Unrivaled wraps up its regular season Friday night in Miami and rolls right in the first round of the playoffs on Saturday in Miami, with the semis Monday in Brooklyn and championship Wednesday back in Miami. For that title game, TNT Sports will bring its \u201cUnrivaled Studio Show\u201d live to Sephora Arena ahead of the 9:30pm ET tip-off (the women\u2019s hoops event will have a lead-in from U.S.-Canada in the SheBelieves Cup soccer match). Candace Parker, Renee Montgomery and Andraya Carter will be the studio talent for the show on TNT\/truTV. Craig Barry, TNT Sports\u2019 EVP & Chief Content Officer, tells SBJ that requests are out for special guests to make appearances on the show, and the network also wants a good number of players to stop by. <\/p>\n
Like many second-year leagues, Unrivaled\u2019s viewership has dropped off, falling around 40% to average just north of 120,000 viewers across all games on TNT\/truTV (that jumps to 156,000 when excluding games that just air on truTV alone). \u201cBringing on two new teams, starting to try new formats, going on the road, having a better understanding of the cadence of how they\u2019re playing, adding a night — I think that\u2019s all progressive, and progress isn\u2019t easy,\u201d Barry said. While viewership is lower, games on truTV in particular continue to have 60% of its audience as female, with TNT in the high 50% range. That compares to something like U.S. Women\u2019s Soccer having a 40% female audience or the NCAA Women\u2019s Basketball Tourney being 38% female. <\/p>\n
Barry called Unrivaled President Alex Bazzell a \u201creally good\u201d partner. \u201cYou can\u2019t move too slow or it might become stale. You can\u2019t move too fast or you may put yourself in a negative position,\u201d Barry said of Bazzell. \u201cThis is that point for him where he needs to kind of figure out what\u2019s next and what\u2019s best.\u201d Barry noted moving more games outside of Sephora Arena to larger venues could be a positive. \u201cWe\u2019re interested in evolving the presentation, the experience. We think bigger crowds mean more energy. We think a bigger venue means more dynamic coverage,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom a content perspective, we want to continue to push that forward and we\u2019ve kind of done all what we can do with the current venue.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unrivaled wraps up its regular season Friday night in Miami and rolls right in the first round of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[402,99,37316,18419,434,1765],"class_list":["post-494895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-basketball","tag-sports","tag-tnt-sports","tag-unrivaled","tag-wnba","tag-womens-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494895","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=494895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}