Court TV headed back to US TV screens
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 11 December 2018

Katz Networks plans to relaunch Court TV in the US – devoted to live, gavel-to-gavel coverage, in-depth legal reporting and expert analysis of the nation’s important and compelling trials.

A long-running series for more than 20 years, Court TV brought high-profile courtroom dramas, including the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers and Casey Anthony, into American living rooms. Continuing that legacy, the new Court TV network will launch in May 2019, available for cable, satellite, over-the-air and over-the-top carriage.

The new Court TV has secured over-the-air distribution agreements with major local TV station group owners including Tribune, Scripps and Univision. These agreements allow Court TV to reach more than halft of US television households at launch, with concurrent cable carriage of a quarter of US cable homes, it said.

Underpinning the announcement is the fact that Katz Networks has acquired Court TV’s intellectual property, including the trademark, website and complete, original 100,000-hour Court TV library from Turner Broadcasting.

“Court TV was a top-20 cable network and at the height of its popularity when the network was taken off the air in 2008,” said Jonathan Katz, president and CEO of Katz Networks. “Today, while consumer interest in the real-life drama of true-crime programming is at an all-time high, there is no dedicated daily court coverage on television. We expect the new Court TV to fill that void on cable, satellite, over-the-air and over-the-top.”

“Scripps and Katz look forward to reestablishing Court TV’s important legacy of providing Americans with transparency into the US courts system and fulfilling our company mission of journalism and public service,” said Brian Lawlor, president of Local Media for Scripps. “We believe today’s TV audiences will be drawn to the network, leading to the same strong revenue growth and return on investment the other Katz networks have delivered.”

In 2017, EW Scripps Co took full control of Katz broadcast networks, taking the 95% of shares in the company it didn’t own for a net purchase price of $292 million.