New Venture to Pitch Sports Programming

The nation’s largest manager of athletes is teaming up with an entertainment production company and a fledgling cable channel to produce sports programming for urban audiences.

Backed by such marquee names as SFX Entertainment and Hollywood financiers Peter Guber and Quincy Jones, the new venture, Mandalay Sports & Urban Entertainment, aims to create programming for network and cable television, the Internet and theaters.

The venture will be equally owned by Guber’s Mandalay Sports Entertainment, which owns four minor league sports teams in addition to sports entertainment production units, and New Urban Entertainment. New Urban is a joint venture of SFX and Space Station Television.

SFX, which is being acquired by radio giant Clear Channel Communications, represents more than 650 professional athletes and owns or operates 120 arenas and concert venues. Space Station Television, backed by Quincy Jones, was formed in 1996 to launch a cable channel for African Americans and has a limited carriage agreement with AT&T.;

The new venture will be operated by Kip and Kern Konwiser, president and executive vice president, respectively. The brothers now operate New Urban.

“This is part of a strategy to migrate the experience of live sports to a wider orbit,” Guber said. “We can take what [New Urban] created and broaden the reach with our capital infrastructure.”