 | This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(November 2015) |
Steve Bornstein | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 20, 1952 |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Occupation | Corporate executive |
Steve Bornstein (born April 20, 1952) is the chairman of the Media Networks division of the gaming company Activision Blizzard. He previously held high-ranking roles at NFL Network, [1] ESPN, and ABC. [2] While at ESPN, he organized showing SportsCenter reruns during the morning hours.
Bornstein was born and raised in a Jewish family [3] in Fair Lawn, New Jersey to Julian Leon and Marge Frankel Bornstein. Bornstein is the youngest of four siblings, the others being Fred, Andy, and Faye. [4] He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science in communications. [5]
Bornstein began his career as a producer, and later executive producer, at WOSU-TV in Columbus, Ohio. He also worked with Warner-Amex Cable, producing Ohio State Buckeyes football programming for the company's interactive QUBE system. [6]
In January 1980, he joined ESPN as the manager of program coordination when the cable sports network was a four-month-old start-up. During his time as manager of programming coordination, he developed and implemented ESPN's successful programming philosophy of presenting a mix of events, sports news and special interest programming. In 1988, Bornstein was promoted to Executive Vice President of Programming and Production. He advanced through the network's programming and production ranks, becoming ESPN's youngest president and CEO in 1990 at age 38. [7]
In January 1992, ESPN Radio was launched and began a rollout of 24-hour programming in October 1998. Also in 1992, Bornstein established the subsidiary ESPN Enterprises to develop new businesses like ESPN.com, which has grown to become the leading sports news and information site on the internet. [8]
Bornstein helped to oversee the debut of ESPN2 in October 1993 and ESPNews in November 1996. In October 1997, Bornstein directed the acquisition of Classic Sports Network and rebranded the channel as ESPN Classic, adding yet another network to the ESPN family. [9] Additionally, Bornstein oversaw the development of ESPN International, which has grown to include ownership - in whole or in part - of 24 television networks internationally, as well as a variety of additional businesses that allow ESPN to reach sports fans in over 61 countries and territories across all seven continents. [10]
In March 1998, ESPN the Magazine was launched as a joint venture of Disney Publishing and ESPN with distribution being handled by Hearst Magazines. [10]
Throughout his time at ESPN, the network created the SportsCenter franchise, NFL Countdown , NFL PrimeTime , Baseball Tonight and the Outside the Lines series. In addition to his contributions to ESPN programming, Bornstein developed the X Games and Winter X Games, week-long extreme sports competitions. [11] Bornstein is also credited with the creation of the ESPYs Awards, short for Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Award. First awarded in 1993. [10]
During his tenure at ESPN, Bornstein's team won 59 Emmys and 57 Cable Ace Awards.[ citation needed ]
In April 1996, Bornstein was named President of ABC Sports. [12] In a short time, Bornstein established ABC Sports as the preeminent network of college football, creating the College Football Championship Series, and extending contracts with all major CFB conferences.
In 1999, Bornstein was named President of ABC, where he was responsible for all the media network and cable assets at ABC/Disney. [13]
In January 2003, Bornstein was appointed president and CEO of NFL Network and Executive Vice President of Media [14] by then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. [15] While at the NFL, Bornstein oversaw the league's media division, which included the relationships with national broadcast and sponsorship partners as well as NFL-owned media assets and revenue.
In November 2003, Bornstein launched NFL Network, which was the most widely distributed sports network in the history of the industry when it launched and became the youngest network ever to win a Sports Emmy after just 58 days on the air. [16]
On April 14, 2004, Bornstein was integral in creating the first NFL schedule release special. The two-hour segment was the first of its kind to announce the schedule for the upcoming NFL season. Since then, similar segments have aired each year across various competing networks in prime time. It was also Bornstein's suggestion to move the start of each NFL Draft from Saturday afternoon to Thursday evenings in prime time. The yearly draft has since become a staple on the NFL calendar with millions of people tuning in every year. [17]
In 2009, Bornstein spearheaded the creation of NFL RedZone, the widely acclaimed channel produced by NFL Network that whips around live to every NFL game on Sunday afternoons delivering the touchdowns and most exciting moments to viewers. [18]
Under Bornstein's leadership, NFL Network and NFL RedZone completed distribution deals with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable in 2012. [19] Currently in more than 72 million homes, NFL Network now has carriage agreements with each of the country's largest television providers including Comcast, DirecTV, DISH Network, Cablevision, Cox, Charter, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse. [20]
Ultimately, Bornstein would bring the league's internet and mobile assets in-house and help build NFL Media into a collection of league-owned media assets including NFL Network, NFL.com, NFL Mobile, NFL RedZone, NFL Now, and NFL Films along with the NFL's social media platforms.
While building out and growing the NFL's own media assets, Bornstein reconfigured and repackaged the NFL's television assets and helped the league bring NBC back into the fold, move Monday Night Football to ESPN, introduced flexible scheduling, and created a new package of Thursday primetime games for NFL Network which introduced the modernized version of Thursday Night Football. What started as an eight-game, cable-only schedule, Thursday Night Football has expanded to a staple in the NFL calendar, with Amazon Prime taking over the primetime package in 2021. Bornstein was instrumental in the December 2011 landmark nine-year extensions with CBS, FOX and NBC which continue the NFL's tradition on broadcast television through the 2022 season. Those new deals came just three months after he helped secure an eight-year agreement to keep Monday Night Football on ESPN until 2021. "Steve Bornstein". Broadcasting & Cable .
Bornstein also helped lead renewal negotiations in 2014 with DirecTV for exclusive rights to carry NFL Sunday Ticket and its package of every Sunday afternoon out-of-market game through a new multi-year agreement. The 2014 renewal also expanded DirecTV's rights to stream NFL Sunday Ticket live on mobile devices and via broadband, known as NFL Sunday Ticket TV.
In 2014, Bornstein was succeeded by Brian Rolapp as CEO of NFL Network.
Bornstein takes part in numerous charitable activities with a wide range of organizations. He is the founder and current board chair of The V Foundation, one of the nation's cancer research funding organizations, which has raised more than $125 million for cancer research in the name of late college basketball coach Jim Valvano. [5] In addition, he has served on the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the California Governor's Council on Physical Fitness, the National Cable Television Association, Hampton University, Steamboat Ventures, and Infoseek.
In October 2021 the video game publisher Activision Blizzard announced the establishment of a new esports competitive video game division headed by Chairman Steve Bornstein and Senior Vice President Mike Sespo of Major League Gaming. [21]
Bornstein lives in Los Angeles with his wife Carol and four children. [22]
NFL Network is an American sports-oriented pay television network owned by the National Football League (NFL) and is part of NFL Media, which also includes NFL.com, NFL Films, NFL Mobile, NFL Now and NFL RedZone. Dedicated to American football, the network features game telecasts from the NFL, as well as NFL-related content including analysis programs, specials and documentaries. The network is headquartered in the NFL Los Angeles building located next to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and broadcasts its worldwide feed from Encompass Digital Media in Atlanta, Georgia. The network has secondary East Coast facilities in the NFL Films building in Mount Laurel, New Jersey.
The television rights to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games are the most lucrative and expensive rights of any sport in the world. Television brought professional football into prominence in the modern era after World War II. Since then, National Football League broadcasts have become among the most-watched programs on American television, and the financial fortunes of entire networks have rested on owning NFL broadcasting rights. This has raised questions about the impartiality of the networks' coverage of games and whether they can criticize the NFL without fear of losing the rights and their income.
ESPN on ABC is the branding used for sports event and documentary programming televised by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in the United States. Officially, the broadcast network retains its own sports division; however, in 2006, ABC's sports division was merged into ESPN Inc., which is the parent subsidiary of the cable sports network ESPN that is majority owned by ABC's corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, in partnership with Hearst Communications.
ESPN Sunday Night Football was the ESPN cable network's weekly television broadcasts of Sunday evening National Football League (NFL) games. The first ESPN Sunday night broadcast occurred on November 8, 1987, while the last one aired on January 1, 2006.
NFL Sunday Ticket is an out-of-market sports package that broadcasts National Football League (NFL) regular season games unavailable on local affiliates. It carries all the regional Sunday afternoon games produced by Fox and CBS. The ideal customer of this package is presumed to be a fan of a team who is unable to see their team on local television because they do not reside in one of that team's markets, or sports bars who want to increase business by attracting fans of out of market teams. Beginning with the 2023 NFL season, for residential customers in the United States, NFL Sunday Ticket moved exclusively to YouTube TV, as well as to YouTube's recently-launched Primetime Channels service as a standalone subscription option. The league then formed a new company called EverPass Media to distribute the package to bars, restaurants, and other commercial venues. From 1994 to 2023, the package was distributed in the United States exclusively by DirecTV.
In broadcasting, the term blackout refers to the non-airing of television or radio programming in a certain media market.
Thursday Night Football is the branding used for broadcasts of National Football League (NFL) games that broadcast primarily on Thursday nights. Most of the games kick off at 8:15 Eastern Time.
ESPN Australia is the Australian division of ESPN, part of the ESPN International grouping. It is offered in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.
DirecTV is an American multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital satellite service serving the United States. It also provides traditional linear television service delivered by IP through its U-verse TV brand and a Virtual MVPD service through its DirecTV Stream brand. Its primary competitors are Dish Network, traditional cable television providers, IP-based television services, and other over-the-top video services.
ESPN Classic was an American multinational pay television network owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications.
As of the 2022 NFL season, CTV and TSN broadcast Sunday games. Monday Night Football airs exclusively on TSN. TSN and CTV 2 own rights to Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football. RDS carries games in the French language from all timeslots. U.S. network television feeds may also be available, often from multiple markets, on cable and satellite ; all games are subject to simultaneous substitution. Monday Night Football also airs in simultaneous substitution with the ABC feed on CTV2 beginning with the 2023 season.
NFL RedZone is an American sports television channel owned and operated by NFL Network since 2009. As a "special" game-day exclusive, it broadcasts on Sundays during the NFL regular season from 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern, or when the last afternoon window game ends. RedZone provides "whip around" simulcast coverage of all Sunday afternoon games airing in-progress on CBS and Fox.
ESPN Goal Line & ESPN Bases Loaded was a gametime-only cable channel operated by ESPN which operated from the start of the 2010 college football season until the end of the 2019 college football season. The channel was active during two college sports seasons; during college football season as ESPN Goal Line and through the NCAA Division I Softball Championship for college softball and NCAA Division I Baseball Championship for college baseball as ESPN Bases Loaded. In both cases, the coverage provided live look-ins and analysis of multiple games in progress. The coverage switched between games to show interesting defensive plays and scoring drives, such as offensive teams entering the red zone (football) or with runners in scoring position (baseball/softball).
ESPN is an American-based global cable and satellite television channel that focuses on sports-related programming inc
A carriage dispute is a disagreement over the right to "carry", that is, retransmit, a broadcaster's signal. Carriage disputes first occurred between broadcasters and cable companies and now include direct broadcast satellite and other multichannel video programming distributors.
The history of the National Football League on television documents the long history of the National Football League on television. The NFL, along with boxing and professional wrestling, was a pioneer of sports broadcasting during a time when baseball and college football were more popular than professional football. Due to the NFL understanding television at an earlier time, they were able to surpass Major League Baseball in the 1960s as the most popular sport in the United States. Today, NFL broadcasting contracts are among the most valuable in the world.
Recently, the NFL's TV broadcasters have suffered annual financial losses because advertising revenue is unable to keep up with the rising costs of broadcast rights.
Until the broadcast contract ended in 2013, the terrestrial television networks CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as cable television's ESPN, paid a combined total of US$20.4 billion to broadcast NFL games. From 2014 to 2022, the same networks will pay $39.6 billion for exactly the same broadcast rights. The NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies that control a combined vast majority of the country's television product. League-owned NFL Network, on cable television, also broadcasts a selected number of games nationally. In 2017, the NFL games attracted the top three rates for a 30-second advertisement: $699,602 for NBC Sunday Night Football, $550,709 for Thursday Night Football (NBC), and $549,791 for Thursday Night Football (CBS).
From 2014 to 2022, CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as cable television's ESPN, paid a combined total of US$20.4 billion will pay $39.6 billion for exactly the same broadcast rights. The NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies that control a combined vast majority of the country's television product. League-owned NFL Network, on cable television, also broadcasts a selected number of games nationally. In 2017, the NFL games attracted the top three rates for a 30-second advertisement: $699,602 for NBC Sunday Night Football, $550,709 for Thursday Night Football (NBC), and $549,791 for Thursday Night Football (CBS).
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