Ski Racing - January 16, 2012

OUT OF THE GATE

World Cup Unplugged

Or, where did my Universal Sports go? By Eric Williams January 1 was not such a happy start to the new year for thousands of households across the U.S. that lost their access to the Universal Sports Network, which specializes in live and playback coverage of both summer and winter Olympic sports including World Cup ski racing.

U.S. SKI TEAM/DOUG HANEY

Universal Sports Network CEO David Sternberg said the move was planned and the timing was right.

Universal Sports interviews Nolan Kasper after his fourth-place finish in the Birds of Prey slalom last month.

“We launched the network in
2008 with the intention that it
would not always be a free, over-
the-air network, that we would
use the broadcast distribution
that we had on the NBC stations
to acquaint viewers with our content and to create awareness and
interest in the channel,” Sternberg told Ski Racing. “At some point,
because sport production is so costly and labor intensive, we
planned to ask for a license fee to be paid for access to the chan-
nel. The way we look at it, we basically did a three-year preview
with all the stations and when those station agreements came up
for renewal at the end of 2011, we looked at the timing and we
looked at the content we had going into the Olympic year of 2012
and we looked at market conditions. We felt that it was the right
time to move forward with the transition.”
In September, Universal created an 800 number and a website
for fans to let their TV providers know they wanted to keep the
channel that previously reached between 35 and 36 million Amer-
ican households. With the involvement of passionate fans, Stern-
berg expects the network’s audience to return to those numbers
before the 2014 Games.