Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc, the parent company of Ring of Honor, announced in a press release that they are in the process of purchasing The Tennis Channel for $350 million. As part of the deal, they’ve been making arrangements with cable companies that would increase the network’s footprint from 30 million homes to 50 million.
With Sinclair also being behind the American Sports Network (ASN) programming package for broadcast stations, the obvious speciation is that The Tennis Channel could be rebranded as ASN. Since Sinclair also owns ROH, it may or may not be a stretch to think that if that happened, ROH could get a spot on the cable network, even if just as filler programming. That said, since Sinclair has programmed ROH on COMET, their science fiction themed broadcast network for digital subchannels, it wouldn’t even be that strange if ROH ended up on The Tennis Channel in its current form.
As noted by Mike Johnson at PWInsider, this is the first time since WCW was sold that a wrestling promotion will be under the same umbrella as a cable network. If Sinclair were to want to do something with ROH on the Tennis Channel, it opens up possibilities (like live specials) that aren’t available now with ROH airing at all hours on a slew of different local broadcast stations.
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