The growing popularity and interest in WNBA games can be linked to the influx of talented rookies, increased media coverage and its appeal to younger audiences.
The 2024 WNBA All-Star Game drew an eye-popping 3.4 million viewers, becoming the most-watched All-Star event in the league’s history. Other regular season games have drawn upwards of 2 million viewers.
An influx of new players, including Caitlin Clark, Cameron Brink and Angel Reese, gave women’s basketball some added traction with reaching a broader fan base. And cable and broadcast networks have been airing more games than ever before.
But traditional TV isn’t the primary force behind the WNBA’s distribution.
Unlike major sports like the NFL, MLB or college football, you don’t need a subscription to a streaming service or cable TV to watch most WNBA games.
In fact, live WNBA games are now available on IonTV across a variety of FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels.
ION TV has been broadcasting WNBA games, including weekend games, for free through over-the-air TV and on a number of FAST platforms. ION is available on The CW, Freevee, Google TV, LG Channels, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Tablo TV, TCL Channel, Tubi, WatchFree+ (Vizio), and Xumo Play.
Cord-cutters using a TV antenna can likewise watch IonTV for free as well as an over-the-air (OTA) broadcast channel.
This free-sports movement is being driven by Scripps Sports, a division of The E.W. Scripps Company that launched in December 2022.
“We clearly had (an) interest in advancing the priority of women’s sports. We believed that ION was a platform that really was complementary to supporting women’s sports,” Scripp Sports President Brian Lawlor told Awful Announcing in December 2023. Lawlor said Scripps lifted the overall reach of the WNBA by almost 30 percent.
E.W. Scripps owns 61 TV stations in 41 markets across the U.S.; however its 2021 acquisition of ION Media increased the company’s reach to 100 percent of U.S. TV households.
In addition to the WNBA, Scripps now has secured partnerships with the NHL’s Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights. Both NHL teams are available free on local OTA stations. Likewise, the Big Sky Conference will be broadcasting its college football and basketball games for free on local TV stations.
In August, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro told reporters that Disney would pursue local sports rights by offering them through its streaming properties. Executives at Scripps Sports didn’t know it at the time, but their foray into acquiring local sports rights came just before the decades-long reign of regional sports networks (RSNs) started going into freefall.
Diamond Sports Group, which owns regional Bally Sports Networks, is still working to emerge from bankruptcy after filing for Chapter 11. Warner Bros Discovery, which has been dealing with its own financial challenges, decided in early 2023 to get out of the RSN business by dissolving or selling off its AT&T SportsNet networks.
