Approximately 800 hours of college football and basketball, professional bull riding, WWE fights, NASCAR races, PBA bowling and professional volleyball that air each year on Nexstar’s CW broadcast network will steam from a venue that might be considered surprising: ESPN.
Under a deal announced Wednesday, ESPN will reap the extra hours of activity and the audience that comes to its direct-to-consumer subscription service with the new sports inventory, while the CW will oversee sales of ad revenue tied to those games. The CW matches will only stream at ESPN, and will not be made available on its linear TV outlets.
“Instead of standing up our own DTC product, we have a built-in audience” at ESPN, said Brad Schwartz, president of The CW, during a recent interview, addressing growing concerns about the ongoing fragmentation of sports properties across streaming venues. “The last thing the world needs” is another stand-alone streaming outlet,” he says., “People don’t want to subscribe to another platform.”
The pact between the two media companies hints at continuing efforts to “bundle” content and services as consumers have a dizzying array of subscription-based broadband outlets to consider. ESPN’s parent company, Disney, offers a “bundle” of all its owned streaming services, and Disney and Fox Corp. offer a bundle of ESPN and the new Fox One streaming outlet, both of which focus heavily on sports. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery offer a bundle comprised of Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max.
The idea of melding CW’s sports content with ESPN’s streaming service came about as Schwartz spoke regularly with Nick Dawson, who oversees college sports programming and acquisitions at ESPN. CW has access to ACC games that ESPN does not, even though ESPN operates a stand-alone outlet devoted to ACC sports. CW also has access to Mountain West and Pac-12 games and WWE content that ESPN does not. ESPN currently does not have a major rights deal with NASCAR or Professional Bull Riders.
“This gives a reason for fans of those sports to come to ESPN,” says Dawson.
And the deal gives the CW ” accessibility for our consumers, and incremental reach for our advertisers,” says Dan Lanzano, president of national advertising sales for Nexstar.
The CW becomes the latest in a very small number of third-party offerings that have made their way under ESPN’s aegis. ESPN can now offer NFL Network and NFL RedZone thanks to a recent pact that gave the NFL a 10% stake in the sports-media giant. And ESPN is now offering MLB.tv, a package of out-of-market baseball games that are quite desirable for die-hard fans.
“We think this is a real value add for our Unlimited subscribers,” says Emily Horowitz, vice president of ESPN’s direct to consumer strategy. Adding more content “makes that product as attractive as we possibly can.”
CW was best known for young-audience-skewing programs like “Gossip Girl” and “Arrow,” but has, since Nexstar purchased the bulk of its ownership, built up a portfolio of sports programming that Schwartz says has proven attractive to audiences. The executive says 28% of people who watch CW primetime offerings during the week are now also watching sports on the weekend, up from 21% in the prior year. “The hardest thing to do and the most important thing to do,” he says, is getting audiences to make habits of watching your programming.
Separately, the CW Network and Roku unveiled a partnership launching in Fall 2026 that will bring CW entertainment programming to The Roku Channel for next-day streaming. CW programs including “Policy 24/7,” “Scrabble” and “Trivial Pursuit” as well as new installments of “WWE NXT” will be made available via a CW-branded hub, which will also feature more than 800 hours of CW library content.
Source: variety.com
