TORONTO – Sportsnet confirmed Thursday that it bought the Grand Slam of Curling from sports media and entertainment company Insight Sports, as Cartt.ca reported on Wednesday.
Part of the World Curling Tour, the elite series of men's and women's curling events will feature teams from across Canada and from around the world. Sportsnet will own and operate the series through a newly created in-house events division, and will share broadcasting duties of the tour with CBC via a sub-licensing agreement. The tour itself has been around in one form or another since 2001 and Rogers has designs on making this as big-time as possible.
"Curling is an essential part of our Canadian sports fabric, and the Grand Slam of Curling is the cream of the crop in international curling events," said Scott Moore, Rogers Media’s president of broadcasting, in the announcement. "We are proud to own and operate the Grand Slam of Curling, as it furthers Sportsnet's commitment to producing world-class content, anyplace, anyhow and anywhere and allows us to integrate and engage the sports fan in innovative ways through our new events division."
This winter will see three events, each with a $100,000 purse, with plans to grow perhaps as large as a dozen events in the coming years. “This can be the PGA Tour of curling,” added Moore during the press conference in Toronto. “We believe we can really take this and blow it up.”
"This is great news for the Canadian curling community as a whole”, added Pierre Charette, president of the World Competitive Curlers Association. “Sportsnet will operate events that are second-to-none, broadcast more games and take the Grand Slam of Curling to another level."
The 2012-13 Grand Slam of Curling series kicks off with The Masters scheduled for November 14 to 18 in Brantford, as 34 men’s and 34 women’s teams take to the ice.
But why own the series, Moore was asked? Why not just grab the broadcast rights? Simple, really. Owning the entire series puts all of the weight of the Rogers organization behind it, from TV to radio to wireless to broadband to print. “The key is to be able to use all of our platforms to build and promote it,” Moore told Cartt.ca in an interview after the press conference. Plus, sponsors can be sold a whole multiplatform package from a presence at the event to online placement and ads on Citytv and Sportsnet.
“We think that between ourselves and our partnership with CBC that we can bring all those assets together and build this into something great,” added Moore.
So why not just go all the way and launch a curling channel? Golf and Tennis have their own channel and many leagues and teams have their own channels. Why not curling? “There has to be enough world class content first, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility some day,” he said. “The reason to want to own anything is that in a world of expanding choice and eventually, internet television, where you can go to any of a million sites to get video, you want to have a brand that is going to stand out and content that going to stand out and a community that will support that.
“Could there be a curling channel? Not in the next couple of years maybe but there could certainly be a curling channel on our website that would complement all the other things we’re doing on television.”
The purchase of the Grand Slam of Curling is just the first step in Rogers’ quest to own content from soup-to-nuts that is IP resilient. That is, popular content that it can own and exploit on any and all platforms, however the company wishes, maximizing exposure and revenue. However, Moore wouldn’t tip his hand at what the company has up its sleeve next, except to say that with Canada’s diverse population may point the company in unexpected directions.
“We have been in talks with a few other sports,” he said. “We’re looking at sports that have a growth opportunity… sports out there that we think we can own now or partner with now that will have growth potential down the road… Canada is growing more diverse, ethnically, and Sportsnet fans are demanding to see sports that, years ago, most Canadians didn’t care about.”
Now not to be, ’er, swept aside, Sportsnet rival TSN was quick to remind us of a news release from last year trumpeting its long term deal with the Canadian Curling Association which includes the exclusive Canadian rights to major Season of Champions events through 2020. In addition to French-language coverage on sister station RDS, that deal also includes broadband, mobile, radio and video-on-demand rights.
Perhaps there will be two PGA Tours for curling in the coming years.
It’s also worth noting TSN has run an in-house events department, TSN Events, which acquires sports marketing rights and develops original content such as The Dominion All-Star Curling Skins Game presented by Pinty’s which is set to debut in January 2013.
If we Canadians thought curling was a competitive pastime already, the immediate future for our best sliders seems now rather bright as it has now fully gone pro.
