SBJ Media: How CW sports chief Mike Perman sees the landscape

You might have caught me courtside Friday on TNT at Unrivaled -- the backward hat was a dead giveaway. But tonight, it’s a new experience (and maybe one less visible from the TV cameras). I’m at MSG for my first WWE “Raw” experience. Let’s see how Netflix’s investment is paying off.

The CW’s Mike Perman is helping implement a sports strategy at a network better known for teenage heartthrob programming than young guns on the field of play, but he comes to the table with a great deal of experience.

Perman, the CW’s new head of sports, spent 16 years at NBC and has advised on a number of multiple rights deals. I did a deep dive in the magazine this week with Perman on how he and the CW plan to execute around sports, but I also picked his brain on a number of other sports media storylines.

Being a longtime exec at NBC, the NBA coming back to the network was an obvious place to begin. For starters -- he was surprised about how heavy streaming will be (50% of NBC’s games will head to Peacock, something Perman feels wasn’t plausible when he was there).

But whether its WWE on Netflix or MLS on Apple TV+ or the NFL on Prime Video, streaming is en vogue. But so is broadcast TV (it’s not just Peacock getting NBA tonnage, but the NBC broadcast channel). Headed the other direction? That’s cable TV.

But the different strategies likely depend on the league these days.

“That’s a challenge of my job,” said Perman. “It depends on the property you’re talking to. When I was at NBC, we shut down NBCSN because our CFO looked out and saw that cord-cutting is going to keep getting larger, and we were not going to make as much money. Take a look at NASCAR -- they’re split up between a bunch of different properties. At the same time, you’re putting more promotion out there.”

But as Perman points out, streamers in particular haven’t taken the same approach. “Everybody talks about Amazon and Netflix. They have the finances to do basically what they want, when they want,” he said. “That’s part of the challenge now -- going out and looking at properties. I don’t think people really know what [streamers’] overall strategy is. Apple, for example, has gotten into MLS, but they haven’t really gotten into many other things for sport.

“That’s the unknown about what the streaming services are going to do. I don’t look at everything as bad competition. If we’re splitting things, we can help Amazon. Amazon can help us with NASCAR. We can help Turner. They can help us. There could be some advantages to it.”

As Unrivaled wraps its inaugural regular season tonight in Miami, the new 3-on-3 basketball league’s production team is already envisioning what the second year could look like.

The league has averaged 186,000 viewers across its telecasts on TNT and truTV to date, with women making up more than half of its audience. Warner Bros. Discover has a six-year deal with the league, including a third-year look-in, and if the deal runs to its conclusion, it could be worth $110 million.

But how has Unrivaled stacked against other properties?

It finished higher than the NWSL regular season last year, with that league averaging 175,000 viewers across ABC, CBS, ESPN and ION. Unrivaled was also well above women’s college hoops on Big Ten Network this season (78,000 viewers), or even the Caitlin Clark-fueled BTN numbers from last season (101,000).

On the flip side, Unrivaled was below the 280,000 viewers that ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU averaged for women’s college hoops this season. It was also well below another winter startup in the TGL, as that golf league was at 513,000 for its regular season.

In terms of total reach, Unrivaled has seen 10.5 million viewers (for a “reach” comp, TGL was at 19.3 million).

Building for the future

“Overall, it’s been an incredible experience and a big learning experience for everybody,” said TNT Sports supervisory producer Ann Lutzenkirchen, who helms Unrivaled’s studio shows.

“It’s been amazing to build something that everyone’s proud of,” added Morgan Weinbrecht, TNT director of live production. “It’s really exciting to think about what we’re going to be able to do with the championships this coming weekend, what we’re going to be able to do next season and all the things that we’re going to be able to talk about and ideate and build upon this summer.”

On social, Unrivaled pulled in 157 million cross-platform views and 12 million cross-platform engagements. When I was there over the weekend, stars packed the 850-person arena, including WNBA Las Vegas Aces C A’ja Wilson and Heat exec Udonis Haslem.

“There are so many ways we can grow,” said Weinbrecht. “It was played for eight weeks in Miami. What if it goes and plays a week in New York? What if it goes and plays a week in California? What if it moves around every week? What does it look like to bring this even closer to the fans? We want to be able to have an impact on more viewers, fans, champions.”

Road show in 2026?

In terms of travelling outside Miami next season, decisions are still ongoing, but Lutzenkirchen is excited by the opportunity.

“I would love that -- get more fans involved,” said Lutzenkirchen. “It is a very repetitive broadcast every week because it’s the same arena. ... So if it was up to me, I would say let’s go on the road all the time. It’s exciting that people are even talking about that, because it’s showing that, hey, there’s an appetite and there’s a success story here.”

My colleague Austin Karp and I will speak more about the topic on the SBJ Sports Media Podcast this week, but Unrivaled is unlike any sports experience I’ve had.

• Matt Barrie signed a multiyear contract extension with ESPN, which will see him continue hosting “SportsCenter,” as well as his studio and play-by-play roles for college football, TGL and more. Barrie is repped by WME’s Jim Ornstein.
• The regular season audience for TGL’s debut effort was not only younger than most other major sports on U.S. TV, but it was also well above what ESPN/ESPN2 had in the same winter windows last year, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• ESPN SVP/Production Meg Aronowitz spoke with my colleague Ben Portnoy about the strategy around the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament as the network and the sport look to capitalize off the momentum of the last few years.
• Some golf media nuggets from resident links expert Josh Carpenter. CNBC and Golf Channel will team up for a pair of special “simulsegments” this week from the Players Championship, which tees off at TPC Sawgrass on Thursday. Meanwhile, Golf Channel analyst Johnson Wagner, who has made a name for himself re-creating notable shots from tournaments, will continue the viral sensation for GC starting tonight with a re-creation of Hal Sutton’s famous “Be the right club today!” shot from the 18th fairway at TPC Sawgrass.
• As NBC looks to keep growing its Premier League audience, the network sees opportunity -- particularly with the NFL done -- to take advantage of Sunday afternoon windows here in the U.S. around “Big Six” clubs (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur), notes Karp.
• In an op-ed for SBJ this week, media consultants Ed Desser and John Kosner write under the header, “Consolidation and subscribers will power ‘Sports Streaming 3.0.′”