between the hundreds of billions of dollars in the aggregate — I’m sure it’s close to half a trillion or trillion dollars — in sports globally and the austerity that is hitting sports journalism, right? We’re seeing that all the time. And I mentioned that just as a segue into a question about ESPN and the NFL. ESPN, one of the leading sports journalism organizations of the last — I don’t even know how long they’ve been around — 40 years, something like that. They’re now thinking about letting the NFL buy a stake. What does that tell you?"