Actress Whoopi Goldberg at the origin of AWSN, the television channel dedicated to women’s sports
The AWSN channel, All Women’s Sports Network, has been available in the United States since November 13. Two thousand hours of live sport announced for the 2024-2025 season. Viewers will be able to see the European Champions League, women’s tennis, 3-on-3 basketball, like at the Olympic Games. We should also see surfing, skateboarding, field hockey, the French and Swedish football championships, judo, volleyball. “If a woman plays a sport, we have her,” promises one of the founders. In addition to live broadcasts, the channel also offers documentaries, broadcasts, match replays and other programs that can bring the public closer to the athletes.
Whoopi Goldberg is listed by the co-founders of AWSN. The Oscar-winning actress for Ghost in 1991, which we also saw of course in The color purple, Sister Act Or Jumpin’ Jack Flashno longer does much cinema, but she is in American homes daily with the talk show The View, also targeting a primarily female audience. Kamala Harris stopped there during the campaign. Whoopi Goldberg says the channel was her idea. An idea that goes back 16 years, and perhaps even before that since she explained that as a child, she loved sports and wanted to do it with her brother, who was quite good at basketball and baseball, but that her friends would send her away always, even gently, in the status of a little girl. The idea arose to expose women’s sport and its athletes, even in youth sections, to change mentalities.
Can the AWSN channel work when there is already an abundance of sports on television? We can ask ourselves the question. There is a global ambition behind this project all the same. Ultimately, the channel hopes to be present in 65 countries. It already exists in the United States, but also in India, the Middle East and the Philippines. Now, it is broadcast on Vizio WatchFree+, a free platform as its name suggests, but very little known to the general public.
In 2023, a study by the Wasserman agency estimated media coverage of women’s sport in the United States at 15%, including social networks. But without university sport, which is very popular, this share drops to 8%. AWSN hopes to help change that. There are promising trends. The WNBA, the women’s basketball league, has just signed a two billion dollar television rights contract over 11 years. So yes, the NBA contract is worth 35 times more over the same period, but two billion over 11 years is more money than what Canal + pays for the men’s rugby championship, for example. We also had confirmation in October that a professional baseball league would start in 2026 in the United States.
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