On a recent Saturday night, the CW found itself in an unusual position: Beating ABC and CBS in total viewers. Credit goes to their coverage of college football, as its Aug. 29 broadcast of a surprisingly competitive matchup between Florida State and New Mexico State averaged 2.1 million viewers, making it the most-watched sports broadcast in network history. Granted, the CW has only been in the sports business for three years.
But it was a reminder that, as the network marks its 20th anniversary this month, the broadcast network is admittedly in quite a different place than it was even a few years ago. And that’s by design: Under new owner Nexstar, which took over the CW in 2022, the network has undergone a rather dramatic transformation. While previous co-owners Warner Bros. and CBS utilized the CW as a place to program young adult dramas from its respective studios, Nexstar has aimed to broaden out the CW to focus on low-cost procedural drama acquisitions, repeatable unscripted fare and live sports that it feels better suits its stations’ needs.
Coincidentally, the final scripted holdover from the previous CW ownership, “All American,” wrapped its run with a series finale on Sept. 28. Our job was to create a network that the local stations can be successful with. And the product that is the best for doing that is sports.
And so, if we were going to evolve the network, get the network to profitability, then moving into sports certainly became a very important strategy.” In building CW Sports, the network started with LIV Golf and then brought in Atlantic Coast Conference college football (joined later by deals with the Mountain West and Pac-12 conferences). The CW also has Professional Bowlers Assn. coverage, AVP beach volleyball and has signed a seven-year deal with NASCAR to air its O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, which consists of 33 races annually. According to NASCAR chief media and revenue officer exec vice president Brian Herbst, the O’Reilly series saw a 6% increase in viewership this year on the CW, on top of a 9% bump the previous year.
We thought the distribution strategy was great in terms of a free-to-air broadcast network across all 120 million-plus TV homes, as well as a marketing strategy at the Nexstar local station group level … We’re super happy with the results for the first couple of years, and we expect continued growth out of it for the balance of the term.” Meanwhile, the CW reunited with the WWE (which was part of the network’s initial 2006 launch with “Smackdown”) in 2024 with “WWE NXT,” which airs live on Tuesdays. Schwartz says all of that adds up to 700 hours of live sports this year, up from zero just a few years ago. Nearly half of that is now live sports.” Nexstar networks president Sean Compton adds that the company has calibrated the CW’s focus “as a program provider for affiliates.
Properties like NASCAR, college football, basketball and WWE [pull] significant numbers of viewers to our stations, and that audience flow strengthens the entire local brand of those stations. That’s the outcome that matters to us the most being a company that owns a lot of local TV stations.” On the unscripted front, the CW has invested in repeatable franchises like the cop docuseries “Police 24/7,” as well as game shows like “Scrabble” (hosted by Craig Ferguson) and “Trivial Pursuit” (hosted by LeVar Burton). All three of those shows have been given large episodic orders so that they can be sold into daytime syndication, including on Nexstar stations.
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