TNT Sports Chair & CEO Luis Silberwasser said F1 and UFC, two properties with expiring media rights deals, have “perked our interest.” Appearing on “The Varsity” podcast, Silberwasser said, “We like both. I think they are in conversations with their current partners. Combat sports is an area that we don’t have. AEW, it’s not combat sports. It’s sort of a hybrid between entertainment and sports. … Given our experience with sports internationally, we know the passion for Formula One. And we know that in [the U.S.] market, it has grown and it has great potential.”
But Silberwasser added that his company will be “disciplined and strategic” about any decisions. “It has to meet those objectives that we want,” he said. “It has to be able to offer us value from a distribution perspective, from a Max perspective, and generate the scale that we need to be able to monetize it.”
TNT Sports (TBS in particular) has been a national media partner for MLB since 2007, when it first picked up a package of regular season and postseason games (the actual relationship between the company and MLB dates back to 1973, when Braves games started airing on TBS’ predecessor). But while ESPN’s deal with MLB for “Sunday Night Baseball,” the Wild Card round and Home Run Derby coming to an end after this season, Silberwasser feels the extra tonnage of baseball is not something his network will jump at.
“We’ve navigated our distribution deals in a really, really good way. It is hard for us to see that we could acquire [MLB] rights and get an immediate monetization on those rights right now, given the fact that our distribution deals are locked in a pretty good way,” he said. “…We love baseball and we look forward to continuing to have baseball, love our postseason and we look forward to sort of understanding better what the league is thinking and we’re regarding the new world after 2028.”
NCAA Basketball Tournament expansion has also been a much-discussed possibility lately, and TNT Sports, alongside CBS, have rights to the men’s March Madness locked up into the early 2030s. But would TNT get behind adding more teams to the Dance?
“We have had conversations with both Charlie [Baker] and Dan [Gavitt] on tournament expansion,” Silberwasser noted. “It is something that is in their court right now -- trying to figure out what does expansion really mean in terms of the number of extra teams, number of extra games. When will those games happen? How are they selected? What are the economics behind that expansion? What are the interests of not only the NCAA, but also the conferences. … But in principle, we support expansion” (“The Varsity,” Puck, 3/15).
