Tour de France Broadcaster NBCSN to Close

The NBC Sports Network will disappear into the ether at the end of 2021. The channel was originally called the Outdoor Life Network, before changing its name to Versus, and then to NBCSN. Now, after 25 years, the home of the Tour de France in the US is officially shutting its doors.

What does this mean for the Tour de France? Well, nobody is sure. NBC’s new streaming network, Peacock, seems like a good home for it. NBC also frequently use their other channels for major sporting events like the NHL and Premier League, and have already signaled their intent to broadcast the Stanley Cup and NASCAR on their USA Network.

Whether NBC continues to buy the Tour de France rights is another question. Many of their sporting rights are up for renewal soon, and this may be the earliest sign that they’re winding down the huge scale of their Sports Group.

As far as we know, NBC also currently holds the rights to UCI events, but doesn’t do a lot with them. In fact, it mostly seems to farm them out to FloBikes. But maybe our past experience of being in the exact same relationship is shaping our interpretation of what’s going on with those rights.

We’d guess that one of two things will happen:

• NBC will relinquish the rights to the ASO and UCI events. They’ll go instead to Discovery, who own Eurosport and GCN, and who should absolutely already be consolidating these rights globally.
• NBC will keep the Tour de France, and broadcast it on Peacock.

At $5 a month each, either one of these two options is cheaper than keeping your cable package. So hey, this could be good news!