USA Sports President Matt Hong said Versant hopes to make the WNBA \u201cappointment television\u201d following the company\u2019s 11-year deal with the league that kicks in next year. Hong was speaking at Versant\u2019s investor day and noted the league\u2019s \u201chockey stick-like growth,\u201d making it a \u201cproperty that we feel like we can get ROI from.\u201d<\/p>\n
USA Network will carry at least 50 WNBA games — including three WNBA Finals \u2013- as part of the agreement that begins with the 2026 season. He touted plans for Wednesday night doubleheaders on USA Network.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of why the league chose us is because of our history and our expertise and our ability to have done this with other of our lead partners and programming in the past,\u201d Hong said. \u201cOur leadership team at USA Sports has a lot of experience doing this in terms of quality of production, how we program the assets, marketing, character development and storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n
CNBC\u2019s Julia Boorstin, who was moderating a panel with Hong, asked about Versant and its ability to compete with streamers, including the notion that it would be a tall task against the likes of Amazon, Apple and others.<\/p>\n
Hong pointed to the WNBA deal as evidence that Versant isn\u2019t only living in the same marketplace with those streamers, but, in many cases, also winning.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only are we currently competing, but we\u2019re having quite a bit of success,\u201d Hong said. \u201cWe will go after sports that we feel like we can help grow, again with that overlay of ROI. We\u2019ll continue to be disciplined about where we can generate a return from distribution and advertising revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"USA Sports President Matt Hong said Versant hopes to make the WNBA \u201cappointment television\u201d following the company\u2019s 11-year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[50741,99,434],"class_list":{"0":"post-332775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-golf-channel","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}