It Must be March. I'm Searching for truTV.
Happens every year
Happy March Madness. The station you usually forget even exists is back on your radar.
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Trying to find truTV on your entertainment system has become a ritual of March. It’s like taking the shortcut to the bar your friend told you about: You know it’s probably here somewhere, but the whole neighborhood around these parts feels pretty unfamiliar.
Believe it or not, that could be changing. And if it does change, it’ll be sports that drives truTV out of the shadowy corner and into more recognizable territory.
Bye, Impractical Jokers. Greetings, alterna-cast.
It’s been almost 15 years since the little network that couldn’t got thrown into the NCAA tournament broadcast mixer, and here in 2024 truTV will be home to 13 men’s games during the tournament, including the First Four games Tuesday and Wednesday and a bunch more beginning today.
But that’s only part of a larger rollout of sports-related programming for the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network. Its corporate parent has decided to try to make truTV relevant (at least in terms of what cable systems will pay to carry it) by injecting a heavy dose of sports that’ll include simulcasts of TBS and TNT broadcasts of the NBA, MLB and NHL, along with original programming and alt-casts of some of the bigger properties.
It is all synergistic, of course. Warner Bros. Discovery owns TBS, TNT and truTV, along with a slew of other brands, including Max, HBO, Food Network, HGTV, OWN – on and on. Finding more ways to distribute high-cost acquisitions like the NCAA tournament only makes sense.
But truTV’s future is also tied up in Warner’s joint venture with Fox and Disney to launch their sports-exclusive streaming service sometime next year. That involves packaging content from ESPN, Fox Sports1 and TNT, but truTV is also a part of it – so driving more sports through the little network now is a way to set the network up for that future parlay.
TruTV could use the attention. In 2023, the network ranked 84th in ratings across all viewers, with an average audience of 120,000, an 18% drop from the year before. If you put that in the context of what’s happening this month, it means that truTV is the throw-in network for the NCAAs behind CBS (No. 2 overall in 2023 ratings), TNT (11th) and TBS (14th).
Maybe you can only slam together so many rock-blocks of Impractical Jokers and World’s Dumbest before people start nodding off. At any rate, truTV generally trails such ratings contenders as Laff, Great American Family and Defy TV. (These are all actual networks.)
Sports content isn’t a panacea for everything that might ail a network, but considering that a chunk of truTV’s new programming will be games already owned by Warner, there’s every reason for it to build around that valuable existing stock.
And truTV certainly will be getting sportsy, at least in concept. In addition to the simulcasts and alt-casts, the network will have a nightly sports update show as well as a weekly program based on “House of Highlights,” the social media-driven sports-clip showcase that has 52 million Instagram followers.
There are also plans for sports movies and documentaries, a nightly betting-themed show (natch) and an interactive program built around whatever sports conversations happen to be dominating social media in the moment. They’re calling it “Handles,” which, whatever.
Will it work? It’s gotta work better that truTV as is. The network is reported to command about 33 cents per cable subscriber monthly, compared with more than 10 bucks for ESPN and around $3 for TNT. (These are market research estimates.)
Adding a heavy rotation of sports isn’t an overnight fix, but you’re not required to care about it. All you need to know is that the network you’ve always had to re-learn how to find during March Madness may soon be more easily located. You might even have reason to want to find it.
A version of this story appears at Barrett Sports Media.
More is better when it comes to sports programming 🤣