In the final keynote of the 2025 TV Tech Tech Leadership Summit, March 13, TV Tech Content Director Tom Butts spoke with Brian Lawlor, president of Scripps Sports about the company's sports network that launched in late 2022.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. You can view the complete interview (and the rest of the summit) here.
TV Tech: Thank you for joining us today Brian. Every year, more live sports games dominate the ratings, and every year it seems like the Super Bowl attains new viewing records.
But it's not just the NFL. Ratings are up on most professional sports, and in particular, women's sports. A new report was released this week from EDO that found that TV viewership for women's sports, both professional and college, surged 139% in 2024, fueling a 56% year over year increase in ad impact.
So with that as the foundation of our conversation, Brian, can you tell us about the evolution of Scripps Sports?
Brian Lawlor: I think those stats tell a really fascinating story, and it was something that we identified about three years ago. We bought ION (network) during the pandemic—that's our big national network. It may look like TNT or TBS, but the reality is that ION is an over the air broadcast network with local affiliates in every market. So not only is it on cable and satellite, it's also over the air and now FAST, so it really is a pretty widely distributed network.
The prior owners did not have a sports strategy, but we looked at it and said, ‘all right, well, it's the fifth highest rated network in America, behind NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox. All of them do a ton of sports so maybe we should look at sports as well as other genres.' We spent about six months looking at all sports rights and sort of just trying to get a feel for what was happening inside of sports and what rights were going to become available.
"It's really hard to be a women's sports fan in America, because there's just no consistency."
We looked at local and national and about mid-2022, we definitely felt like most leagues were seeking reach. The NFL is on over the air broadcast platforms in every local market, on a Sunday or a Monday. But beyond that, every other league, even if they have a deal with ESPN or TNT, those networks now are only reaching about 60-65% of the households in the market. And so there are a lot of leagues that are just missing a lot of fans, and yet we can solve that, we have this over the air broadcast network. Once we realized the power of what we had, then it was, well, where do we want to play?
There are a lot of rights that are tied up into 2030, there's a lot of rights that are just really expensive and there's a lot of rights associated with mature leagues that just are sort of growing 1-2% a year, if they're growing at all.
And the more we looked, the more we recognized at that point that anytime there was any women's sports, they seemed to be growing over the year before, like the College World Series, NCAA Gymnastics, College Basketball with the Final Four and WNBA finals. So we recognized that there was just a unique interest in all sports, not just a singular one, relative to women.
But it's really hard to be a women's sports fan in America, because there's just no consistency. And so we felt like we had an opportunity to build sort of these franchise blocks where, you know, we did it for the WNBA, and then ultimately, last year for the NWSL, we blocked out 7:00 to midnight for the WNBA every Friday during the season. So now games were easy to find; it was easy to follow the league and easy to follow players and rivalries, and you didn't need cable and satellite, right?
I'm really proud of what we've accomplished. We continue to believe that the women's sports space is a great place.
TVT: Scripps Sports launched right around the time of the Caitlin Clark phenomenon, first in the NCAA and now the WNBA. How fortuitous was that?
BL: Absolutely. Prior to last season, from 2008 to the start of last season, there was not a single regular-season WNBA game that reached a million viewers; last year there were 23. My favorite headline last year of everything written, there was a headline that said “Caitlin Clark made Scripps Sports look like geniuses.” I'm grateful for Caitlin Clark, there's no doubt about it, but it's also just been great for women's sports overall.
TVT: So Scripps Sports is not an RSN, you’re not an ESPN or Fox Sports, so how do you distinguish yourself from those guys?
BL: The regional sports network was a great business for decades. For about 30 years that was the foundation of MLB, NHL, NBA teams in local markets—that was their distribution. Ten-fifteen years ago they reached 80% of all the households in a market; today that number is less than 40 in most markets.
And so if you own a NHL team or an NBA team, and your games in your own home market are not available to 60% of the households in your market, you’ve got a bad business mode, even if you know the checks cleared, you have a problem because you're not building any fandom.
And that will ultimately not just not only affect ratings, but it'll affect, you know, merchandise sales or ticket sales, even sports betting. We’ve figured out what our business model looks like so we are partners to three NHL teams right now, the Florida Panthers, last year, Stanley Cup champions, the Vegas Golden Knights, Stanley Cup champions the year before, and the Utah Hockey Club, this is their first year. We're their partner in making these games visible.
And so our pitch is that in the markets that we're doing business, we have a primary over the air TV station, a second station, an independent and we're going to put 70 live NHL games on that second station, make them available, use the primary station—the news and marketing platform—to drive viewers to that second station and and help create awareness of the brand and the team. So we really like the formula, and it's worked.
TVT: When it comes to sports on TV today, the market has become very fragmented with broadcast and cable and the networks launching their own D2C streaming services as well as Netflix and Silicon Valley tech companies like Amazon and Apple. It’s created some confusion among sports fans, particularly when they have to sign up to a streaming service just to watch an NFL playoff game—which instigated a Congressional hearing last year. I'd like to ask you to comment on the current state of the business, and particularly in regards to other players coming into the business.
BL: Yeah, by the way, I had the pleasure, or maybe lack thereof, of testifying at that hearing. There's a lot of money behind those tech companies, and they can come in and outbid any one of the broadcast networks or local broadcasters, if they want to. More and more we're seeing Apple, Amazon and now Netflix; Netflix is going to be interesting. And each one of them have different strategies.
The way we think about it is they're complimentary; I don't think just taking all of your rights and putting them on, you know, a streamer and behind a paywall, is what fans are looking for—I don't think that's worked well for MLS and their deal with Apple.
In terms of the technology, yeah, look, they've stumbled, but they've gotten better, and it's no longer an issue for Apple. It's not an issue for Amazon; Netflix, their first couple live events—they had never done live events—and then they did the boxing match, and now they've done some Christmas Day football. In just three or four events they have gotten better, and now they're into live wrestling and all so I think their technical problems are behind them.
For the full interview and the rest of the summit, visit here.
