Sinclair's Multicast Networks CHARGE, Comet, ROAR and The Nest Announce Record Breaking Growth and New Programming Acquisitions
The networks posted gains fueled by several strategic initiatives, including the acquisition of anchor series, expanded distribution in top 10 DMA markets, rebranding of TBD to ROAR, strategic programming decisions, and successful fan-focused, multi-platform events including COMET FEST and CHARGECON.
These strategic moves, combined with the highest year-over-year coverage growth among all Nielsen-rated broadcast networks 1, have propelled the networks to impressive season-to-date ratings growth in the top 10 DMAs with CHARGE up 21% YoY, Comet up 17%, and ROAR up 40% among total viewers. 2
To further drive growth, Sinclair has acquired new premium series and movies for the upcoming 2025-26 season across all four multicast networks:
CHARGE, the go-to destination for the biggest police procedural franchises in TV history, will add two powerhouse series to the fall schedule with Criminal Minds and Homicide: Life on the Street, marking the series' return to broadcast television. These join an already stellar lineup that includes CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Comet, the leading sci-fi and fantasy network on free TV, boosts its schedule this fall with fan favorites Xena: Warrior Princess and The Outer Limits, alongside Stargate SG1, Grimm and The X-Files, plus blockbuster 'Mega Movies' featuring The Matrix trilogy for Comet Fest 2026, Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks to celebrate the icon's 100 th birthday, The Terminator, and Star Trek franchises. In November 2026 the network will broadcast Christopher Nolan's groundbreaking film, Interstellar.
ROAR, which features groundbreaking contemporary comedy, adds two series hosted by Jane Lynch, Hollywood Game Night and past seasons of Weakest Link to the fall lineup, which includes previous seasons of Saturday Night Live, Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Key & Peele.
The Nest continues to expand its successful schedule of 'real people, real stories' series and specials, adding Gene Simmons: Family Jewels, Wahlburgers and My Ghost Story in primetime this July, joining Cold Case Files, Ice Road Truckers and Dog the Bounty Hunter.
'Sinclair's multicast strategy is firing on all cylinders,' said Adam Ware, Senior Vice President of Growth Networks at Sinclair. 'We've made bold moves—elevating content and expanding reach, and viewers have responded making Sinclair's portfolio of multicast networks the fastest growing group in the rapidly expanding free TV sector.'
About Sinclair:
Sinclair, Inc. (Nasdaq: SBGI) is a diversified media company and a leading provider of local news and sports. The Company owns, operates and/or provides services to 185 television stations in 85 markets affiliated with all major broadcast networks; owns Tennis Channel, the premium destination for tennis enthusiasts; multicast networks CHARGE, Comet, ROAR and The Nest; and the nation's largest streaming aggregator of local news content, NewsON. Sinclair's AMP Media produces a growing portfolio of digital content and original podcasts. Additional information about Sinclair can be found at www.sbgi.net.
1 Nielsen NTI HH coverage, all Nielsen-rated broadcast networks, May'25 vs May'24
2 Nielsen L+SD Top 10 DMAs P2+ Imp, Total Day (M-Su/8am-3am), Jan-May'25 vs Jan-May'24
Category: General
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Adobe Wants You To Use Firefly AI To Complete An Artist's Unfinished Film
Cars floating in the sky. Upside-down skyscrapers that remind you of Christopher Nolan's "Inception." Confused protagonists standing on the ledge, running in the woods, driving an off-road bike, or piloting a fishing boat inside a flooded museum. None of this makes sense, and everything does, because it's art imagined by director and AI artist Sam Finn, who partnered with Adobe to make a video that's under two minutes long titled "The Unfinished Film." Created with Adobe's Firefly suite of AI tools that have received significant upgrades in recent months, "The Unfinished Film" is "more than just a creative experiment," according to a blog post from Adobe. "It's a community storytelling project designed to celebrate creative freedom and collaboration. We started with a simple question: What happens when you hand off an idea—not a finished product—to the creative community and invite them to take it further?" "The Unfinished Film" can be a great marketing tool for Adobe, as the company is inviting creators to come up with their own versions of it. AI image and video generators have gone viral more than once, with ChatGPT's 4o image generator, Google's Veo 3, and Higgsfield Soul being good examples. Adobe Firefly could also benefit from the same popularity among creators. Specifically, Adobe wants them to use the AI image, video, and audio tools available in Firefly to complete "The Unfinished Film." It's an initiative meant to showcase the growing abilities of the Firefly AI suite to help creators put together anything they imagine with incredible ease. Read more: Photoshop For Android Launches In Beta With Built-In Firefly AI What Can Adobe Firefly AI Do? Adobe explains in the blog post that it spent time with creators involved in the video-making process, including editors, filmmakers, and creative teams, to understand what they want. The company says it learned they want amplification, or "tools that spark new ideas, speed up workflows, and preserve creative control," rather than the automation that AI tools can offer. Firefly is a collection of AI tools available on desktop and mobile that Adobe continuously updates. Earlier this year, we saw Adobe launch Firefly apps for iPhone and Android that complement the Firefly desktop experience and add exceptional third-party AI tools to the app, including Google's Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and Runway's Gen-4 video generator. Firefly Boards supports moodboarding and ideation, so the entire creative process can take place inside the app. Whether you use the Firefly AI models or rely on third-party options, Firefly lets you do everything in one place. You can generate images and make AI videos controlling everything about the scene and camera with simple text prompts. Firefly supports audio and effects generation for your productions. All AI content created with the Firefly apps contains a Content Credentials watermark that indicates that a specific piece of art was developed with the help of AI. Visible watermarks would be even better, but they aren't suitable for all projects. What's also important is that Adobe doesn't use your creations and upload data to train its generative models. Change The Unfinished Film Any Way You Want Creators excited about the opportunity to edit "The Unfinished Film" with Firefly AI can download it and do whatever they want with it. Adobe encourages them to remix and reshape it and then share it on social media with the #AdobeFirefly hashtag. Unfortunately, there's no contest here, which would have worked even better to make this Adobe idea go viral. The company's social channels, including Instagram, feature four versions of "The Unfinished Film" from storytellers who already use AI to bring their concepts to life: Noémie Pino, Phil Cohen, Jad Kassis, and Keenan Lam. Some of them kept Finn's narrative structure and modified it by adding their own perspective and ideas. Others recut Finn's film and only used a few sequences that served as inspiration. Pino's version of "The Unfinished Film" stood out to me. The artist didn't jump straight into Firefly to get the AI image and video generation tools working for her. She storyboarded her ideas and then created her own protagonist out of clay. Pino took photos of the real-life objects, edited them with Adobe's tools, and then used the images to direct the AI. She then inserted the animated version of her clay character in Finn's "Unfinished Film," turning it into her own story. Also interesting are the short behind-the-scenes clips these four creators made to show how effortless it is to use Firefly AI to bring your ideas to life immediately, without waiting for someone to approve a budget, create special video effects, and manage a production set. Lam's BTS tutorial for "The Unfinished Film," which you'll see on social media, stands out for its creativity. Read the original article on BGR.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' movie under fire for filming on 'occupied' Indigenous land
Director Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie "The Odyssey" is already facing backlash for allegedly filming on indigenous land under "military occupation" in the Western Sahara. After the picture wrapped up shooting in the area last week, the Sahrawi Government expressed "deep concern and strong indignation" that the "Oppenheimer" director's follow-up project was filming in the city of Dakhla, a location it claims is currently under "illegal military occupation by the Kingdom of Morocco." "The Ministry firmly expresses its strong condemnation and unequivocal rejection of the decision to select an occupied territory as the location for a major international film production, without any form of consultation or coordination with the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, internationally recognized as the Polisario Front," its statement read. The statement continued, "This act constitutes a dangerous form of cultural normalization with the occupation, and an unethical exploitation of art and cinema to whitewash the image of a colonial situation that is still imposed by force and met daily with the steadfast resistance of a people struggling for freedom and dignity." James Cameron Slams 'Oppenheimer' Avoiding Aftermath Of Atomic Bombings On Japan As 'Moral Cop-out' The Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara) similarly put out a statement urging Nolan and Universal Pictures to "stop filming in Dakhla and stand in solidarity with the Sahrawi people who have been under military occupation for 50 years and who are routinely imprisoned and tortured for their peaceful struggle for self-determination." Read On The Fox News App "By filming part of 'The Odyssey' in an occupied territory classified as a 'journalistic desert' by Reporters Without Borders, Nolan and his team, perhaps unknowingly and unintentionally, are contributing to Morocco's repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime's efforts to normalize its occupation of Western Sahara," María Carrión, the festival's executive director, said. Actor Javier Bardem, who has appeared in FiSahara before, shared the festival's statement on his Instagram account last week. "For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city. Another illegal occupation, another repression against a people, the Sahrawi, unjustly plundered with the approval of Western governments, including the Spanish. #FreeSaharaNow," Bardem wrote. Meanwhile, Reda Benjelloun of the Moroccan Cinematographic Center, a public administrative film agency in Morocco, called the film "extremely important" as the first major Hollywood project to shoot in the area. 'Oppenheimer' Director Christopher Nolan Says Ai In Film Carries 'Responsibilities' Like Atomic Bomb Creation "Dakhla will indeed offer extraordinary opportunities in the future to foreign productions which will find human resources there as well as a geography very different from other regions of Morocco," Benjelloun said in an interview. "Today, Morocco's strength lies in being very responsive to demand and also having very efficient local executive production companies that do a great job." Fox News Digital reached out to Universal Pictures and a representative for Nolan for comment. "The Odyssey" spent at least four days filming in the area which has been classified as a "non-self-governing territory" by the United Nations. Seventy percent of the land is currently controlled by Morocco, though Morocco has proposed a plan to give the country autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. President Donald Trump recognized Morocco's claim to the land and endorsed its plan in a statement during his first term in 2020. "The Odyssey" is set to be released on July 17, 2026, and adapts Homer's ancient Greek epic poem of the same name. It has also filmed in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland and Iceland and is expected to continue filming in Ireland and the article source: Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' movie under fire for filming on 'occupied' Indigenous land Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
4 days ago
- Fox News
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' movie under fire for filming on 'occupied' Indigenous land
Director Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie "The Odyssey" is already facing backlash for allegedly filming on indigenous land under "military occupation" in the Western Sahara. After the picture wrapped up shooting in the area last week, the Sahrawi Government expressed "deep concern and strong indignation" that the "Oppenheimer" director's follow-up project was filming in the city of Dakhla, a location it claims is currently under "illegal military occupation by the Kingdom of Morocco." "The Ministry firmly expresses its strong condemnation and unequivocal rejection of the decision to select an occupied territory as the location for a major international film production, without any form of consultation or coordination with the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, internationally recognized as the Polisario Front," its statement read. The statement continued, "This act constitutes a dangerous form of cultural normalization with the occupation, and an unethical exploitation of art and cinema to whitewash the image of a colonial situation that is still imposed by force and met daily with the steadfast resistance of a people struggling for freedom and dignity." The Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara) similarly put out a statement urging Nolan and Universal Pictures to "stop filming in Dakhla and stand in solidarity with the Sahrawi people who have been under military occupation for 50 years and who are routinely imprisoned and tortured for their peaceful struggle for self-determination." "By filming part of 'The Odyssey' in an occupied territory classified as a 'journalistic desert' by Reporters Without Borders, Nolan and his team, perhaps unknowingly and unintentionally, are contributing to Morocco's repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime's efforts to normalize its occupation of Western Sahara," María Carrión, the festival's executive director, said. Actor Javier Bardem, who has appeared in FiSahara before, shared the festival's statement on his Instagram account last week. "For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city. Another illegal occupation, another repression against a people, the Sahrawi, unjustly plundered with the approval of Western governments, including the Spanish. #FreeSaharaNow," Bardem wrote. Meanwhile, Reda Benjelloun of the Moroccan Cinematographic Center, a public administrative film agency in Morocco, called the film "extremely important" as the first major Hollywood project to shoot in the area. "Dakhla will indeed offer extraordinary opportunities in the future to foreign productions which will find human resources there as well as a geography very different from other regions of Morocco," Benjelloun said in an interview. "Today, Morocco's strength lies in being very responsive to demand and also having very efficient local executive production companies that do a great job." Fox News Digital reached out to Universal Pictures and a representative for Nolan for comment. "The Odyssey" spent at least four days filming in the area which has been classified as a "non-self-governing territory" by the United Nations. Seventy percent of the land is currently controlled by Morocco, though Morocco has proposed a plan to give the country autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. President Donald Trump recognized Morocco's claim to the land and endorsed its plan in a statement during his first term in 2020. "The Odyssey" is set to be released on July 17, 2026, and adapts Homer's ancient Greek epic poem of the same name. It has also filmed in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland and Iceland and is expected to continue filming in Ireland and the UK.
