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Sinclair owns and operates local TV stations that broadcast news and sports, and sells the advertising time around that programming.
Sinclair is one of the biggest owners of local television stations in the United States. It runs dozens of channels in cities and towns across the country, and those stations make their money mostly by selling commercial time to local businesses, car dealers, and national advertisers who want to reach people watching the evening news or a ballgame.
The news part is the heart of it. A Sinclair station in, say, Buffalo or Seattle produces hours of local news every day — anchors, weather, high school sports, the stuff people tune in for. That local habit is valuable, because a viewer who trusts their local news team is a viewer an advertiser will pay to reach. Sinclair also owns a stake in the Tennis Channel and has invested in regional sports networks, so live sports — which people still watch on TV as it happens — is a growing part of the pitch. The company's economics are a bit like owning a toll bridge on the information highway. Retransmission fees are the second big money-maker: cable and satellite companies pay Sinclair for the right to carry its stations, and that stream has grown as cord-cutting reshapes TV. Sinclair also runs multicast networks — extra channels squeezed into a station's signal, like Comet and Charge! — which cost little to run and sell ads against. Like every broadcaster, Sinclair is fighting a slow decline in traditional TV viewing, and it has pushed into digital content and newer ad formats to keep up.
Sinclair has a colorful and controversial history. It grew huge by buying up stations aggressively, and it once tried to buy Tribune Media in a deal that collapsed in 2018 after regulators raised questions about how the company would maintain local control; the episode left it with a hefty breakup fee and a reputation for pushing the rules. It also launched the now-defunct streaming service STIRR and made a disastrous investment in regional sports networks bought from Disney, which it later wrote down heavily. The lesson from those years: Sinclair is willing to swing big, and not every swing connects.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026