NFL Network's Good Morning Football is headed to syndication for the 2024-25 season, confirms Sony Pictures Television, which is handling national distribution.

The show, which has been airing on NFL Network since August 2016, will produce two additional original hours each day to air five days a week on broadcast and other platforms. Good Morning Football — or GMFB, as it will be called in syndication — will premiere ahead of NFL preseason football this summer.

Stations can take one or two hours each day and air the show whenever they want. GMFB is being sold to stations with a 7-7 barter split, meaning there will be seven minutes of national advertising and seven minutes of local advertising in each hour-long episode. Deals are currently in progress, according to Sony, and will be announced at a later date.

Good Morning Football stars Kyle Brandt, Jamie Erdahl, Jason McCourty and Peter Schrager, who discuss all things NFL in a roundtable setting. Besides the regular hosts, it also features guests and sideline reporters talking about the NFL news of the day. The show airs 7-10 a.m. ET Monday through Friday on NFL Network and is available to watch on the NFL Network live stream. 

While the NFL season runs from preseason matchups in August through the Super Bowl in early February, Good Morning Football airs year-round. Producers plan to produce 42-48 weeks of original episodes, while stations will be able to run the show 52 weeks a year, including repeats.

Riding the coattails of the Travis Kelce-Taylor Swift romance and a highly competitive NFL season, Good Morning Football posted its most-viewed season since 2017, with viewership up 16%, according to Sony.

Good Morning Football is executive produced by Michael Davies and his Embassy Row Productions, which is housed at SPT.

Jeopardy! will host its biggest Tournament of Champions yet with 27 players taking on the challenge starting Friday, February 23. 

The field includes players who have won the most games since Jeopardy!’s last Tournament of Champions in 2022. It also includes six players who advanced out of Jeopardy!’s Wildcard competitions, which feature former contestants who won between one and three games playing for $100,000 and an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Four Wildcard champions are playing from season 37/38 and two are coming in from season 39, which has yet to conclude on broadcast. Rounding out the cast are the winners of the Jeopardy! High School Reunion Tournament as well as season one of ABC’s Celebrity Jeopardy!.

Players will compete across nine quarter-finals, three semi-finals and a best-of-seven finals series. The first player to win three games during the best-of-seven final will claim a $250,000 grand prize and an invitation to compete on the upcoming Jeopardy! Masters primetime event on ABC. 

Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions tends to garner strong ratings, especially as the tournament goes on and the stakes climb ever higher. 

Following is the list of returning champions and the competition schedule:

Friday, February 23: Quarterfinal 1

– Suresh Krishnan, a six-game champion from Suwanee, Ga.

– Matthew Marcus, a four-game champion from Portland, Ore.

– Emily Sands, a three-game champion and S37/38 Champions Wildcard winner from Chanhassen, Minn.

Monday, February 26: Quarterfinal 2

– Ben Goldstein, a five-game champion from Dexter, Mich.

– Cris Pannullo, a 21-game champion from Ocean City, N.J.

– Jared Watson, a three-game champion from Greenville, Texas

Tuesday, February 27: Quarterfinal 3

– David Sibley, a four-game champion from Walla Walla, Wash.

– Yungsheng Wang, three-game champion and S37/38 Champions Wildcard winner originally from Lafayette, La.

– Hannah Wilson, an 8-game champion from Chicago, Ill.

Wednesday, February 28: Quarterfinal 4

– Nick Cascone, a one-game champion and S37/38 Champions Wildcard winner originally from Queens, N.Y.

– Jake DeArruda, a three-game champion originally from Ludlow, Vt.

– Yogesh Raut, a three -game champion from Vancouver, Wash.

Thursday, February 29: Quarterfinal 5

– Kevin Belle, a three-game champion from Silver Spring, Md.

– Luigi de Guzman, a five-game champion from Arlington, Va.

– Juveria Zaheer, a S39 Second Chance winner and S39 Champions Wildcard winner from Whitby, Ontario, Canada

Friday, March 1: Quarterfinal 6

– Brian Henegar, a three-game champion from LaFollette, Tenn.

– Josh Saak, a three-game champion and S37/38 Champions Wildcard winner from Boise, Idaho

– Stephen Webb, an eight-game champion from Longmont, Colo.

Monday, March 4: Quarterfinal 7

– Ike Barinholtz, Celebrity Jeopardy! Season 1 champion from Chicago, Ill.

– Melissa Klapper, a three-game champion from Merion Station, Pa.

– Ray Lalonde, a 13-game champion from Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Tuesday, March 5: Quarterfinal 8

– Justin Bolsen, Jeopardy! High School Reunion Tournament champion from Canton, Ga.

– Ben Chan, a nine-game champion from Green Bay, Wisc.

– Emmett Stanton, a three-game champion from Baltimore, Md.

Wednesday, March 6: Quarterfinal 9

– Sean McShane, a three-day champion from South Boston, Ma.

– Troy Meyer, a six-day champion from Tampa, Fla.

– Season 39 Champions Wildcard Winner (to be determined)

The semi-finals start Thursday, March 7, and the finals begin Tuesday, March 12. The finals will run through at least Thursday, March 14, if someone manages to win three in a row, but if seven games are needed, the tournament will conclude Wednesday, March 20. 

Syndicated game show Jeopardy!, now in its 40th season, is produced by Sony Pictures Television and distributed by CBS Media Ventures. It is hosted by Ken Jennings and executive produced by Michael Davies. 

Jeopardy! will officially be co-hosted by the tag team of Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings, executive producer Michael Davies confirmed Wednesday (July 27).

That the move was in progress was reported earlier this week but had not been officially confirmed by Davies, the show or producer Sony Pictures Television until now.

“I write today with the exciting news that we have closed and signed deals with Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings to be the hosts of Jeopardy! moving forward,” Davies wrote in a blog post on Jeopardy.com.

“The fact is, we have so much Jeopardy! to make, and so many plans for the future, that we always knew we would need multiple hosts for the franchise and we are just so grateful that Mayim and Ken stepped in and stepped up to put the show in a position to succeed. And succeed it has. With Mayim and Ken hosting, the show is considerably up in viewership year over year, with more than 27 [million] viewers tuning in each week this season. When you consider that almost every other show in broadcast television and syndication is declining, this has been a quite remarkable season: we’re the most-watched entertainment show on all of television. Yes, all of television.”

Jeopardy! had been looking for a new permanent host since the death of Alex Trebek in November 2020. Jennings and Bialik have been co-hosting the show on a temporary basis since last fall.

Beyond sharing hosting duties on the syndicated strip, Bialik and Jennings will also host special events and primetime specials.

Jennings, who is Jeopardy!’s winningest contestant ever and a consulting producer on the show, will kick off the show’s 39th season in September as well as the inaugural Second Chance competition and the popular Tournament of Champions, which this season will feature such players as Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Mattea Roach, Ryan Long and more. Jennings will host through December. 

In January, Bialik, who also stars in and executive produces Fox sitcom Call Me Kat, will take the reins. During her run, Bialik will also host “a couple of new tournaments,” according to Davies, as well as the Jeopardy! National College Championship.

In the final six weeks of summer, Jeopardy!, like most syndicated shows, airs repeats. This year, Davies said he and his fellow producers have “handpicked six weeks of some of our favorite episodes of the season, featuring our closest games, super-champions, and some of the people who will be announced as part of our inaugural Second Chance competition.”

Beyond the host announcement, Davies also made some news about what’s coming up for the long-running game show.

Starting Monday, Jeopardy! will release a daily three-minute highlight reel of the day’s episode on its website, across its social media and with its partner TV station affiliates. 

Finally, the show is launching a new weekly podcast titled, “Inside Jeopardy!”  that will be hosted by Davies and Jeopardy!’s producing team. Davies is an experienced podcaster, having co-hosted the soccer-focused “Men in Blazers” podcast since 2014. “Inside Jeopardy!” will kick off with an announcement of the returning players who will face off in the show’s inaugural Second Chance tournament. Davies will also “share my vision for Jeopardy!’s future, including new developments in the areas of pop culture and sports, plans for a Jeopardy! Honors awards show and my biggest and most passionately held idea: a Jeopardy! Masters league in primetime or on a streaming platform,” he wrote.

“Mayim and Ken are both extraordinarily talented and simply lovely humans. They support the staff and each other,” wrote Davies. “They love and respect this institution of a television program. In return, the staff and I are honored to work alongside them.” ■

Michael Davies has been named permanent executive producer of Jeopardy!, he announced Thursday in a post on Jeopardy!’s website.

“Today, I am delighted to announce that I have accepted Sony’s offer to become the show’s full time Executive Producer,” Davies wrote. “I am both honored and humbled by the faith the studio and the staff have put in me. Over the next few months, the scope of our plans will become clear. But, for now I just want to thank everyone in the Jeopardy! community for your phenomenal support.” 

Davies is best known for creating and executive producing massive game show hit, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, which dominated ABC’s primetime in the early 2000s with Regis Philbin as host and then moved into syndication from 2002-2019. A celebrity version of the game currently airs on ABC primetime with Jimmy Kimmel as host.

In 1999, Davies launched his company Embassy Row, which Sony Pictures Television acquired in 2009. Embassy Row, where Davies remains president, produces such shows as Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live and AMC’s Talking Dead, among others. 

“My television journey … started in development: first at Merv Griffin, then Disney, then ABC, then Sony, where I have spent a career creating and finding new ideas for television,” Davies wrote. “After a while, I started producing those ideas as well. A few have been huge hits. Some have been critical hits. Others, less so (!) But I’ve only ever produced what I’ve developed. I’ve never been given a show to produce, let alone a legacy. And it’s one of the reasons why, after more than three decades in this business, the opportunity to step in and help out on Jeopardy! on an interim basis has been such an unexpected pleasure.” 

Last fall, Sony tapped Davies to take over Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on an interim basis after Mike Richards was fired. In March, Bellamie Blackstone was named executive producer of Wheel of Fortune.

While Davies runs Jeopardy!, he will also work closely with Sony to develop more content in the game space via Embassy Row, he said.

“The studio’s strong commitment to game shows also allows me to bring Embassy Row’s game show development and production expertise to the new Sony Games area being run by my partner in all things Jeopardy!, Suzanne Prete. Suzanne and I are like the human embodiment of a Venn diagram, very different backgrounds and starting points, but a huge shaded area in the middle where we are completely aligned on the future of Jeopardy! and the game show business at large,” Davies wrote. 

“Honestly, without the strength of our working relationship and the trust we both have in each other, I would never have been able to succeed in the interim role, and I never would have taken, let alone been offered, the permanent role. We have so many plans to expand our working relationship in the future and already several Embassy Row creatives and producers have started work within the group. With the brilliant Bellamie Blackstone joining to lead Wheel of Fortune, the studio’s superb library, multiple shows in development, and a reinvigorated partnership with our colleagues over at GSN, Sony is truly positioned to become an even greater force  in the game-show space.” ■

4K TV is not yet a mass-market phenomenon, but Fox Sports said it’s preparing for an inevitable “evolution” once the pixel-packed format is widely adopted by distribution partners and consumers.

Fox Sports, which has already produced some NASCAR races and college basketball games in 4K, is taking another step forward this fall as it moves ahead with a plan to produce one college football game per week in 4K — for a total of 13 games.

The first took place on Sept. 2, when the Maryland Terrapins visited the Texas Longhorns.

Fox Sports will distribute its full slate of college-football games in 4K with DirecTV, which has been using its satellite-TV platform to spearhead an ambitious strategy around the emerging video format.

“They’ve got the distribution, and they have the technology to move 4K from the remote [location] to the house,” Michael Davies, Fox Sports senior vice president of field and technical operations, said.

Fox is also discussing 4K distribution of those games with Layer3 TV, the Denver-based IPTV cable operator that supports 4K on all its boxes that has launched service in markets such as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Dallas/Fort Worth and Longmont, Colo., with New York on deck.

4K’s College Try
The college football slate represents Fox Sports’s most significant 4K project to date.

“This gives us a great opportunity to flex our muscles a bit with what 4K can be,” Davies said. “College football at this level is something that can be done in 4K and can be done successfully, so we’re excited about giving it a try.”

Davies said the 4K college football productions will offer some efficiencies because Fox Sports can produce the event in 4K and downconvert it for a wider audience watching the game in HD or standard definition.

“You don’t need to make too many sacrifices in terms of the production level [and] the end cost,” he said.

Additionally, these productions will take advantage of other features usually found in a standard football broadcast, such as on-screen graphics and yellow lines that mark first-down locations, but designed for 4K-level resolutions.

“The graphics look beautiful in 4K,” Davies said. “I think that puts the sheen on the whole production.”

Unlike its earlier NASCAR productions, Fox Sports won’t need to roll in a separate truck for the 4K college football productions, and it will need only one production crew to pull them off. (That wasn’t the case for 3DTV productions, which required separate crews and a different set of cameras.)

For this year’s games, Fox Sports has earmarked a 4K truck from Denver-based Mobile TV Group that also did some work with NBC to produce a handful of Notre Dame football games in the format.

“It’s got some reps under its belt,” Davies said, noting that the productions will use the guts of the 4K truck while preserving the overall workflow. “The goal is to put all of this in one truck.”

Though Fox Sports will learn some new 4K lessons this fall, it’s also drawing on some that it got from its earlier 4K productions.

“Organization is key,” Davies said. “You have to organize yourself very well to make sure you don’t run out of inputs.”

Plus, Fox Sports plans to be selective on what can be upconverted and inserted seamlessly into the 4K feed. Replays, for example, are still done in HD and upconverted for the 4K telecast.

Looking ahead, Davies said Fox Sports is “itching to get our hands on some HDR production,” referring to High Dynamic Range, an emerging technology that will make the pixels brighter and more colorful and complement the pixel density afforded by 4K.

“When we look at the evolution of the format … the Holy Grail is 4K HDR,” Davies said. “That’s what’s we’re working towards. We think there’s a lot of benefits that come from the combination of resolution and High Dynamic Range, but we’re not quite there yet.”

Also not there yet is widespread consumer adoption of 4K TVs. While the pace of 4K/UHD TV adoption is ahead of the transition from standard-definition to HD, according to the Consumer Technology Association, there’s still a lot of ground to capture.

Shipment of 4K TVs in North America are expected to more than double, from 11.7 million in 2016 to 25.9 million in 2020, according to IHS Markit.

Said Davies: “4K is an evolution. For us, this is an opportunity to work week over week in this space, and it also gives us a laboratory to experiment with different things in 4K.”

Hollywood studios have made noise with virtual reality content, theme parks have put VR headsets on roller coaster riders, CNN live-streamed a presidential debate in VR, and even retailers are getting on board with virtual reality to help sell everything from chairs to appliances.

But Philip Lelyveld, virtual and augmented reality initiative program lead for the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California, could only chuckle during a presentation here when he shared survey results that showed what consumers want most with their VR.

An Ericsson Consumer Labs survey from late last year found that using VR for retail (64%), VR smartphone apps (62%) and movie experiences (57%) were the top three interests among smartphone users. No. 4 on the list? All-angle tech support.

The results just go to show that the young consumer VR industry is still feeling its way around when it comes to what works with VR and what appeals to the average customer.

“The modern era of virtual reality is less than three years old,” Lelyveld noted. “It’s a new art form; it’s a new storytelling tool.”

But according to Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations for Fox Sports Media Group, sports broadcasters especially are still in a trial and error period with virtual reality.

“We’re still learning about virtual reality,” he said. “There are things you think are quite captivating but turn out [disappointing].” Something like boxing in virtual reality holds great promise, because it’s extremely close and intimate. A huge soccer field is a different story altogether. “Things that look far away [normally] look very far away in VR,” Davies said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

NEXT TV BRIEFS

TV Everywhere Isn’t Going Anywhere

John Bishop, chief technology officer for Akamai Technologies’ media business, looks at how people are ingesting content, and sees a sea change happening. And a big part of that is TV everywhere.

Giving consumers the option to access their pay TV content anywhere, on any device, at any time, has become an expectation, not just a nice thing to have, Bishop and other panelists agreed here on the “TV Everywhere: The Multiscreen Challenge” panel.

And this relatively new way of ingesting content isn’t without its drawbacks.

“I think the Olympics [this summer in Rio de Janiero] is going to be a massive event for [TV everywhere],” Bishop said. “I think a lot of people are going to be really unproductive at work. People are going to be watching Usain Bolt running at work at 3:30 ET.”

Barry Tishgart, vice president of Comcast Wholesale, added that TV Everywhere companies need to approach each global region differently. Unlike in the U.S., where at-home pay TV is prevalent, some countries are digital-only and mobile-first. “In some parts of the world, multiscreen viewing surpasses set-top viewing,” he said.

Google’s DoubleClick Clicks With Cablevision, Roku

Daniel Alegre, president of global partnerships at Google, last week announced the launch of DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion, with initial distribution deals with Cablevision Systems and Roku.

The news, which came during a wide-ranging keynote session here, is a step toward further injecting Google into the traditional TV ecosystem.

The Dynamic Ad Insertion tool “makes ads hyper-relevant for viewers across any screen they watch by creating individual viewer streams,” Alegre said.

Alegre was joined onstage by Cablevision chief operating officer Kristin Dolan, who described the MVPD’s bid to become a “connections company” instead of a cable company. The embrace of the DoubleClick setup, she said, fits in with the overall innovation push at Cablevision, which just rolled out Hulu via the set-top box. “How do we allow people to not only experience when they want but also take advantage of the subscriptions they have to other things?”

She added, though, that 91% of viewing on Cablevision still happens live. “It shows that a lot of people still want to watch things as they happen, which should be good news for all the broadcasters in the room.”

— Dade Hayes, B&C