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Warner’s sports properties are being assimilated into Skydance, but some aspects of the company’s approach to games and contests may continue.
Craig Barry, a senior sports executive at Warner’s TNT Sports who helped
cultivate a creative approach to rights and formats, has been named chief content officer at Skydance’s global sports group, which on Thursday unveiled its new executive team. While working for Warner, Barry played a key role in testing alliances with emerging sports like videogames, and in recent years, has been involved in creating celebrity-sports concepts that give viewers top quality golf and basketball concepts without having to rely on professional sports league and the exponential fees they typically seek.
He will report to David Berson, the chairman of Skydance’s sports operations, who has become a bigger figure in the world of sports media since the company was formed from the merger of the former Paramount and Warner.
TNT Sports has been a backer of the golf contest known as “The Match”that brings together celebrities and athletes to compete, often on holiday weekends, and a “Dunkman” basketball dunking contest built around Shaquille O’Neal. There has been strong interest in “Unrivaled,” the three-on-three women’s basketball league that plays during the WNBA off-season and weaves sponsors around play in unique fashion. The sports unit has also had to be nimble and more innovative in recent seasons, thanks to a dissolution of a longtime rights alliance between the company and the NBAthat resulted in the departure of dozens of hours of programming on the TNT cable network.
“In any partnership, you have to be open to trying to figure out what the best value proposition is,”Barry told Variety in 2025, discussing the way in which advertisers were integrated into Unrivaled.
Barry’s new role — surprising in some sense because it brings a veteran from the company being acquired into the new mix at the company that is in charge — was unveiled Thursday, as Berson announced his new executive team.
Berson may have need of an expert from the non-CBS side of things. For the past several years, Warner and Paramount have shared rights to the NCAA March Madness men’s basketball tournament, which airs across CBS, TNT, TBS and TruTV. In early 2007, those rights will be held under a single company’s umbrella for the first time since 2010.
Jeff Gerttula,who has led digital operations across CBS in recent years, has also been placed in a key new role. He was named executive vice president and managing director of the sports unit. He will oversee digital, international, strategy and business development for sports.
