Articles
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1 day ago |
puck.news | John Ourand
Over the past half-decade, as our media transformation has played out in Hemingway-esque terms—gradually and then very rapidly—a couple of truths have become self-evident. First, as we all know, live sports have become the coin of the realm. These days, middle schoolers can practically recite the rights fee that Netflix paid for its Christmas Day football doubleheader, or what Amazon forked over for its Black Friday contest.
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4 days ago |
puck.news | John Ourand
Back in January, the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart approached Justin Connolly, Disney’s affable president of platform distribution, with a job that seemed right up his alley. Google was looking to hire a vice president for YouTube—someone who would oversee all media and sports content acquisition and relationships.
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1 week ago |
puck.news | John Ourand
Way back in 2001, a little cable channel called ESPN outbid NBC by $300 million to pick up rights to the NBA. Then-NBA commissioner David Stern decided to sacrifice the bigger audiences on broadcast TV for the guaranteed money and younger viewers on cable. It was one of the great masterstrokes of the Stern era, and a harbinger of the sports-on-cable era.
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1 week ago |
puck.news | John Ourand
Welcome to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand, back in Washington, D.C., after a refreshing long weekend of hiking mountain trails in West Virginia and sending Marchand directly to voice mail. Over the past couple of months, I wrote a lot about Fox Sports’s marketing efforts around the Indy 500. This was the first year Fox carried the race, and the network put a lot of resources behind it (including hiring broadcaster Will Buxton, a star of F1 and Drive to Survive).
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2 weeks ago |
puck.news | John Ourand
The year 2025, at least for the sports media industrial complex, is sort of like a midterm election. The industry is understandably fixated on 2028-9, the big kahuna, when Major League Baseball’s deals expire with Fox and WBD, and when the NFL has a chance to exercise an out in its own deal, which could spell mortal trouble—well, even more mortal trouble than already exists, if you can believe such a thing—for CBS and Paramount or, really, any of the broadcasters.
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RT @Ourand_Puck: New pod: @JeffPassan on the gathering labor and media storm clouds that MLB is facing. https://t.co/eOesX0CDza
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RT @Ourand_Puck: New pod: The sports documentary godfather, Connor Schell, on why this golden age of nonfiction sports content isn't ending…