The Wide World of the TV Sports Business

It's been a busy week for the TVND Sports Desk

A few Friday items before you get your weekend started. As it turns out, all are from “The Wide World of TV Sports,” as it were. But all have meaning to the business of sports being on television.

The first headline from this past week was the surprise announcement that Roger Goodell, the normally affable Commissioner of the National Football League, was putting himself on the equivalent of the “unable to perform” list and was declining an invitation to appear before a June 10th hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee about the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. The committee’s chairman is convening the hearing, the always pugnacious Jim Jordan of Ohio.

And for his part, commissioner Goodell is skipping the hearing, citing a note from his lawyer stating that he can’t appear “due to litigation related to the topic of the hearing.” What that means in English is that the commish doesn’t want to have to defend the practice of moving NFL games over to places like Amazon, Peacock and Netflix, which wasn’t quite imagined some 65 years ago when the Sports Broadcasting Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The law is what gives the NFL (and other professional sports leagues) their limited exemptions to the nation’s antitrust laws. That’s what allows the league to collectively bargain the TV rights to all 32 teams’ regular- and post-season games. But the law was written back when a whopping three national networks were the only way that fans could watch professional football games on television.

Needless to say, the TV landscape has changed just a bit since those days in the Kennedy administration.

And some members of Congress do not like that watching some games now requires multiple paid subscriptions to streaming services. To be clear, they weren’t thrilled about games being on cable when ESPN picked up its first NFL package. That little problem was addressed by allowing a broadcast TV station in each team’s home market to air the ESPN game over the air—for a more-than-modest fee, of course. (The same solution is still used for any game not part of the broadcast network’s NFL schedules.)

The Trump administration has put the league under scrutiny for the ongoing shift of NFL games to streaming services in recent seasons. First, the Department of Justice was reported to be investigating the league’s potential “anticompetitive practices.” Then the Federal Communications Commission asked for “public comments” from consumers about their experiences with the shift of NFL games from broadcast TV to streaming.

So naturally, Congress wants to ride in and get its members’ faces on the record, asking some tough questions of the league and some experts on the topic.

Apparently, those experts will include Outkick.com founder and talk radio mouthpiece Clay Travis, who is always down for some of the rational, reasonable discussions sports talk radio is known for. (Why yes, that is sarcasm right there.)

For his part, Commissioner Goodell’s lawyer explained the league’s position on the subject of the hearing: “The NFL’s decision to license a few more games to widely adopted streaming services is simply a reflection that those platforms now offer significantly more reach than the current pay TV ecosystem and that broadcast television remains the foundation of our media distribution.”

He could have added (but didn’t): “Until those streaming guys pay us a lot more money for our product.”

In fact, the matter being litigated is what will keep the Commissioner from appearing on Capitol Hill. It centers around the league’s popular “Sunday Ticket” package, where you can pay to watch every game, on every Sunday during the regular season. “Sunday Ticket” moved from its original home for 29 years on the DirecTV satellite service to the YouTube TV streaming service in 2023. (That’s YouTubeTV, the paid streaming service — not the free YouTube.com featuring all those cooking videos.)

The lawsuit in question has a twisting history. It began as a class action lawsuit against both the NFL and DirecTV covering the years from 2011 to 2023. The central claim was that the league and the satellite company wouldn’t sell either individual games or just a single team’s season (which many fans would want). Instead, it forced subscribers to buy a package that included all of the teams’ games every Sunday. In June 2024, a California jury found against the NFL in the case and awarded some $4.8 billion in damages. But two months later, the Federal judge in the case tossed the verdict on a technicality, claiming that two witnesses used flawed economic data to calculate damages before the jury. The case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

And so, it’s a “no-go” for the Commish to sit before Congress on June 10th.

Also this past week, headline number two was an interesting development about watching the games of another professional sports league on television, and this time it’s the Stanley Cup Championship of the National Hockey League that is underway, featuring the two teams from the traditional Hockey towns of Las Vegas and Raleigh?

So much for the growth of Canada’s greatest sports export.

The NHL’s championship series is airing on ESPN and ABC. That would be all well and good, but just as the Stanley Cup was getting underway, on June 1st, The E.W. Scripps Company, owners of some 54 television stations across 36 local markets in the country, pulled its stations off of the DirecTV service in an all-too-familiar “retransmission negotiation dispute.” That’s when a broadcaster can’t reach a financial agreement with a multichannel video program distributor (MVPD), such as a cable or satellite TV provider, to carry the broadcaster’s TV stations.

Scripps owns a significant number of ABC-affiliated stations in its group, including KTNV, which serves Las Vegas. This “blackout” of the station on DirecTV means that subscribers to the satellite service will not be able to watch ABC's telecasts of the Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup. Such blackouts are a common effect of these retransmission disputes, and sports is usually one of the things that brings the broadcaster and MVPD back to the bargaining table.

But in this case, TheDesk reported first that ESPN was going to make all of the Stanley Cup games available via the ESPN app, including to those DirecTV subscribers in markets like Las Vegas, where the local Scripps-owned ABC affiliate would not be available due to the blackout from the “retransmission negotiation dispute.” This meant that hockey fans who are also DirecTV subscribers could still see the games—just via a different way than they normally would on their local ABC station.

It’s the first time we are aware of where a network owner, in this case Disney, owner of both ESPN and ABC, has allowed the network to effectively “bypass” its network affiliates to deliver sports programming directly to the audience via its streaming service. That means DirecTV subs who might otherwise be deprived of watching sports programming because of what’s known in the television business as a “retrans dispute” will still be able to do so — just via a different source.

This will not sit well not only with Scripps but with all ABC affiliate owners, who will definitely see this as a betrayal by their network that benefits the “other side” in future blackouts over “retrans disputes.” Expect to hear more about this going forward.

And finally, ABC is also carrying another major sports championship this week.

That would be the NBA Finals, featuring the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks as they play for the Larry O'Brien Trophy. Knicks fever has gripped NYC hard in the first week of June, as the Knicks haven’t been in the championship series since 1999. For its part, ESPN and ABC have substantially beefed up their NBA coverage, and for the first time in eight years, there isn’t a “Presented by YouTube” sponsorship plastered all over the Finals.

It’s a welcome change after years of so many YouTube logos appearing on the court and in TV broadcasts. In the 2023 finals, fans could see nine different YouTube logos at the same time.

So far in 2026, basketball fans who happen to be DirecTV subscribers in places where Scripps owns the local ABC station won’t be seeing those YouTube logos, or for that matter, the games themselves at least until Scripps reaches a new deal with DirecTV.

Hopefully they won’t miss seeing Spike Lee courtside being very happy—or very sad, as the case might be for his beloved New York Knicks.

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