Phil McGraw, popularly known as “Dr. Phil,” is expanding his Fort Worth-based broadcasting endeavor, Merit Street Media, with its first sports broadcasting deal.
The Fort Worth-based network will begin airing live Professional Bull Riders league events starting in July as well as becoming the host of RidePass, the PBR’s lifestyle channel, with its move to Merit+, the non-subscription free streaming service for Merit Street.
“The alignment between who the PBR’s fan base is in middle America with down-to-earth family values is what we’re focused on. They embrace the same values that we do,” McGraw said. “They have a marquee sport that is just going vertical. It’s a rocket ship. So it’s the perfect match. We want to take this to a whole new level of creating an immersive experience.”
Merit Street will exclusively air PBR Unleash The Beast, the league’s premier individual tour, live from November to May. Previously, events used to air on CBS on tape delay. Merit Street will also air the league’s team events live on Sunday afternoons while CBS will continue to air it on delay.
Along with individual and most team events, Merit Street has also gained the rights to pre and post-event coverage, 50 episodes of bull riding news and analysis program PBR Now and six two-hour events of the Women’s Rodeo World Championships.
McGraw, PBR CEO and commissioner Sean Gleason and Merit Street’s chief operating officer and executive vice president Joel Cheatwood declined to disclose the financial details of the deal. But for Merit Street, acquiring the media rights came with a hefty price tag, Gleason said.
“It’s a four-year deal and a very right priced media deal for the partnership between the two,” he said.
It’s the first sports broadcasting deal for Merit Street Media but McGraw and Cheatwood are not looking to add another sport to the network in the near future, McGraw said.
“It didn’t come cheap, and nor should it,” McGraw added. “This is a marquee sport. To us, it’s the pinnacle. Everything from here will be downstream from this deal because we think this is the ultimate professional sport. We want to think about nothing right now except professional bull riding.”
It means that Merit Street now has the rights to over 300 hours of original PBR content and that it won’t be competing with CBS over which network will air live PBR events. Bull riding fans will be able to watch PBR events during consistent broadcasting windows from Fridays to Sundays. Merit Street and the PBR have not yet announced what time those broadcasting windows will take place.
In McGraw’s own words, Merit Street will provide viewers with a Hard Knocks level of insider content for already-existing PBR fans and an introduction to the world of bull riding for Merit Street’s wider audience, like families.
CBS Sports, the PBR’s media partner for the past decade, will still be a part-time home for the PBR until at least 2030. PBR events will still air on CBS and Paramount+. In 2023, the PBR on CBS garnered a total of 31 million viewers and, on average, generated 900,000 viewers per broadcast. CBS will get 25 hours of PBR content every year.
“We are excited that CBS Sports will continue our decades-long partnership with the PBR and showcase the sport for years to come,” said Dan Weinberg, executive vice president of programming for CBS Sports. “PBR’s aptitude for growth and dynamic spirit have pushed them to new heights, and we look forward to delivering PBR to viewers across the country on CBS and Paramount+, with more broadcast hours than ever before.”
The PBR didn’t always have broadcasters lining up to air its events.
During its infancy in the early 1990s, the Pueblo, Colo.-based league used to pay up to $350,000 for the privilege to be on networks like The Nashville Network. But all of that changed in 2000 when it began buying airtime on its soon-to-be home, CBS. It also bought airtime on FOX and NBC. In 2012, the PBR made CBS its official home by inking a media rights deal.
Similar to other sports trying to tap into young markets, marketing its riders, bulls and teams as more than just athletes will be critical to its success on Merit Street. The split-media rights deal has the potential to launch the league into another stratosphere, Gleason said.
“I think that we’ve made it so difficult for our fans to truly engage with the sport. CBS Sports Network couldn’t handle the capacity of the content that we have. So our viewers only got pieces of the story throughout the course of the year,” Gleason said. “Merit Street brings us the opportunity to deliver our story from beginning to end. CBS is still going to be a partner, but Merit Street Media is going to supercharge us.”
McGraw and Merit Street Media have been on a spending spree since the network delayed its launch to April 2. The television startup signed big names ahead of its premiere date like Steve Harvey, Nancy Grace, Bear Grylls, Mike Rowe, body language analysts The Behavior Panel and Texas TV news presenters Dominique Sachse and Kris Gutierrez.
McGraw teamed up with Fort Worth-based Trinity Broadcasting Network to distribute his upstart network to over 65 million homes when it launched. However, he’s said in the past he wants a strict separation between Merit Street and TBN, with the two producing independently of one another.
For Merit Street’s COO, Cheatwood, formerly of FOX News, CNN, The Blaze and TEGNA, the deal between itself and the PBR serves to strengthen the network as it goes into the future.
“I think this is the next step towards making Merit Street Media the news, information, entertainment and sports destination in America, bar none,” Cheatwood said. “I honestly believe you’re going to see this network emerge as really the top destination from a media standpoint in this country.”
Though the trio promised that neither McGraw nor any of his Merit Street coworkers will ever hop on a bull themselves, people can access the network through cable and satellite on platforms like DirecTV, Dish, U-Verse TV, Comcast and Xfinity.
