[jonathan]

Quick question because I'm curious, if anyone was watching Sky Sports News at midnight, how did they mark the new year?

[dvboy]

Worrying scenes from the NFL in Cincinnati where Damar Hamlin of Buffalo Bills collapsed on the field during play and was taken to hospital. Around an hour later the NFL suspended the game for tonight.
Channel 5 (taking ESPN commentary) pulled away from replays pretty quickly and then replaced their broadcast with a standby programme after some discussion.
Sky Sports taking ESPN coverage in full continuing with their coverage throughout.

[dvboy]

Just to update (having watched it back on +1), Channel 5 replaced their coverage with a Tony Robinson travel documentary. After their presenter said they were going to a break it seems the channel decided to end the broadcast instead.

On Sky Sports, they went to recorded NFL highlights when ESPN ended their broadcast and handed over to SportsCenter.

[RhysJR]

Worrying scenes from the NFL in Cincinnati where Damar Hamlin of Buffalo Bills collapsed on the field during play and was taken to hospital. Around an hour later the NFL suspended the game for tonight.
Channel 5 (taking ESPN commentary) pulled away from replays pretty quickly and then replaced their broadcast with a standby programme after some discussion.
Sky Sports taking ESPN coverage in full continuing with their coverage throughout.

The match has now been abandoned/postponed. 

Watching the Channel 5 broadcast back on +1 and they stayed on air for around half an hour after the incident began, with the first few minutes of the coverage being fairly normal (talking about tactics etc.) before the seriousness set in. They also showed one or two replays of the incident from ESPN within those first few minutes but appears the broadcast stuck to wide shots or shots of coaches, officals etc. in the time up until Channel 5 went off air.

A very distressing situation to see.

[RhysJR]

Watching the rolling ESPN coverage and have to echo the below in what a exemplary job Scott van Pelt et al. have done. Rolling news coverage is a hard skill to master and not one many sports broadcasters have a chance to practice or prepare for, but they have been great at sticking to the facts and having an honest and open discussion about how serious tonight's incident is and how dangerous football can be in general.

ABC left the SportsCenter simulcast at 4am GMT/11pm ET.


twitter.com 

[RhysJR]

Warner Brothers Discovery Sports Europe / Eurosport have announced their broadcast team for the upcoming Australian Open. No major changes to the English language coverage, Alize Lim, Mats Wilander and Tim Henman will anchor from The Cube in London again, whilst Barbara Schett will be in Melbourne as last year, this year joined by Laura Robson.

The notable headline from the list of other voices that will be heard across Europe is that Boris Becker will return to Eurosport Germany's coverage following his time in prison and subsuquent deportation from the UK. He wil be in Munich rather than Melbourne.

media.discoverysports.com 

The latest company news and press releases from Discovery Sports - home of the O…
  Source: media.discoverysports.com

Another thing I'd note from the press release is the provision of free-to-air coverage across Europe.

Warner Bros. Discovery will also harness the breadth of its free-to-air networks, ensuring the widest possible audiences are reached during one of the headline events on the sporting calendar. 6’Eren – (Denmark) - local players and singles finals, MAX (Norway) – matches featuring Casper Ruud, K9 (Sweden) – singles matches, TV5 (Finland) – men’s and women’s singles finals; and TVN (Poland) – the women’s singles final should it feature Iga Swiatek, will broadcast a host of matches over the course of the Australian Open.

I assume the BBC's highlights of the second week will return this year, but it is a shame WBD don't offer any FTA coverage, however limited, of the their two exclusively live grand slams in the UK, especially considering the loss of the ITV 4 French Open coverage two years ago.

[Brekkie]

Really is, and a shame now that the Aussie Open is sold on a Europe wide basis that effectively locked out UK only broadcasters from any free to air deal for live coverage. There is an argument that the grand slam singles finals outside of Wimbledon should at least be on the B-list to guarantee FTA highlights.

[RhysJR]

Some cricket commentary news, and Australian batter David Warner will join Fox upon his retirement

twitter.com 

[Rdd]

A few changes to Premier Sports FA Cup coverage; they now appear to have rights to both ITV and BBC packages as well as their “additional” (mostly 3pm) coverage. Previously the coverage only included the BBC and “additional” package; ITV games were only available on ITV itself, if you could pick it up on free to air satellite, Manual Tuning on Sky or terrestrial overspill.

Moreover the ITV games are an actual ITV network feed, including (subject to timing constraints) pre and post game coverage and ITV Sport graphics, in other words the same show that goes out on ITV. Assuming other games will still be world feed coverage.

[thegeek]

If we're being picky, it's the FA who've notified UEFA that the 3pm blackout window will not apply. Curiously they've chosen to not include 31st December in the blackout window - it returns on January 14th (after the FA Cup3rd Round).

Despite the 3pm blackout not being in force today, it looks like it's only really the BBC taking advantage by showing goals from FA cup matches on Final Score. (There's a La Liga 2 match on La Liga Sports TV, but that seems to be it.)