According to a report in Motorsport.com, NASCAR’s next broadcast deal will be announced on Wednesday afternoon and will be split across three television partners and one exclusive streaming entity.
This is for the broadcast rights agreement set to begin in 2025.
According to the report, FOX Sports will return to broadcast the first 14 races of the NASCAR Cup Series season with NBC returning to air the final 14 races. The middle 10 will be split between a returning TNT and a streaming partner that Motorsport believes to be Amazon Prime.
TNT aired the ‘NASCAR Summer Series’ from 2007-to-2014, a six-race mid-summer stretch between FOX and ESPN.
The report expects the announcement to come at 5 p.m. at the start of the NASCAR Champions Week celebration in Downtown Nashville. It did not reveal knowledge of the length or terms.
NASCAR president Steve Phelps indicated earlier in the week that such an announcement would come sooner rather than later.
“We are going to have an additional partner and we may have two additional partners,” Phelps told NBC Sports. “That’s kind of where we’re trying to figure out in these last few weeks — what that’s going to look like, but we already know we’re going to have more partners.”
Phelps also articulated a reason to have events across over-the-air, cable and streaming.
“I think what I would call hedging our bet is a smart thing for us to do as a sport,” Phelps said. “No one has any idea what’s going to happen with streaming and what’s going to happen with cable. We do know that broadcast television is going to be around for the foreseeable future at 125 million homes. That’s not going to change.
“What we do know is that the cable universe has declined. So what does that look like in two years, five years, seven years? Don’t know, but we better make sure that we have distribution points that will allow us to be successful moving forward, to have as many eyeballs as we can, while not insignificant, also getting paid. The revenue is significant that comes from these media rights or from these media partners.”
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NASCAR broadcast agreement and what it means
The current $8.2 billion agreement with FOX and NBC expires after the 2024 season but the hold-up on finalizing an agreement beyond next season is also holding up negotiations between NASCAR and the race teams over an extension to the charter agreement.
The agreement between NASCAR and the Cup Series teams, collectively represented by an entity called the Race Team Alliance, ends alongside the current television agreement. Right now, 65 percent of the TV money goes to the tracks, 25 percent goes to the teams and 10 percent goes to NASCAR itself.
With a new television contract in place, NASCAR and the teams can then work towards a new agreement amongst themselves.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.