The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and Scripps have signed a multi-year settlement to broadcast Friday night time regular-season games on ION tv. The plan is to show off roughly 44 games over 15 weeks, starting on May 26 and operating till September 8. There will likely be nationwide games that all of the nation can see, in addition to ones proven in regional markets in two tv home windows on Fridays.
Scripps president and CEO Adam Symson declared that “Fans would understand every Friday on the broadest platform, they could gather around the television and watch the WNBA . . . This is an incredible opportunity to provide that kind of viewing experience for WNBA fans.” The WNBA is the primary sports activities league to air on ION and convey the entire games. Details of the programming across the games are nonetheless being labored out.
WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison mentioned, “To be the inaugural partner is really groundbreaking. The media landscape continues to evolve. We are at the forefront of that evolution.” Over the previous 12 months, there was main viewership momentum for girls’s basketball. The 2022 WNBA steady season used to be probably the most considered on ESPN since 2006. This 12 months’s ladies’s NCAA Tournament had its easiest viewership ever for the name recreation between Iowa and LSU drawing 9.9 million audience; it used to be the primary time the championship recreation used to be proven on ABC.
The present deal between the WNBA and ESPN is about to finish in 2025. This 12 months, the community will display 25 steady season games and all of the playoffs once more. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert mentioned of the deal with ION: “Access to watch WNBA games is in high demand, and Scripps’ dedicated Friday night lineup of WNBA games on ION will become much-desired appointment viewing for WNBA fans.” Symson also said that the deal was a “perfect marriage,” including that “women’s sports have been squeezed in major programs around other things. It’s time for women’s sports to actually be the primary game of the week. That’s what it will be for us.”