The CW will route every one of its live sporting events to the ESPN app starting this summer, the network announced Wednesday, sending roughly 800 hours of football, basketball, bull riding, NASCAR and WWE NXT to the worldwide leader’s direct-to-consumer subscription instead of building a streaming product of its own.
The slate is wider than it sounds. ACC football and men’s and women’s basketball, Pac-12 and Mountain West games, the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series (formerly Xfinity), PBA Bowling, PBR Bull Riding, AVP volleyball, WWE NXT and the 2026 Arizona Bowl will all live on ESPN Unlimited, the $29.99 streaming tier ESPN launched last August. The games stay on CW’s broadcast signal too. The streaming rights are the new piece.
CW president Brad Schwartz framed the choice plainly. “We were hunting for a streaming solution, and the thing that we knew was that the world doesn’t need another direct-to-consumer product,” he told TheWrap. “We decided our strategy was not going to be adding to that challenge for people and that we were going to partner with somebody to do it. If you’re going to find a partner for sports, the worldwide leader in sports is a pretty good one to go with.”
That’s the math behind it. Standing up a fresh app, marketing it, and convincing sports fans to download a fifth or sixth subscription would cost more than the inventory is worth. ESPN already has the audience.
For ESPN’s side, the appeal is inventory ESPN can’t get anywhere else. CW carries ACC, Mountain West and Pac-12 games that Disney’s networks don’t hold the rights to, plus WWE’s developmental brand. “As we continue to evolve ESPN’s direct-to-consumer experience, collaborations like this allow us to better serve fans by making more of the sports they love available in one place,” said Rosalyn Durant, ESPN’s executive vice president of programming and acquisitions, in the announcement.
CW will keep the ad sales for these games, a structure that mirrors how Paramount handles CBS sports on Paramount+ and how Peacock carries NBC’s. The network has been quietly turning into a sports broadcaster since Nexstar bought the controlling stake in 2022. Schwartz said 28 percent of weekday CW primetime viewers are now watching the network’s weekend sports, up from 21 percent the year before. Habit, in his words, is the hardest thing to build.
The ESPN piece arrived alongside a separate deal with Roku. Beginning this fall, CW’s scripted and unscripted programming, including the upcoming Jason Priestley vehicle “Private Eyes West Coast,” the unscripted “Police 24/7,” and game shows “Scrabble” and “Trivial Pursuit,” will stream next-day on The Roku Channel. WWE NXT will land there every Wednesday after its Tuesday night live broadcast. CW’s hub on Roku will also carry more than 800 hours of library content.
Schwartz compared the Roku setup to FX on Hulu, the cable-network-inside-a-streamer arrangement that Disney has run for years. “How do we combine the best of broadcast with the best of streaming so that we can bring fans and advertisers of all of our content into both areas?” he said. “You need a streaming partner for that.”
CW’s own app has been downloaded 110 million times, by Schwartz’s count, and isn’t going anywhere. The network just doesn’t want to compete with ESPN and Roku for the attention of people already inside those products.
Emily Horowitz, ESPN’s vice president of direct-to-consumer strategy, said adding the CW slate “makes that product as attractive as we possibly can” for ESPN Unlimited subscribers. The first CW games stream on the ESPN app this summer, with the Roku entertainment hub launching in the fall.
