John Ourand

1 week ago | puck.news | John Ourand

When it comes to sports programming, the mantra around Netflix has always been to watch what they do, rather than listen to what they say. For instance: While they said they were perfectly content to stick to sports-adjacent docuseries like Quarterback, what they eventually did was acquire a couple nine-figure Christmas Day NFL games. Anyway, with all that in mind, I decided to ring up LightShed’s Rich Greenfield on the day that the streamer released its first-quarter financials.

1 week ago | puck.news | John Ourand

The media business, above all else, is a copycat game. So when ESPN signed lucrative and loophole-laden deals with Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith, virtually every agent received inbound from their roster of clients looking for similar concessions. Perhaps they weren’t agitating for Stephen A.’s $20 million per annum, but they wanted some of the same flexibility to create content on other platforms.

1 month ago | puck.news | John Ourand

Back in the 1980s, IndyCar had an outsize footprint in the American sports landscape. Driver Mario Andretti was a legit star, whose name even made it into rap songs, and A.J. Foyt and Rick Mears weren't all that far behind. In the intervening years, of course, the circuit's cachet has wanned. Last summer, Fox Sports picked up IndyCar rights on the cheap-around $25 million per year-with the hope that its fortunes could be reversed.

1 month ago | puck.news | John Ourand

Weeks ago, long before the news leaked to The Athletic or any defiant press release was issued, Jimmy Pitaro visited Rob Manfred to deliver the news in person that ESPN was likely going to opt out of the last three years of its broadcast deal with Major League Baseball.

2 months ago | puck.news | John Ourand

For the past decade, NASCAR Cup Series races have been relatively easy to find: Fox carried the first half of the season, NBC carried the second. But a couple of years ago, as NASCAR executives started negotiating new media rights, they discovered what other sports leagues had already figured out-spreading your schedule across as many platforms as possible was the surest way to increase value. NASCAR's new, much sweeter rights deals kicked off with last weekend's Daytona 500.