LOS ANGELES, Might 11, 2023 – Tennis Channel – with extra stay protection than any sports activities community – will rejoice its twentieth anniversary on air Monday, Might 15. In 20 years the community has grown from an concept in Los Angeles to the U.S. media dwelling of the game throughout different-but-complementary linear tv, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), on-line and free ad-supported streaming tv (FAST) platforms. It produces and airs extra stay hours of sports activities yearly than some other community, and gives tennis matches and storylines to seven nations outdoors the USA. In doing so, Tennis Channel has essentially modified the best way the game was coated previous to its debut, with tennis followers now having fun with every day, daylong telecasts all through the whole lot of the January-December tennis season. That tennis followers might observe constant protection of their favourite sport the best way followers of different sports activities have for years was extraordinary on the community’s outset.
In its infancy Tennis Channel provided choose skilled males’s and ladies’s tennis in addition to sister sports activities like racquetball, badminton and desk tennis. The community steadily gathered its now 93% of all stay rights to the game in the course of the previous 20 years. This contains changing into the unique U.S. dwelling of males’s (ATP) and ladies’s (WTA) skilled tour matches throughout all platforms. In that point Tennis Channel has additionally established itself because the American dwelling of Roland Garros (the French Open), the second of the game’s 4 majors, whereas a number of hours of protection on the different three: Wimbledon, the US Open and Australian Open.
Tennis Channel has additionally constructed one of many all-time television-sports rosters, with Corridor of Famers, former gamers and award-winning sportscasters. This contains Martina Navratilova, Tracy Austin, Jim Courier, Lindsay Davenport, Andy Roddick, Chanda Rubin, Paul Annacone, Taylor Townsend, Ted Robinson, Brett Haber and Steve Weissman, amongst many others.
“In our wildest goals 20 years in the past we couldn’t have imagined the modifications in media and know-how which have allowed Tennis Channel to share this sport in its entirety, in the best way that it really exists each week on the excursions,” mentioned Ken Solomon, president, Tennis Channel. “We’ve engineered persevering with success by innovation and a bespoke mannequin that works for the followers, the excursions and the gamers. The unique linear community, the SVOD platform and FAST channel mixed provide you with a tennis expertise that’s by no means been out there in historical past. However no matter mixture or by themselves, they go well with something our viewers, sponsors or distribution companions want. Constructing on them, we’re excited to think about the place Tennis Channel will likely be on its thirtieth anniversary and past.”
From an concept that many questioned, Tennis Channel grew to turn into one of the vital profitable impartial networks in tv on the time it was acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2016. Immediately the community consists of:
- LIVE TV: Tennis Channel (2003): the unique, linear tv community with greater than 8,700 hours of every day, stay tennis and storytelling narrative all year long
- ON-DEMAND: Tennis Channel Plus (2014): the primary SVOD streamer to make use of the now ubiquitous title “Plus,” which provides 4,500 matches and permits viewers to decide on which stay or on-demand courts they wish to watch. With its debut, Tennis Channel turned the primary tv community to place a subscription streaming service and authenticated tv on the identical app.
- FREE, LIVE TV: T2 (2022): the community’s second channel, a free ad-supported streaming service with stay matches and an much more broadly interesting method, out there immediately on Samsung TV Plus and YouTube TV starting June 1
- WEB/SOCIAL: Tennis.com (relaunched in 2021 after 2017 acquisition): essentially the most complete tennis web site on the earth, with real-time attracts, schedules and rankings; stay scores; calendars; estimated begin instances, head-to-head outcomes and win possibilities; consumer personalization; hyperlinks to stay and on-demand matches; and unique content material extensively disseminated throughout the most well-liked social platforms
- PODCAST: Tennis Channel Podcast Community (2019): the digital dwelling for podcasts devoted to the game, with shut to twenty podcasts immediately, together with Assume About it With Victoria Azarenka, Kickserve Radio and Tennis Channel Reside
- GLOBAL: Tennis Channel Worldwide (2020): the community’s service in Austria, Germany, Greece, India, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK, with stay matches and unique native programming tailor-made to every market. Tennis Channel is now the unique dwelling of all WTA girls’s tennis in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Heading into its third decade, Tennis Channel plans extra innovation and growth distinctive to the sport it serves. As legalized betting and different gamification turn into extra accessible in the USA, the community – with its media rights to virtually all the sport – has extra avenues for integrating consumer engagement from followers all through the nation. Second solely to soccer in sports activities wagering all over the world, legalized tennis betting in America is already seeing an identical rise in small prop stakes between buddies having enjoyable whereas watching collectively. Globally, the identical media mannequin that has been successful domestically is translating to its worldwide buyer base as properly, which the corporate expects to develop exponentially in the course of the subsequent decade. In little greater than a 12 months, FAST channel T2 is already in additional houses than the unique Tennis Channel reached on its tenth anniversary, a quantity that’s going to skyrocket within the years forward. In the course of the sport’s largest event outdoors the majors in March, Tennis Channel examined a metaverse prototype and envisions a time when all of its platforms are linked in a digital ecosystem with e-commerce choices that lets followers really feel like they’re really strolling round these beloved worldwide occasions.
Maybe most importantly, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tennis Channel plan to supply the unique, linear tv community that launched in 2003 direct-to-consumer in 2024. This, for the primary time ever, would make Tennis Channel out there to everybody in the USA – itself a milestone as soon as unimaginable.
