Tennis Channel


Tennis Channel is an American sports-oriented digital cable and satellite television network that is owned by the Sinclair Television Group subsidiary of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It is devoted to events and other programming related to the game of tennis, along with other racquet sports such as badminton and racquetball. Launched on May 15, 2003, the channel is headquartered in Culver City, California, and produces its programming out of an HD-capable broadcast center in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City. Ken Solomon serves as the network's Chief Executive Officer.
Tennis Channel is available across the United States from most cable providers and on satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network. As of January 2019, the channel has 61.2 million households as subscribers.

History

In 2001, the Tennis Channel was founded by Steve Bellamy, who soon hired Bruce Rider to head up programming and marketing. A group known as the "Viacom Mafia"—a group that includes Viacom's former CEOs, Philippe Dauman and Frank Biondi, and current CEO, Thomas E. Dooley—became involved in the founding of the channel. This group invested and rounded up additional investors, Bain Capital Ventures, J.P. Morgan Partners, Battery Ventures, Columbia Capital, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, who as a group invested about $100 million. These founders felt with other single sports channel like the Golf Channel succeeding with a mostly male demographic and tennis having viewer of both sexes and of a desirable high-end demographic that a tennis channel would draw in advertisers. The channel was launched in early-2003, with its first live event being a Fed Cup tie in Lowell, Massachusetts in April.Barry MacKay was one of the original Commentators.
In 2005, Tennis Channel acquired the ATP Tour's Franklin Templeton Tennis Classic in Scottsdale from IMG, and moved it to Las Vegas as the Tennis Channel Open in 2006. Tennis Channel moved the open to Las Vegas for 2006, and announced plans to hold women's and junior events alongside it.
In 2005, after struggling viewership, credited to a lack of coverage of high-profile tournaments only promising a limited amount of television coverage.

Sinclair era

On January 27, 2016, Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of over-the-air television stations in the United States, announced that it would acquire Tennis Channel for $350 million. In the statement announcing the purchase Sinclair CEO David Smith said that Tennis Channel had high-quality content and advertisers, though it had been valued low and was under-distributed. Sinclair also gets greater than $200 million of net operating losses to offset its future taxes. The deal was closed on March 2, 2016. Days later, Tennis Channel announced an extension to its contract for the French Open. In addition, citing its preference to hold rights to the entire tournament, ESPN dropped its sub-licensing agreement with Tennis Channel for the French Open, giving it exclusive cable rights to the tournament.
In March 2017, Sinclair additionally acquired Tennis magazine and Tennis.com, seeking to integrate Tennis Channel with them to boost its cross-platform presence. With the January 2018 launch of a new Tennis Channel app, the Tennis Channel add two more channels to the app, Tennis Channel Plus 2 and The T, a free channel.
In October 2018, it was announced that Tennis Channel had acquired rights to the 46 overseas events of the WTA Tour under a five-year deal beginning in 2019, replacing beIN Sports. beIN had acquired the WTA Tour rights as part of a larger deal covering 30 countries, but the deal faced criticism from U.S. viewers due to the network's narrow carriage, as well as scheduling conflicts that favored international soccer matches—giving WTA events inconsistent and intermittent coverage.
In 2019, Tennis Channel reached a five-year extension of its rights to the Citi Open. The tournament also re-joined the US Open Series under new ownership.

On-air personalities

The network broadcasts live tournaments, news, one-on-one interviews, game analysis and skills instruction. Tennis Channel provides extensive coverage of the Davis Cup, Fed Cup and Hopman Cup as well as other tournaments throughout the year. Tennis Channel is the exclusive cable rightsholder of the French Open; while it previously sub-licensed portions of this coverage to ESPN, this arrangement ended in 2015.

Original series

The Tennis Channel launched an HD simulcast on December 31, 2007.

Carriage disputes

On September 4, 2011 during the US Open, Tennis Channel pulled its signal from Verizon FiOS, Cablevision, Suddenlink Communications, Mediacom, WOW!, Knology and General Communication Inc. systems after the providers declined to accept a new agreement that the Tennis Channel made with the National Cable Television Cooperative. Along with a fee increase, the agreement also required that the Tennis Channel be moved from their optional sports package to their digital basic tiers. Tennis Channel returned to Verizon FiOS on January 17, 2012.
In July 2012, the Federal Communications Commission ruled in favor of Tennis Channel following a three-year dispute between the network and Comcast over placement on extra-fee sports tier. As a result of the ruling, Comcast was prompted to remove Tennis Channel from its sports package tier, available to customers via an extra charge, and carry the network on the same basic cable tier as Comcast-owned Golf Channel and NBCSN. The FCC found Comcast's previous handling of the network to be discriminatory. This marked the first time that a cable distributor was found to have violated federal anti-discrimination rules. Comcast successfully disputed the ruling in 2013, continuing to carry Tennis Channel on its sports package. The company appealed to the Supreme Court, but was denied a hearing.