In the opening week of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, audiences will start to get a glimpse of what ESPN has to offer as the tournament’s exclusive live TV network carrying the event.
This year marks the first of the next 11 years in which ESPN has exclusive live coverage of the U.S. Open, according to a deal made between the network and the U.S. Tennis Association, with the Tennis Channel given rights to re-air outside of the live window. ESPN also has rights to the complete coverage of Wimbledon and the Australian Open.
“We found that this is an absolute winning formula, to be able to cover from end to end live rights, to be able to tell the story in a busy media environment with lots of doors and windows for consumers to access it from,” said Scott Guglielmino, senior vice president of programming and global X at ESPN.
Having complete coverage of the event allows ESPN to “really get into a rhythm and cadence of the tournament,” Guglielmino added, and further emphasized that exclusive coverage gives ESPN the advantage to enhance storytelling, since all live coverage is under the network’s control.
The additional content available through ESPN2, ESPN3 and WatchESPN gives fans the opportunity to access content anytime, anywhere through streaming and mobile devices—and to drop in on any of the 10 or 11 matches happening at once. This gives a viewer the ability to watch every single match, if they choose.
The network is even helping people through a video tutorial on how to access the tennis content on ESPN3 via the WatchESPN app, whether they use a cable provider or another streaming service. WatchESPN is an app that’s part of the TV Everywhere movement, which has helped revolutionize the way we watch television, and especially sports coverage, on the go. The popularity of the concept is evident through the success of WatchESPN, which experienced over 1.2 million unique viewers of the College Football Playoff National Championship earlier this year.
Jamie Reynolds, vice president of production at ESPN, added that having exclusive live coverage rights is especially more advantageous to storytelling in the sport of tennis. “That is tennis, this event, the fortnight of any of these majors, is very much a commitment to the commitment, meaning our approach from a production standpoint is much healthier and much more robust if we can tell every story, run from first ball to last ball, whether it’s on the E3 platform, E2 or E1, that we can actually live in the moment,” said Reynolds.
ESPN reporter Dave Nagle wrote this week that the network’s recent television programming strategy centers on deeper coverage of championship events, as opposed to quantity and variety of various sports and events. Nagle said that its coverage in tennis since the start of the millennium shows how the network has evolved to focus on these prestigious competitions, first by acquiring a large portion of Wimbledon before making it exclusive in 2012, then by adding the U.S. Open in 2009 and sharing live coverage with CBS and Tennis Channel.
This week, as the 256 men and women’s players go through the first three rounds and into the round of 16, viewers can find the live streams available on each day of the tournament starting at 11 a.m. ET on ESPN3, and TV coverage starting at 1 p.m. ET on ESPN. ESPN’s coverage, which includes up to 11 courts at once, also includes new 12-hour time slots starting at 11 a.m. ET Saturday, Sept. 5 – Labor Day Monday, Sept 7. The women’s singles final airs on ESPN on Sept. 12, with the men’s singles final on Sept. 13.