The Milwaukee Bucks have formed a new partnership with Bustos Media that will expand the NBA team’s Spanish-language coverage in the market. Three upcoming games will air on Regional Mexican “La Gran D” WDDW.

The team says the broadcasts on “La Gran D” WDDW are “the cornerstone” of a new partnership. Good Karma Broadcasting’s “ESPN Deportes 1510 AM” WRRD will continue to carry some Bucks games in Spanish but its daytime only signal prevents it from airing night games.

The three upcoming games that will air on WDDW are on Feb. 22 vs. the L.A. Lakers, March 9 vs. Miami and April 5 vs. Cleveland. Longtime Milwaukee broadcaster Andy Olivares will call the games.

The Bucks March 6 game vs. Oklahoma City will air on WRRD with Jamie Cano calling the action. Good Karma principal Craig Karmazin is an investor in the Bucks.

“As this innovative new ownership group and management team return this proud franchise to prominence, they also are changing the landscape of Greater Milwaukee and will make a huge impact on the community,” John Bustos, managing partner of WDDW, said in a release. “We look forward to working with them to bring that excitement to the fast-growing Hispanic community that we serve so well.”

The NFL has remained committed to broadcast television, even as it collects more money from ESPN and DirecTV than other media outlets. For example, the NFL’s games on ESPN and NFL Network have to be carried on local over-the-air channels in the markets of the teams involved. And ESPN’s coverage of last weekend’s wild-card playoff game was simulcast on ABC.
Not surprisingly, the league has focused its “Thursday Night Football” television negotiations on the broadcast networks, leaving ESPN and Turner Sports as long shots to claim the package, according to several sources.

Other leagues are warming back up to broadcast TV, too. ESPN and the NBA made a joint decision to have ABC start carrying a Saturday night schedule of eight NBA games on Jan. 23, as a complement to the Saturday night college football games it carries in the fall. Last summer, ESPN moved its midsummer ESPY awards to ABC for the first time and saw such a dramatic viewership jump (250 percent) that the ESPY franchise should remain on ABC for the foreseeable future.

It’s not only ESPN and ABC. A few years after leaving broadcast TV for cable, the British Open Championship made a move that it believes will result in bigger TV ratings by returning to broadcast television this summer on NBC. NASCAR came back to NBC last summer, persuaded by the promise of more broadcast coverage. And the Comcast-owned network introduced professional boxing to broadcast audiences last year for the first time in years, albeit as part of a time-buy arrangement.

Similarly, Fox’s schedule is littered with sports programming, from Big East basketball games to international soccer games and UFC fights to prime-time MLB games. CBS produces almost all of its major sports programming exclusively for its broadcast network.

Coming full circle

The current embrace of broadcast TV stands in contrast to 2008, when ESPN outbid Fox to bring the BCS exclusively to cable television. At the time, it seemed that the sports media business was at the beginning of a tipping point of sports migrating to cable.

The NHL placed two of its Stanley Cup Final games on a relative small cable channel called Versus (now NBC Sports Network); NASCAR moved its end-of-season Chase for the Sprint Cup exclusively to ESPN; and MLB moved one of its league championship series to a cable channel — though its executives said at the time that the World Series never would move off broadcast television. All sports, other than the NFL, contested some of their biggest games on cable TV, from the NBA and MLB semifinals to the NCAA basketball tournament.

Sports leagues increasingly decided to forgo broadcast’s bigger audiences for more money from the cable networks

that could write bigger checks, thanks to their dual revenue streams.

Now the latest moves in sports media fly in the face of those trends from a decade ago. And each move back from cable to broadcast is a boon for broadcast network executives and their PR spin doctors, who warned for years that sports properties were not seeing the big picture when they gave up broadcast distribution for the allure of cable dollars.

“The PGA Tour and PGA Championship are good examples for us,” said CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus. “Part of the foundation of those two properties are corporate sponsorship sales. The best way for a corporate sponsor to reach the largest possible audience is on broadcast television. There is certainly a place on cable television for golf properties. But the majority of the big-time golf properties seem to have a better home on broadcast television than they do on cable.”

Today, sports rights holders that migrated to cable increasingly are agitating to get media companies to move their games back to broadcast television. Unlike 2008, broadcast networks now have a dual revenue stream as well, allowing them to better compete with cable networks for media rights.

“Now, given retransmission consent — where broadcasters have two revenue streams and are looking for live event programming — sports programming is the most natural fit [for broadcast networks],” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group. “Broadcast companies are willing to utilize their time slots for live-event sports in a way that maybe, half a decade or a decade ago, maybe they weren’t.”

The different perception of broadcast television as a business could be seen at an industry conference in the fall, when CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves offered a full-throated defense of broadcast TV.

“I’ve been hearing that network television has been dead since the day I took this job over 20 years ago,” Moonves said at the Sports Media & Technology conference in New York. “Network is still pretty damn important and pretty damn successful.”

More exposure for sports

While ESPN officials acknowledge that moves, like creating a prime-time series around the NBA, may look like a shift in philosophy, they say the move does not represent anything new. The upcoming Saturday night NBA series, for example, essentially moves games from one broadcast time slot on Sunday afternoons to a different broadcast time slot on Saturday nights.

ESPN said it jointly came up with the plan to launch a prime-time broadcast series around some of the league’s marquee games during its recent round of rights negotiations. The NBA was looking to expose its biggest stars and best teams to the bigger audiences a prime-time time slot could deliver. ESPN was looking to build off of its successful college football series, which regularly wins Saturday nights in the fall.

“We’ve learned that there’s an audience of sports fans that can be attracted to a franchise like this,” said Burke Magnus, ESPN’s executive vice president of programming and scheduling. “We had the benefit of college football continuing to escalate in popularity and the inventory of relevant games got a little deeper and the definition of what could be a prime-time game made it more feasible.

“The thinking is similar here with the NBA,” Magnus continued. “We had a number of games that were configured primarily as Sunday doubleheaders. We wanted to take that same inventory and start a new franchise on Saturday night and tie it as much as possible to college football. We wanted to lead people from one season into the next and make them the very best games that the NBA has to offer. We’ve got our fingers crossed, but we think there is an audience there that will respond.”

Fox, which launched its own sports channel in August 2013, has taken a similar tactic with its broadcast channel.

Properties such as NASCAR, which has six Cup races on cable and 10 on broadcast, and the Big East, which will have 12 games on broadcast this season, including the championship game, increasingly are being carried on the broadcast channel. Fox executives believe broadcast coverage helps grow the sport, leading to bigger cable audiences.

“Strategically, while we’re always trying to grow the cable channel, we also realize that it’s good for the viewers, advertisers to be on broadcast,” said Bill Wanger, Fox Sports’ executive vice president of programming, research and content strategy. “For sports that aren’t as popular and still growing, we use the broadcast network to lift that exposure.”

NBC, which operates NBCSN and Golf Channel in addition to a broadcast network, carries almost all of its sports across both broadcast and cable. Lazarus said sports rights holders benefit both from the broadcast network’s reach and ratings, as well as the cable channels’ quantity of coverage. In particular, NBC has found success with English Premier League programming in the noon time slot on weekends — a time period the network had been devoting to time buys.

“We found that we could improve our programming by bringing live sports to that daypart on the broadcast network,” Lazarus said. “We could give the sport broader exposure and market back to the cable asset in this virtuous circle between broadcast, cable and digital.”

NBC also found that it needed a consistent broadcast schedule for its strategy to work.

“You can’t just do it as a special — two or three times a year,” Lazarus said. “That doesn’t build habit; it doesn’t help your broadcast affiliate sell it; and it doesn’t help viewers get to be confident that it’s going to be there when they go to look for it.”

In the face of competition from pay-TV and digital media companies, some sports TV executives believe that not only will many of the biggest sports remain on broadcast TV for the foreseeable future, but other events and leagues will follow.

“We still believe very strongly in the power of broadcast television and still believe that there are certain events that we would like to see remain available on every television set in America, whether it’s the Masters, or Super Bowl or SEC football Saturday afternoons,” McManus said. “The best showcase and the best way to serve the viewer and the advertiser is on broadcast television.”

Lionel Messi will skip the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in six months because Argentina’s national team coach Gerardo Martino says the Barcelona star needs to rest.

Martino spoke Monday on Argentine radio station La Red and said Messi will play in the Centennial Copa América tournament in the United States, but not the Olympics in Brazil.

“Messi will not go to the Olympic Games,” said Martino, who said it was “too much” for the Barcelona star to play in both events and also World Cup qualifiers.

The Centennial Copa América begins June 3, and the Olympics open two months later on Aug. 5.

“We have the Copa América, the Olympic Games, and World Cup qualifiers in September, October and November,” Martino said.

He also mentioned Barcelona’s heavy schedule in various tournaments, adding to the wear-and-tear on the Argentine.

Messi is 28 and could have been selected for the Olympic team as one of three over-23 age players. He led Argentina to the gold medal in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics.