The South African Broadcasting Corporation through SABC Sport is pleased to announce an exciting multiyear television broadcast rights agreement with the National Basketball Association (NBA). As part of the partnership, SABC Sport will air more than 35 games throughout the season, including a Christmas game, NBA All-star Saturday Night, Conference Finals and The Finals, broadcast live or delayed, on SABC 1 and The SABC Sport Channel on DTT, TelkomOne and Openview. In addition the SABC will host a weekly magazine show "NBA Action" which covers the league's news and highlights.
The first live broadcast will kick off with a pre-game live studio presentation at 22:30 on Saturday, 30 October. Followed by the inaugural live broadcast of the 75th Anniversary Season where the Washington Wizards will host the Boston Celtics.
Due to time difference between South Africa and the United States, the live or delayed broadcasts will start between 20:00 and midnight on the same Saturday on SABC 1 and The Sport Channel.
e.tv once held rights to NBA for several years and often used News & Sport for reruns and highlights before it sudden departure from their stable.
Since the launch of SABC Sport, Openview has been creating more hype for the channel which led to speculation that News and Sport would soon be reduced to ashes.
As seen above, it looks like the SABC will be leveraging content from the News and Sport channel as eMedia seems to be diverting their focus away from sports. Not long ago, the channel stopped broadcasting La Liga.
Impact Wrestling Ain't Changing Houses
Amidst their possible exit from sport, Impact Wrestling has been added onto eVOD so it seems probable that sports may not be wiped out entirely or at not wrestling.
Over the years, wrestling has been viewed not only as a sport but general entertainment. Unlike other sports, wrestling resorts to storylines and gives each wrestler a persona to start rivalries and get viewers pumped for the action.
WWE could have some involvement with Impact's freedom from execution seeing that it once aired on e.tv as indicated below:
"Africa has always been a strong market for IMPACT Wrestling, where our passionate fans continue to engage with our content on multiple platforms,” said Ed Nordholm, Chief Corporate Officer of Anthem Sports & Entertainment and president of IMPACT Wrestling. “We are thrilled to bring professional wrestling back to e.tv, where the sport has a long history and track record of success.”
“e.tv is proud to be the home of Impact Wrestling across Sub-Saharan Africa. We received enormous traction from having aired wrestling (WWE) on our channels a few years ago, and it is only befitting that we bring back content that highly resonates with our audience. We hope to build the IMPACT Wrestling brand on our multi-channel platforms for many years to come,” added Marlon Davids, MD, echannels.
In future, we could actually see the content be transmitted on e.tv and especially eExtra now that the whole streamlining has reduced the reruns on the channel.
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