Cablefax

Sports Broadcasting Hearing Preview

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The hearing must go on, even without NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in the hot seat at Wednesday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the Sports Broadcasting Act. While Goodell declined to appear due to ongoing litigation, NAB President/CEO Curtis LeGeyt will be at the witness table. Look for him to make the case that the Act doesn’t need to be eliminated—but that Congress needs to reaffirm it applies to league negotiations with media companies that distribute games through free, over-the-air broadcast, not paywalled streaming. The Act, passed by Congress in 1961, grants professional sports leagues a narrow antitrust exemption for broadcast rights, allowing them to pool individual team rights and negotiate collectively. According to LeGeyt’s prepared testimony obtained by CFX, the NAB chief will focus on how fans prefer a simpler model as more games migrate to streaming, with prices continuing to increase. “The conclusion is straightforward: fans are paying more, working harder and, in many cases, receiving less access than they had under the traditional broadcast model,” he concludes. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez also will be at the hearing, notable because the FCC has launched a proceeding to examine the state of sports broadcasting. Her message will focus on media consolidation under the Trump administration. “According to reports, the scrutiny now being applied to sports leagues through government agencies like the FCC and DOJ appears to be driven less by a genuine interest in protecting fans and more by the influence of powerful media companies with close ties to this administration that stand to benefit financially from the outcome of that scrutiny,” she said in prepared testimony. “I have called this pattern the Billionaire Buddy Bypass, where the public interest gets bypassed in favor of a powerful few, and it extends well beyond sports broadcasting into a sweeping consolidation of media power that poses serious risks to journalism, to free expression, and to the Americans that depend on both.” Also scheduled to appear at Wednesday’s hearing are Clay Travis, president of Fox News-owned sports and commentary platform OutKick, and serial bar and restaurant entrepreneur Jim Hallers, Founder and Managing Partner, Tailgators Pub & Grill. Hearing kickoff is at 10am ET.

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Cox Deal Fills Spectrum Reach Map Gaps

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As the Cox–Charter combo inches closer to approval in California, Spectrum Reach SVP/CRO Dan Callahan was asked during a Kagan summit Tuesday what Charter’s advertising outfit likes from Cox’s business. “We’re still learning,” Callahan said. “I think just looking at the map, adding Phoenix, San Diego, Las Vegas, New Orleans, it’s a great complementary addition to where we already operate. Great adjacent markets.” – Callahan also shared that “this year we’re going to see about half of our subscribers using the Spectrum TV App to some degree,” while discussing Charter’s progress in video. He added that “some still have a set-top box as well, but with Seamless Entertainment,” which bundles live TV with third-party streaming apps. It’s not just the simplicity of having all video content that’s attracting customers, Callahan explained, but the value proposition. The operator offers more than $125 in retail streaming value in its packages at a time when SVODs have consistently raised prices. “The promise of cutting cable to save money is now, I think, deemed false,” Callahan said.

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MSG, NY1 Have Knicks Fever

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Wednesday’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and Spurs is one for the memory book, with 1999 marking the last time the New York team was in the finals. To help commemorate the occasion, Spectrum News NY1 and MSG Networks are jointly producing a special edition of MSG’s preview show “Knicks Talk Live” that’ll air on both networks at 7pm ET on Wednesday. The half-hour show will air live from MSG studios with NY1’s Pat Kiernan and Stef Manisero to host. They’ll get an assist from MSG analysts Steve Novak and Wally Szczerbiakand NY1’s Dean Meminger, whose father, also named Dean Meminger, played for the Knicks the last time they won a championship in 1973.

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CFX Magazine: The Cynopsis Sports Edition

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Late last week, hundreds of sports media, marketing and tech execs gathered in NYC for the Cynopsis Sports Awards & Top Women in Sports Gala. CFX chronicled this year’s winners and finalists in its June issue of CFX Magazine, with exclusive Luminary profiles of NBCUniversal, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) and Stanley 1913, along with a special Top Women in Sports feature spotlighting the executives reshaping media rights, sponsorships and storytelling across the sports ecosystem. View the digital edition here.

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Starlink: Shiny Object or Solid Bet?

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What better time to talk about LEO satellite connectivity than on the week that SpaceX, which operates Starlink, is about to launch its IPO. During a Kagan panel on fixed wireless and LEO, Nokia VP, Broadband Policy and Funding Strategy Lori Adams speculated that Starlink could eventually hit a regulatory wall as it tries to scale to compete with fiber. “LEO is largely an unregulated technology currently. At some point, the FCC is probably going to start to care about how many satellites are being launched into the sky and what the means as far as our orbit, who’s tracking them, space junk. So you could very well, within the next five years, start to see a regulatory scheme come up [with] some heavy-handed regulations that will impact that,” Adams suggested. A fun question during the talk was whether the panelists were interested in buying SpaceX stock Friday. Adams will pass: “Starlink is a company with a complicated business model,” she said. “The problem is that some of their assets literally blow up on the launch pad, so there’s a little bit of a shiny object thing going on there.”

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Versant’s ‘Scrappy’ Sports Strategy

John Saavedra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Versant brands were still under Comcast NBCUniversal, Versant SVP, Strategy and Business Development Celia Kohl helped bring the NBA back to NBC and extend the Olympics partnerships. In the Versant era, one of the spaces she is focused on is women’s sports, including partnerships with the WNBA and League One Volleyball.

While Kohl stressed there’s real passion and dedication for spotlighting women’s sports, “the reality is that we are really interested in growth and growth properties, and it just so happens that many of the growth properties are women’s sports,” she said during Tuesday’s Kagan Media & Telecom Summit in NYC. “They’re seeing a lot of audience growth and interest demand, [which] supports our company mandate to become a growth business and expand beyond what’s really underpinning our linear value.”

The programmer shaped a Wednesday night block around these sports rights, allowing it to create a weekly sports watching habit on USA Network on Wednesday nights, which Kohl views as valuable to creating “very predictable audience flows” as well as serve fans who are increasingly struggling with the proliferation of content across many streaming platforms.

“We want to make sure we’re promoting these sports in the right way, that our fans know where to be and when to watch it [and] that we’re promoting and creating visibility around the athletes,” Kohl explained.

Recent Versant sports deals include a five-year agreement to air Pac-12 football and men’s and women’s basketball. Kohl explained why that partnership made sense for the newly-independent programmer: “We at Versant are kind of this new scrappy spinoff from NBC, and in a way, we have something to prove. We’re in build mode [and] we felt that the Pac-12 were kindred spirits because we were going through that together.”

Being the new spinoff on the block (or “street” might be more appropriate in this case) means Versant is under a “very different lens,” according to Kohl. “When we were owned by Comcast NBCU, there was a little bit more flexibility, and every penny you spent wasn’t necessarily very clear to the market. Whereas right now, as a [standalone] company, every investor is focused on what we’re doing. Wall Street is focused on what we’re doing, so we have to be really smart about capital decisions.” ROI is key to Versant’s sports rights strategy: “As we look at opportunities, we want to make sure that we’re not overspending on things, or we’re not spending on rights that aren’t really going to be very clearly drive value for us,” she said, adding that being independent means that Versant can move more quickly on deals.

Versant’s growth plan also involves diversifying its revenue streams away from linear pay TV distribution and toward digital businesses. According to Kohl, Versant’s golf vertical provides a good blueprint for where the company wants to go. “Eighty percent of Versant’s revenue is driven by our cable business, and the other 20% is driven by our digital and DTC businesses. Our goal, long term, is for that to be 50/50, and right now our golf vertical is 50/50, so we look at a lot of the success that we’ve had in that space and try to replicate it. A lot of that is being able to use the Golf Channel as a microphone to drive forward our businesses like [tee time booking platform] Golf Now.”

Versant is also investing in attracting the next generation of golf watchers by partnering with digital-first brands, such as YouTube channel Good Good Golf. Together, they’re bringing back the golf-themed reality competition series “Big Break,” set to debut in August.

“If you look at the Golf Channel audience, it’s much older, it’s people who have been watching probably their whole life, but some people might say the content is a little stale,” Kohl said. “What Good Good brings is access to that elusive younger demographic that is not watching golf on television. They’re consuming on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. They love the game as much as the next person, but they’re not going to sit down and watch four days of a PGA Tourevent. The more we can access them—either try to get them to watch on our linear platforms or connect with them in the digital space–that’s what the creator economy brings.”

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Fox One in the Skies

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

American Airlines knows how important watching the World Cup is to fans, so it’s partnering with Fox One to make the DTC service available to AAdvantage members in-flight on all domestic flights. The Fox One pass must be redeemed while in-flight, unlocking 24 hours of streaming. The pass can be redeemed seven times in-flight during a calendar year. Fox One, which will stream all 104 World Cup matches, retails for $19.99/month.

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People

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Arkansas-based Ritter Communications named Jerry Sorrentino as VP, OSP Construction and Engineering. He has more than 30 years of telecom experience, including time at Segra, Everstream, CenturyLink and AT&T.

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Optimum Mobile Momentum

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Optimum boasted that it has surpassed 700,000 mobile lines. That’s up from 584,000 in 3Q25 and up from the 674,000 it just reported for 1Q26, a quarter that saw 51,600 net adds. That was the most net adds in six years. Optimum adjusted its mobile go-to-market approach in late 4Q25 to focus on driving multi-line adoption, broadband convergence and affordability. The operator has leaned in on that last point, noting that a survey conducted on its behalf found 79% of consumers have reduced spending in the past two months, with 30% reducing spending on either TV, mobile or internet. It offers three lines with unlimited data for $60/month.

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Muni Hits Snag in Point Broadband RDOF Takeover

Cablefax Staff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The City of Colquitt, Georgia, is still trying to obtain the letter of credit it needs to take over Point Broadband’s $4.2 million in Rural Digital Opportunity Fund buildout and service obligations covering an estimated 2,000 locations in Miller County, GA. In February, the FCC granted the RDOF acquisition to the municipality, which serves approximately 270 customers, giving it 90 days to submit an irrevocable letter of credit from a qualifying bank securing the requisite amount of support for the assigned census blocks. This week, the City of Colquitt told the FCC that the transaction could likely be completed in the “next several days” if the Commission determines the bank providing the letter of credit is “well capitalized.” If the bank is found ineligible to issue the letter, the City said it will likely need to begin the process again, which could take several weeks. – Separately, the FCC Wireline Competition Bureau announced this week that Plains Internet, Easton Utilities and MSEC Communications have defaulted on their RDOF service milestones in Kansas, Maryland and Texas. They’ll receive no further RDOF payments and are subject to recovery and noncompliance measures. MSEC was authorized to receive nearly $4.2 million in RDOF support over 10 years to serve 9,024 locations in Texas; Easton was authorized for $189,047 to serve 909 locations in Maryland; and Plains was authorized to receive $9,834 to serve three locations in Kansas.

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