Turner announced to partners earlier this month that the company would shut down its PlayON! Sports division due to financial underperformance.
Turner has been shopping the unit around and is expected to disband it entirely by the end of June if no buyers are found.
PlayOn, a division of Turner Sports New Media, managed video streaming for USL soccer, the ACC and Atlantic Sun conferences. It also held distribution deals with Big Ten network and a number of smaller sports organizations. These institutions are now seeking new partners to carry them through the remainder of their PlayOn contract and beyond.
No word yet on layoffs or how this will affect the larger Turner New Media organization and its existing operations for PGA.com, NASCAR.com and the NBA.
A Turner spokesperson offered the following statement:
New subscription-based services that serve highly specialized content to niche audiences face growth and distribution challenges in today’s competitive sports media landscape. That is the marketplace reality facing PlayOn.
We have made a decision to continue to focus on our core brands and businesses. As such, we will begin to streamline business operations for PlayOn.
If Turner had delivered the upgrades to the graphics that were promised, then teams could have run ad-bugs during games and there would have been a revenue stream. The delay in those upgrades is what killed the service. It’s Turner’s own fault.
[...] The digital media firm has been on the auction block for a while now, with Turner announcing that it would be shut down back in June after failing to bring in enough [...]
Bookmarked for future reference. TY