Sports & Entertainment Beat

First things first, I owe you an apology for having startled you all the other day. You see, I was piloting a new distribution method for taking the Spotlight to the masses, and (oops!) I ended up setting off alerts on everyone’s mobile phones across the country. I take full responsibility and I really should have known better, particularly after seeing how ticked off people were to have U2’s album automatically pushed to their phones years ago. Although, things seem to have worked out for Bono and Co., adding to their accolades the opening of their residency at the $2.3 billion MSG Sphere in Las Vegas…  There’s also the possibility of dating Taylor Swift to reach a new audience, but I don’t think my wife (let alone Taylor Swift) would appreciate that. So, I think I would prefer good ol’ fashioned word of mouth for increasing my reach – that’s where you come in.

And here I come in with this week’s spotlighted stories:

• • Wallets are out for content streaming companies Apple and Netflix in the sports and film industries. Apple is rumored to be looking into acquiring Formula One racing rights. Netflix is acquiring “His Three Daughters” – a sentence a lot more troubling to hear than it is to read.  
     
  • The sports sponsorship market is hot and growing by an expected $22.64 billion between 2022 and 2027.  Jimmy Donaldson’s (also known as Mr. Beast) food brand Feastables, strikes a jersey patch sponsorship deal with the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets in an effort to get consumers buzzing.
    
    
  • Meanwhile, English Premier League Football Club Chelsea entered into a 40 million pound ($49 million) shirt sponsorship deal of its own with sports technology company Infinite Athlete. Chelsea players will need infinite athleticism to carry all that weight up and down the field.
    
    
  • The WNBA is expanding for the first time in its history, adding two teams: one in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other likely to be in Portland. Exciting news for sure, but not the first time that trailblazers have played in Portland.