Versant, the cable spinoff that separated from Comcast earlier this year, is betting heavily on women’s sports. Its newest wager is dedicating Monday and Wednesday primetime on USA Network to women’s programming year-round.
Cynthia Littleton at Variety took an in-depth look at the strategy, speaking with USA Sports anchor Elle Duncan and Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus. Littleton reported that Versant is using those two nights to train viewers into a habit, building a recurring appointment around the channel rather than treating women’s sports as occasional inventory.
Versant is far from the first media rights player to make big bets on women’s sports recently. E.W. Scripps has built Ion Television’s sports identity almost entirely around women’s leagues, airing the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, and women’s college basketball events like the Fort Myers Tip-Off. Gray Media recently launched Rose City SportsNet, an over-the-air network in Portland built around the city’s WNBA and NWSL teams. Even ESPN is carving out Women’s Sports Sundays, dedicating Sunday primetime hours to women’s leagues during the summer months.
What sets Versant apart from its competitors is exposure. Ion runs a deep slate of syndicated programming beyond sports. Gray operates dozens of other local stations. ESPN has the rest of its sports portfolio to fall back on. USA Network’s Monday and Wednesday slots carry far more weight for Versant, because cable networks make up a large share of its overall business, and live sports remain one of the few things still keeping subscribers in the bundle. If Versant can use women’s sports to build appointment viewing habits, those habits become a reason for fans to keep paying for cable in the first place.
The difference for Versant and its other competitors is just how high-stakes this is for Versant. Ion Television has a very diverse syndicated show portfolio; Gray Media has many other local stations; ESPN relies on many other sports for viewership.
There’s reason to think this can work. Cable sports viewership has held up better than most cable programming, and women’s sports audiences have grown exponentially in recent years, which is exactly why Scripps, Gray, and ESPN are all chasing the same audience.
“We’re now at a place where we’re no longer appealing to people’s morality or it being the right thing to do,” Duncan told Littleton. “Being in women’s sports is just a great business model. What sold me on working with USA Sports was they are truly earnest in their commitment.”
The risk runs the other way. Cable continues to lose subscribers every quarter, and persuading sports fans to stay in the bundle is getting harder as more leagues move to streaming or over-the-air broadcasts. If Versant’s strategy fails to gain traction, it would raise significant questions about one of the company’s central growth initiatives.
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