Stadium's studio is located at United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks. By Ben Strauss Ben Strauss Sports and media reporter Email Bio Follow April 11 at 7:00 AM CHICAGO — One night in mid-February, the marquee college basketball game on the schedule was Duke vs. Virginia, two ACC powerhouses, both ranked among the top teams in the country, both of whom would later earn No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament.
Last year, Stadium made a few splashy hires: News breaker Shams Charania covers the NBA, and former ESPN reporters Jeff Goodman and Brett McMurphy are on college basketball and college football, respectively. The number of broadcast homes, meanwhile, is growing. In 2018, 16 million homes had only over-the-air TV, up from 12 million in 2014, according to Nielsen.
But the difference, Stadium executives point out, is the trend lines — and the potential of the free TV experience. In 2017, the FCC announced a new broadcast standard for free TV that essentially expands the digital bandwidth of each channel. Over the next five years, each over-the-air station could broadcast as many as 25 individual digital sub-channels. If there are now 12 free channels available in a given market, multiply that by 25 and you’d have some 300 channels.
And Stadium’s live game broadcasts have appeared on some of those Sinclair stations. If Sinclair, which has expressed interest in purchasing a group of regional sports networks from Disney, expands further into sports, the opportunity for Stadium to reach more fans is apparent. Stadium is also available through several streaming services, including both packages offered by Sling TV. Still, sports fans are drawn to live broadcasts, and Stadium doesn’t have any premier offerings.
“The hurdle is being known,” Coyle acknowledged. But he added: “We need a certain number of people to watch us, but the bar isn’t very high. We’re not writing checks like ESPN.”
Being partly owned by Sinclair ensures I will never watch it.
Beware: One of the owners of Stadium is Sinclair.