Jim Williams: Staying live in England

Len DeLuca, ESPN’s senior vice president of programming and acquisitions, is a real believer in giving fans live action no matter when it occurs. Incidentally, NBC which always gets high marks for coverage, came under fire from fans for tape delaying last year’s semifinal between Andy Murray and Andy Roddick. DeLuca and I talked about how ESPN has benefited by not doing that during the tennis majors.

DeLuca on the fans’ love of live tennis » I think that most sports fans want to watch their favorite sports live no matter what time we air them. What we have learned from our airing of the four majors is that fans will watch tennis at 1 a.m. from Melbourne, 1 p.m. from London or midnight from New York City. Also, ESPN3 broadband has opened up another audience for those who are either at the office, in a dorm room or in the military. All can watch the action without being near a TV. So between our ESPN2 and ESPN3 audiences, fans have no problem finding our live coverage.

DeLuca on ESPN’s relationship with the Tennis Channel » It has been good for both networks. We will have all the live matches here at Wimbledon, but at the other majors Tennis Channel has done some of the exciting early matches, and we picked up the afternoon and prime-time matches. I think that any relationship that we make that gives fans round-the-clock coverage of a major is not only good for the sport, it is good for the fans, and in end it is great for us as well.

DeLuca on Wimbledon and the World Cup going on at the same time on ESPN » We are blessed with having great programming on our networks going at all times. Everyone knows the bottom line we use to keep people updated on the top headlines and scores. We will use that to keep fans current with tennis on ESPN2 and World Cup on ESPN, so fans will be able to switch back and forth as they see fit.

Jim Williams is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning TV producer, director and writer. Check out his blog, Watch this!