CW Sports to stream via ESPN in unique content pact
Approximately 800 hours of college football and basketball, professional bull riding, WWE fighting, NASCAR racing, PBA bowling and professional volleyball airing each year on Nexstar’s CW broadcast network will come from a venue that could be considered surprising: ESPN.
Under a deal announced Wednesday, ESPN will reap the additional hours of activity and audiences coming to its direct-to-consumer subscription service from the new sports inventory, while the CW will oversee the sale of advertising revenue tied to those games. The CW matches will only be streamed on ESPN and will not be made available on the linear TV channels.
“Rather than creating our own DTC product, we have a built-in audience” at ESPN, Brad Schwartz, president of The CW, said during a recent interview, addressing growing concerns about the continued fragmentation of sports properties across streaming locations. “The last thing the world needs is another standalone streaming outlet,” he says. “People don’t want to subscribe to another platform.”
The pact between the two media companies hints at continued efforts to “bundle” content and services as consumers have a dizzying array of broadband plans to consider. ESPN’s parent company, Disney, offers a “bundle” of all its own streaming services, and Disney and Fox Corp. offer a bundle of ESPN and the new streaming channel Fox One, both of which focus heavily on sports. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery offers a bundle consisting of Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max.
The idea to combine CW’s sports content with ESPN’s streaming service came about when Schwartz spoke regularly with Nick Dawson, who oversees ESPN’s sports programming and college acquisitions. CW has access to ACC games that ESPN does not, even though ESPN operates a standalone outlet dedicated to ACC sports. CW also has access to Mountain West and Pac-12 games and WWE content that ESPN doesn’t have. ESPN currently does not have a major rights deal with NASCAR or Professional Bull Riders.
“This gives fans of those sports a reason to come to ESPN,” Dawson said.
And the deal gives The CW “accessibility for our consumers and greater reach for our advertisers,” said Dan Lanzano, president of national ad sales for Nexstar.
The CW becomes the latest in a very small number of third-party offerings that have made their way under the auspices of ESPN. ESPN can now offer NFL Network and NFL RedZone thanks to a recent pact that gave the NFL a 10% stake in the sports media giant. And ESPN now offers MLB.tv, a package of off-market baseball games that are highly desirable to die-hard fans.
“We think this is a real value-add for our Unlimited subscribers,” said Emily Horowitz, vice president of ESPN’s direct to consumer strategy. Adding more content “makes that product as compelling as possible.”
CW was best known for programs that skewed young audiences, such as “Gossip Girl” and “Arrow,” but since Nexstar bought most of its ownership, it has built a portfolio of sports programming that Schwartz says has proven attractive to audiences. The executive says 28% of people who watch CW primetime offerings during the week now also watch sports on the weekend, up from 21% the previous year. “The hardest and most important thing to do,” he says, is to get the audience into habits of watching your programs.
Separately, the CW Network and Roku unveiled a partnership launching in fall 2026 that will bring CW entertainment programming to The Roku Channel for next-day streaming. CW programs including “Policy 24/7,” “Scrabble” and “Trivial Pursuit,” as well as new episodes of “WWE NEXT,” will be made available through a CW Hub, which will also feature more than 800 hours of CW library content.
