Yahoo Sports is seeking to rethink a classic sports genre—the evening studio show—with The Bounce, a new mobile-friendly NBA program co-produced by the league and Turner Sports.
The Bounce will air for three hours five nights per week and feature highlights from live games, expert analysis, and personality driven content centered around the ongoing games. Yahoo’s parent company, Verizon, and the NBA announced the collaboration at CES on Tuesday.
“We definitely want to evolve how telecasts are presented,” said David Denenberg, NBA SVP for global media distribution and business affairs. “Obviously Yahoo is doing that, in conjunction with Turner who is very forward-thinking about this stuff. We think it makes a lot of sense to reimagine the highlight show and what it could look like in a digital age on mobile phones.”
Just about every network broadcast of a major sporting event includes some sort of pregame and postgame coverage starring talking heads analyzing the action around a set. NBA TV airs Gametime while MLB Network and NHL Network broadcast MLB Tonight and NHL Tonight. Each is that channel’s flagship program spanning several hours of live look-ins and clips from all the concurrent action.
The Bounce will include many of those elements, but executives from the three partners producing the program want to infuse some creativity for the mobile-first basketball fan. It will be the first such offering to be digital-only, though Yahoo’s NBA show will soon be joined by an MLB counterpart from DAZN.
Yahoo will also offer a live scoreboard, social media integrations, and behind-the-scenes footage on The Bounce, which will be produced out of Turner’s Atlanta studios. The program will debut on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Jan. 21, from 5 to 8 p.m. ET but will regularly air from 8 to 11 p.m. ET until the end of the regular season. The NBA and Verizon-owned Yahoo have an existing content partnership that expanded to include carriage of NBA League Pass last year.
“It’s about being able to create products that really fit into ways that a sports fan lives,” said Yahoo Sports GM Geoff Reiss, adding that this show is being produced with the “understanding that we are filling gaps in that fan’s night, not necessarily looking to be the whole night.”
Beginning last fall, Yahoo live-streamed every in-market NFL game, but The Bounce will serve the opposite function, as a portal directing more viewers to ongoing games. A seamless, one-click integration from The Bounce to League Pass won’t exist at launch but is expected to be included in the near future.
However fans migrate from one platform to the other, the idea is that The Bounce will be able to flag an exciting finish in Oklahoma City or a hot shooting night from Houston’s James Harden for fans to tune in and watch live. Denenberg said the goal is to give fans “a pulse of the night through this show.”
“To have the great brand of Yahoo Sports delivering content to our fans and hopefully reaching audiences through mobile—there’s going to be different elements to this show that probably won’t look like your normal studio show—we hope it brings in additional audiences, not just to view The Bounce but also to view our games on the regional sports networks, League Pass, and our national partners,” Denenberg said.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has previously supported the idea of offering fans the chance to “snack” on small game segments. League Pass introduced the option of microtransactions this season, with viewers being able to purchase the fourth quarter (and any possible overtime) for just $1.99.
Details on what exactly The Bounce will look like—and who will comprise its roster of on-air talent—have not been revealed and likely will change over time.
“This is going to be a highly iterative process,” Reiss said. “What it’s going to mean is optimizing the show and figuring out what are the right length spokes of the wheels that we build. Are they going to be eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes? We will be able to incorporate the data that the audience provides us to know exactly how to block out the show, what’s the right length of segments, what’s the right volume of highlights versus commentary for us to build this thing out.”
The prevailing ethos is to meet fans where they already congregate, Reiss said, by delivering a “differentiated, next-generation experience.”
“We’re looking forward to producing this innovative form of content for NBA fans as a supplement to the in-depth coverage available on NBA TV and across the NBA Digital portfolio,” Scooter Vertino, NBA Digital’s SVP of Production, Programming and Content, wrote in an email.
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