John Kosner Spoke to Ben Thompson of Stratechery About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance
Original Article: Stratechery, by Ben Thompson, Thursday, March 2, 2023
An Interview with John Kosner About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance
Good morning,
I am pleased to welcome John Kosner for a Stratechery Interview. Kosner was a long-time NBA and ESPN executive who oversaw the growth of ESPN.com, the ESPN app, fantasy sports, streaming, and podcasting. Since leaving ESPN in 2017 Kosner has been a venture capitalist, advisor, and consultant, and writes a regular column for Sports Business Journal.
We discussed Kosner’s career both at and after ESPN, how he always dreamed of building ESPN.com and how reality differed from his expectations, why Bill Simmons had such an impact on ESPN and the sports ecosystem, and why Twitter sent a chill down his spine. We also touched on the same topics I wrote about this week, including how to fix the NBA and whether sports will appeal to the next generation of fans (this interview was recorded before I published What the NBA Can Learn From Formula 1, and helped influence it).
To listen to this interview as a podcast, click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player. On to the interview:
An Interview with John Kosner About the Past and Future of Sports in an Age of Abundance
This interview is lightly edited for clarity
Background
John Kosner, welcome to Stratechery.
JK: Thank you Ben. I used to listen to Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN here in New York City, and the callers used to say things like “Longtime listener, first time caller”. So I’m a longtime reader, but first time caller.
Well, I appreciate it. You are one of my regular correspondents, which I’ve always appreciated, and it’s a very timely time to talk to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about sports and sports rights, and not just because I’m a sports fan. On Dithering we like to get into sports and some people get grumpy about it because they’re like, “Oh, I want to talk about tech.”
JK: Not me!
Well, yeah, but right now in particular, one of the first topics I ever wrote about on Stratechery was the cable bundle and entertainment and this period we are going through where it’s been one of those things where people have seen this coming for literally twenty or thirty years — and this kind of goes back to your time at ESPN, which we’ll get into — but right now it’s all happening.
Things are changing in a major way and so I want to get the chance to talk to you because you were there, as I just alluded to in the early days, working at ESPN, helping launch ESPN.com, ushering it through not just the initial launch, but the shift to mobile. I’d love to dive into that history and also get some of your takes on what’s happening now and where we’re going. So if that sounds good to you, we can dive in.
JK: Sounds great, Ben. Thank you.
So let’s start with your background. I think people in sports media obviously know who you are, probably far fewer people in tech. So what’s your background? How’d you get into sports? What’d you do at ESPN and what are you doing now? Let’s go through the whole thing.
JK: Great. So I’m one of the few people you’ll ever meet who has had the privilege of doing the jobs he dreamed of doing as a kid. I grew up in New York City, which is where I live now, and I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s and I was obsessed with sports on television. My idol was Roone Arledge, the famous executive producer of ABC Sports who invented up-close-and-personal style of journalism. He pioneered the Olympic TV coverage that we still see to this day in ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Anybody who loves Drive to Survive would appreciate Roone Arledge.
I learned about geography, math, storytelling, and character all through watching sports on TV. It was mesmerizing to me. It was worth noting too, when I was growing up, that three of the biggest sports were Major League Baseball, boxing and horse racing. As much as I loved sports television, I always dreamed of something that was even more. I wanted a product that could combine live sports telecasts with sports writing of the caliber of Sports Illustrated magazine, which I read every week, which would include video highlights, photography, audio, and realtime scores and stats. Essentially, I dreamed about ESPN.com about 20 years before the Starwave crew created it and it’s probably not coincidental that ESPN.com is the product with which I am most associated with decades later.
I grew up in an era of media scarcity. There were three broadcast networks, there were a handful of gatekeepers and limited bandwidth. Today’s landscape and media is the opposite of my childhood and to use a Stratechery theme, there’s now unlimited supply and so the world that I observe later is totally different. My career, I had the good fortune to intern at NBC Sports when I was in college.
When I graduated from college, I got started at CBS Sports where I worked in TV programming. That’s TV programming, not computer programming. I moved on from there to be head of broadcasting in the US for the National Basketball Association. This is truly a dream job for me, I’m sure you relate, as always, an NBA fan growing up, my favorite teams are the New York Knicks and the Phoenix Suns, and in your case the Milwaukee Bucks.
One of the topics of our conversation is Bucks versus Suns, which have a nice little burgeoning rivalry over the last few years.
JK: Interestingly, when I was at the NBA, one of the stars in the sports media business was Bob Iger. Bob Iger really came to prominence during the 1988 Calgary Olympics and then he was passed over to be president of ESPN, to his chagrin. He got over that because shortly thereafter they named him president of ABC Entertainment, which in those days was a much, much bigger job.
And he managed to get control of ESPN in the end. So I guess it all worked out for Bob.
JK: Yeah. I worked at the NBA for eight seasons, then I went to Sports Illustrated Magazine and then for over twenty years I was at ESPN, the last fifteen of which I ran digital media, so that’s ESPN.com, the app, streaming, fantasy games, podcasting and I got to oversee editorial, product development, I ran the P&L. It was truly a dream job. There was another sort of dream team of people that I got to work with, many of whom are still at the company. I left ESPN in June of 2017, and the first person to call me after my news was public was David Stern, the late NBA commissioner. And after — if you know David — after several insults, he suggested to me that we should combine to be investors and advisors to sports tech startups. He had retired from basketball in, I think in 2014.
Yeah, I was going to say 2014, somewhere around then.
JK: Yeah, and he had become a VC. So we got together and we created a little unit called Micromanagement Ventures, and if you know David, you’d appreciate the humor of that.
Yup.
JK: We invested in fifteen different sports tech startups, some of which proven very successful. WHOOP, WSC Sports, which does video highlights, Overtime, which now has a basketball league. Two of the companies got acquired, another one, fuboTV went public. Sadly, David suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in the fall of 2019 and he died on New Year’s Day 2020, and that was just a tremendously sad time. Like so many who know David, I miss him, I think about him all the time, I feel fortunate to have had really two experiences working with him. But in any case, I decided to stay in with the little companies. I have added a couple of other investment advisor positions with companies that are sort of the profile that David and I were looking at. I also consult for a couple of different companies. I consult for Apple, I’ve done projects for the LA ’28 Olympics, done projects for a cloud database company called Snowflake, I do expert witness work, and my friend Ed Desser from the NBA, he and I write articles for the Sports Business Journal.
That’s an excellent framing because I want to get to a couple of your articles. I do have a David Stern question. But there is a couple things you said in your introduction that were really interesting to me. Number one is I love the bit about how you weren’t obsessed with sports, you were obsessed with sports broadcasting or media.
JK: Right, exactly.
Because I’ve always felt like a weirdo because from day one I was fascinated with tech business and I had no business background. It was just that the implications of it seemed super interesting to me and I was interested in the tech part of it, but the products were less interesting than the business bit. And so I feel like you, I got to do the job that I wanted to do. But the second bit is you talk about how you witnessed this shift from scarcity to abundance, which is the dominant shift in everything, right? That’s what is undergirding what’s happening now. When you talk about envisioning ESPN.com basically 20 years before it happened, was that abundance bit in your worldview then? Or was it more like, “Oh, this is going to be a magazine online,” and then you came to appreciate that abundance over time?
JK: I had no idea that the abundance was coming, it just shows you how things changed. I remember when ESPN got started, I was a college freshman, I thought it was one of the stupidest things ever. They were showing reruns of college football games. I remember Nickelodeon got started, “Well who wants to watch that all day”? So I was on the total opposite side, but I’ve always been focused on the creation of great products, the surprise and delight, and I just thought if you could combine these things, wow, that would be something you would have. I remember when CNN Headline News started running scores on the ticker below their headlines, that was a big cultural moment in my life. There used to be a phone service in New York City called Sports Phone, 212-976-1313, and my parents used to strangle me because the phone bills would have incessant calls looking for Suns scores.
That’s amazing.
JK: So like a lot of things this was kind of self-serving, but it struck me that there was beauty to what was done in sports television. There was artistry to Sports Illustrated, and it made so much sense to be able to put those things together. One of the things that you talk about in your columns is what really connects isn’t a revamp of something you’ve already seen, it’s something that’s brand new. And when I got to ESPN and ESPN.com was two years old, I really felt like Nirvana.
ESPN.com
When you look back at the evolution of ESPN.com, there are a couple things I want to get to in that regard. To what extent do you think, just big picture, looking back over what has it been — twenty, thirty years now? — is ESPN.com a triumph for the company versus a, “In the long run, actually all that matters is sports on TV”? To the extent it’s a triumph, why? And to the extent it’s just something off to the side, were there opportunities that were missed or is it just that because of this abundant/scarcity thing, it’s just a completely different product than linear television?
JK: If I’m honest with myself, I think it’s somewhere in between how you describe it. I remember early research among young sports fans saying they really liked the offline version of ESPN, which always cracked me up. The offline version was the television. ESPN has always seen itself as a TV company first, that really hasn’t changed. But ESPN.com established itself as a truly unique service for fans and I think part of it was that it was created outside of ESPN, it was originally a joint venture between Paul Allen’s company, Starwave, and Disney. So it wasn’t started in the core ESPN, and you had some really brilliant people, Mike Slade, Tom Phillips, Geoff Reiss, Aaron LaBerge, who were pioneers with this experience before ESPN was truly integrated into it and it benefited from the point that many in ESPN management really just didn’t focus on it at the time, so we had a chance to experiment.
Right, which was a good thing.
JK: We had the chance to take chances and create something new. We also had, because of the Starwave heritage, a bunch of engineers who were big sports fans, which is really, really unusual and really benefited us during that time. It’s like you’re outside and it’s really foggy and then progressively over time it just gets clearer and clearer and you just begin to understand what to do. When I got started, it was probably the way people feel about blockchain and crypto today, that’s what the early days were like.
I’ll give you one story back there, which I think is kind of telling for how things went. In 2009, Apple was up in Bristol and Eddy Cue, who’s the head of Apple TV Plus and Services now, was in the meeting and he found out who I was and what I did and he came up to me and he said, “Hi, I’m Eddy from Apple and your scores, they suck.” And he took out his second generation iPhone and top left on iPhone was Yahoo Sports. So I said, “Okay, duly noted, you have my attention.”
I get back from the meeting to my desk in Bristol and I called up a fellow named Ed Macedo, who was the head of Stats and Information for ESPN. So I said, “Ed, I just met Eddy from Apple and he says our scores suck” and so Ed Macedo says to me, “Well, I use SportsLine for scores.”
Oof.
JK: So, this is like a Dave Portnoy moment, I called an emergency staff meeting and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new priority — scores,” and people looked at me like I was a Luddite and they said, “Well, we do scores.” And I said, “Yeah, but Eddy says our scores suck,” and this is part of the beauty of the ESPN opportunity, is we had tons of bright people, we had a lot of money and resources, at least compared to others, and the fun part about being a leader is occasionally you can change the roadmap.
So we really dug into this challenge around scores, and the reason was, and I told the group, not trying to be flippant, “Here’s my theory, scores are a reason to come to the site every day and come multiple times and if we do a really good job of that, we can get people to read our recaps, we can get people to watch our video highlights, it becomes a sort of virtuous cycle”. And we invested, we ran high speed lines to every pro and college stadium and arena. We pioneered technology that had a score reveal itself, countdown reveal itself right in a webpage and within fifteen months, we had scores that were qualitatively and quantitatively better than anybody else, at least among our competitive set. The cheeky part of this is I sent the internal reports to Eddy at Apple, and the internal reports were really funny. “Holy smokes, Eddy’s right, we’re seventeen seconds behind Yahoo on this” and whatever, and I don’t know if you remember, but Apple used to take out these full page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and it’d be like the homepage of an iPhone and you’d have OpenTable and Facebook and New York Times.
“There’s an app for that” — they want to sweep that campaign under the carpet when they’re in court and saying they deserve all the App Store money, but anyhow, continue, that’s a side note.
JK: But fifteen months after Eddy’s visit, the ad came out and top left was ScoreCenter, the new scores app from ESPN, and it was like an inside joke between the two of us, and we’ve become friends since then. By the way, for the record, Eddy was absolutely right, because the site traffic really took off once we really embraced scores and real-time information, and it became a reason to come. Also, unlike ESPN in general, I insisted that we cover everything important in sports. It was like a pyramid. What’s the most important thing happening?
I’ll never forget before the Arizona/Pittsburgh Super Bowl, I forgot what year that was, I got a call, it was a Thursday night, and there was a big front page story on Troy Polamalu, who was the terrific cornerback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a big profile, beautiful art, and the editor calls me up and is really excited and says, “What do you think?” So I said, “Not much.” And he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, the Lakers and Celtics…” and this was the team with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and Paul Pierce, “…the Lakers and Celtics are playing tonight and it’s a war, and where’s that game?” So the editor says to me, “Oh, the game’s on TNT.” I said, “I don’t care that it’s on TNT, it’s the most important thing going.” And so the editor says to me, “Well, I guess that means you expect me to put the Dallas/Utah game up next.” And I said, “If that’s the most important thing happening, absolutely.” I said, “We have all day long when games aren’t taking place to do features.”
The other super important thing, which is a differentiator here, was Bill Simmons.
I wanted to get to that because this is what’s really interesting about your focus on this scores bit. It’s fascinating in all sorts of respects, on one hand, kudos to you and ESPN for leaning into this because there’s an aspect, you mentioned the Olympics earlier, where real-time results kind of really fundamentally damaged the Olympics product to a certain extent, right?
JK: Right.
Bill Simmons
But, then in the complete opposite direction, in the feature direction, you were involved with two of the more incredible web properties in my estimation, which were number one, Page 2, where you sort of brought Bill Simmons in and you also had Hunter S. Thompson. I’d love to hear the story behind that, and then we can get to Grantland down the road, but tell me about Page 2 because this was something that was so unexpected from ESPN. You tell me about it for our young readers that don’t remember what that was.
JK: Page 2, I would say I didn’t mess it up, but the key architects in my memory were John Walsh, who was executive editor of ESPN, who moved over to the website when John Skipper took over as the head of ESPN Digital, and John Skipper moved on to bigger jobs, and so by 2003, I was running the website and John Walsh was there, but John had an idea that we were going to bring a bunch of the best writers to bear. So, there was also Ralph Wiley, who was a terrific writer who passed away. He had Norman Chad in there, he had had Hunter S. Thompson, and I couldn’t really follow a lot of what Hunter was writing, but the idea that Hunter was writing on ESPN.com was stupendous.
And again, there was just a level of surprise, but the breakthrough star in this, and I believe was also discovered by John Walsh, was Bill Simmons, and Bill Simmons to me was the defining sportswriter of our generation, and somebody who really changed the industry, really enhanced what we were doing at ESPN.com, both in terms of his writing and of course in terms of the development of his podcast.
I’d go further, I think he’s one of the defining writers period. The funny thing is everyone universally sort of agrees that Bill Simmons is the father of blogging, even though he never technically blogged, but what people are tapping into is he pioneered the voice of blogging that ultimately manifested through the blog format, but you started with obviously his newsletter and AOL and then coming to ESPN, and it was just such a completely different approach to sports writing and writing in general, where you are going to lean in and own the subjectivity, the first- person approach, to ignore any column limits, or word limits, or whatever it might be. It was abundance, it was abundant writing as opposed to scarcity writing. It’s hard to appreciate now when he’s such a fixture how transformative and incredible it was when he popped on ESPN, what is it, 2000, 1999, somewhere around there.
JK: Somewhere around there, and he pioneered this approach of sports and popular culture. He wrote unabashedly as a fan. The thing that I really appreciated was he worked really, really hard. He spent a lot of time agonizing and preparing for the columns, they were well-researched both in terms of the calls that he place on different things and the stats that he put into it. He was truly obsessed, and it was kind of similar to Howard Stern in a way. He was his audience, he understood what his audience was looking for, so he was really tremendous.
It became kind of obvious to me over time, because he was so popular, that you weren’t really going to have Page 2 with Bill Simmons, you were going to have something big with Bill Simmons, and that’s sort of what Grantland became. And, I remember John Skipper called me up, he and Bill had been laying out what Grantland could be, and John was almost kind of sheepish on the phone because I think he thought, “Well, Kosner is not going to like this. We already have a plan for this. It’s going to change everything,” but to me, it was like an IQ test, and Grantland took what Bill had done, he added a bunch of terrific contributors, he expanded what he was doing. It was very, very popular, and the truth is, there were other interesting voices in Page 2, but nobody who really broke through, in my opinion, the way Bill did.
So, this is really interesting because I think the Bill Simmons ESPN experience, particularly in the context of ESPN, is really interesting to me almost from a labor relations perspective, because what’s interesting is one thing that makes the web different is the ability to measure. Say you’re at CBS, and everyone’s going on and on about Tony Romo being the best thing since sliced bread.
JK: Mediocre today.
Exactly, but how do you tease apart audience interest in a game because it’s a football game, and football’s very popular, and the quality of the game, versus the play-by-play guy or the announcer, whatever it might be? Whereas on the web, you can measure exactly who’s getting how many clicks, who’s getting read, and if it feels like that sort of gets at one of the challenges of digital for broad-based media companies generally, because the talent, the people that actually drive it, it’s much more apparent to them and to you who’s actually driving value, it shifts a huge amount of bargaining power to the talent to the detriment of the overall company. Whereas in the analog world they sort of got to ride on the backs of super popular talent who didn’t necessarily know how much value they were contributing, and it was more of a socialistic enterprise broadly speaking. Is that something that resonates with you?
JK: It does. I kind of feel that it’s complicated, and the best managers, I think can figure that out. Meaning, I always thought in my job, we were lucky to have that problem. We were lucky to have somebody who’s becoming so popular that you’re going to pay him a lot of money, and sometimes people would ask me about Bill’s relative stature to other people, and I’d say, “Well, if other people were doing what Bill was doing, then we’d have another conversation.” It was more a challenge, I think, in those years of the fact that there wasn’t really a good sort of commercial strategy around the website. John Skipper loved the idea that we had sort of boxcar numbers of traffic and he loved trumpeting that, but we probably could and should have charged for some of what we did earlier.
There wasn’t a good ad model. It was all sponsorship. Everything that we did was a sponsorship because that was the way ESPN sold, and it was a big business. So, if you went to the homepage and you saw AT&T on the homepage, it was probably because AT&T had bought a huge package from ESPN that included, say the college football playoffs, and as part of that, they got a certain number of ESPN.com homepages. We weren’t really selling the medium for the medium, we weren’t really selling Bill for Bill.
When Bill became a really popular podcaster, I remember he was talking about the podcast network that Adam Carolla had built, “Why couldn’t we do it?” And the reason was I couldn’t really get people’s attention around it. In these big successful companies, you get the tyranny of big numbers. “Yeah, that’s great, but it’s small, I’ve got to focus on something else”, and I suspect Bill probably had more frustration based upon that, the inability to commercially take advantage of what he was doing than some of the other stuff that happened.
Competing With the Internet
That’s my impression too, is it was really aside from of this drama stuff, it was like, “Why can’t you make money on this podcast or why don’t you even try to make money?” This ties back to my question earlier, and it’s very interesting to me, I’ve thought about in the context of tech companies in general. We talk about this even now in terms of the ChatGPT and search and all this sort of thing, there is sort of a bias amongst observers that these big companies ought to dominate every sort of space around them, every sort of adjacent space. It goes back to ESPN.com, what did it actually do for ESPN in the long run? Is this a sort of thing where — look, ESPN at the end of the day, it’s a cable channel, that’s what it is, and it’s inevitable you’re going to be constrained in exploring these opportunities, and it’s easy for Bill to say, “Oh, you guys messed this up,” or sit the outside and say, “Why didn’t Grantland become a bigger success or a subscription product?” And in reality, that’s actually the way the world works like new models of new companies.
JK: I don’t know, Ben. I think it’s all about decisions that get made one way or another and what gets prioritized. The last year that I was at ESPN, I remember November 2016, we had 141 million global uniques. We were number one in the world for the first time in a metric that I really care about. We were the number five daily digital property for millennial males 18 to 34 using their smartphone. I thought the wind was at our back, and had I stayed and maybe had more authority, I certainly would’ve prioritized more what we were doing. Would that have made a difference in the long run? I don’t know. We can only judge by what happened.
I’ll tell you that when Twitter got started, it sent a shudder through me, even in the early days of the fail whale and everything, because Twitter was about real-time information and the most valuable real-time information I was convinced they were going to have in time was sports. Even with all the challenges around that company today, I would say Twitter is an indispensable service to most sports fans, and it has taken up some real estate that ESPN could have or should have wanted to have. And so you can only judge by results. So, ESPN.com and the app remains very popular, it’s probably in that competitive set it’s probably still the number one service.
I still check it every day.
JK: As do I as well, but it also operates in a much more competitive environment.
It operates in a world of abundance, that’s sort of the problem.
JK: But also, if you’re a young sports fan, are you looking to ESPN and SportsCenter for sports video highlights, or are you looking to YouTube and Instagram?
Yeah, House of Highlights.
JK: I mentioned Twitter. On the television side, I remember, and Bill was one of the key people worked on this, the 30 for 30 documentary series really sort of supplanted HBO in sports documentaries. But if you look around today, it looks to me more like Netflix has taken the mantle. By the way, there’s a nice sort of through line here from Roone Arledge to what they’re doing at Netflix. But the big documentaries people are talking about, those series, are the F1, PGA Tour, and now the pro tennis one.
Well, actually, the Twitter point is a really interesting point, because I have two questions about ESPN at this point in time. So number one, to your bit about Twitter appropriately sending a shudder through your spine, I think one of the most remarkable things about the Big Ten story last summer, or them basically leaving ESPN, on one hand, there’s the ESPN angle which is like, “Well, I guess we’re going to finally find budget discipline”. But on the other hand, it used to be that it was insane to leave ESPN because ESPN basically had a pricing advantage, relatively speaking, because you needed to be on SportsCenter, and you needed to have ESPN talking to you. To the extent that that gets stripped away because all the talk is somewhere else, it’s interesting how that actually circles around to impact the core business. That’s where ESPN made a lot of money was on SportsCenter, that gave them a bargaining advantage when it came to rights and now it’s a much more direct sort of relationship, which increases the bargaining power of whoever you’re bargaining with because you don’t have these extra points of leverage.
JK: Right. And the decision to split the previous Big Ten package with Fox and Fox’s investment in the Big Ten Network, over time that became really, really significant and the Big Ten determined that it didn’t need, as you said, to be on ESPN, and that’s a big event in the industry. Now, I also think that ESPN’s acquisition of CBS’ SEC football package and the strengthening of that, Texas and Oklahoma coming in, may have convinced them that the Big Ten, as great as it is, is kind of a nice-to-have if you weren’t going to get the kind of games and rights that they wanted.
Right. They have inventory. You only have so many slots on a Saturday.
JK: Right, exactly. One of the reasons that I think there still will be a Pac-12 deal is the value of the late West Coast windows that the Pac-12 offers. Some of their fans hate it, but to me, live games really matter and that’s the window that — you could fill a Big Ten window with ACC, or SEC, or Big 12, perhaps not as well, but you could fill that window. But at 10:30 Eastern time, there are relatively few places that you can play, Pac-12 has most of them.
Another connection to this, do you think, and you’ve been out of it for six or seven years so I think it probably really does more apply to ESPN in recent days — do you think that they are, in some respects, too online? There’s an aspect where ESPN is the way to reach casual fans, but when you’re online, and I’ve noticed this mostly in the NBA because that’s what I pay the most attention to, but it feels like it’s trying to have a conversation with Twitter, or show how hip they are to the current takes or whatever it might be. And at the end of the day, the money comes from a broader audience tuning into these games, not the lunatics, like me, that are online tweeting about stuff. Is there an aspect where ESPN, it almost would be good to step back from real-time in the sense of what’s happening online right now, and refocus on real-time as in, “Hey, what game is actually on our channels”?
JK: I believe that less getting into the hot takes of things would be a better, that would be a content approach that I would favor. It’s not just ESPN, I think if you look across most websites, if you look across most TV news shows, they’re increasingly programmed by Twitter, either reflecting what’s on Twitter, or the breaking news that’s happening on Twitter, or trying to gin up more heated discussion that takes place on Twitter. It’s very popular. I find it to be a trap.
Yeah. I love your point about Drive to Survive. The documentary angle, that’s where ESPN — that was the missed opportunity. ESPN is actually benefiting from Drive to Survive actually more than anybody, more than even Netflix, right? The ratings are way higher, and if they had Drive to Survive, that’s great inventory. They learned this with 30 for 30, you have this inventory sitting on the shelf, you can drop in at any time. The game ends early, gets canceled, put a documentary on. They have all these daytime hours and what’s interesting about that is it’s anti-Twitter in a way, right?
Drive to Survive just came out this weekend about events that happened a year ago, but it’s something that Twitter could never do. It’s the production, it’s the cutting it all together, that seems to be a much more productive use of resources. One of the things I get so mad about is I feel the NBA and ESPN both do a very poor job of building stars, of building history. You contrast this with the NFL, and NFL Films, which I think is just an unbelievable product and has been for decades, where you have to build up tradition, you build new things, so that people feel invested and that’s a production of decades of investment.
JK: Well, one thing I will say is I believe that one of the unique aspects of the NBA is that its players are like Marvel superheroes for lots of kids and young people. So they may have gotten to it a different way, but the confluence of sports and music and fashion and popular culture is really centered around the NBA. Personally, I’m much more interested in the stories of the players. A friend of mine said, “Every NBA player is an amazing story, but we rarely hear the stories.” In addition, as a big fan, there’s a whole background about the strategy and the way the game is played, and how defenses work.
Why is that not there? ESPN does so much on the strategy and stuff of the NFL, and it feels like the NBA, it’s just Twitter televised.
JK: I feel in general that the national broadcast of the NBA, whether they’re on ESPN or Turner in the US, are substantially similar to the national broadcast when I worked at the NBA. The picture quality is fantastic, the replays have really come a long ways. However, it’s still basically two people in a booth, someone on the sideline, it’s still kind of keys to the game. The whole dialogue around basketball that exists online and specifically on Twitter and on YouTube, et cetera, is not reflected at all on these shows.
To me, that’s a tremendous missed opportunity and something that I believe is inevitably coming. And I would just say, as a Phoenix Suns fan, you appreciate that if you look at the coverage of the team, it’s mostly done by people who aren’t journalists, they’re super fans and they’re bloggers, they’re on Twitter, they do podcasts, they’re on YouTube, they’re heavily influenced by the whole analytics movement around basketball. There’s a whole reality, I’m sure this exists for Bucks fans too, but there’s a whole reality in terms of how the game is analyzed, the best of these people will rewatch a game afterwards, it’s a smorgasbord that is not at all reflected. My point of view is not that there’s anything wrong with a core broadcast, it’s just that so much choice could be added and would be really valuable because no one necessarily wants a one-size-fits-all.
It’s a great point. There’s an opportunity for a whole host of sports fans that know ESPN, where this is basically user-generated content, you’re getting content for free and the experience of finding that content on Twitter is terrible. There’s an opportunity to pull this all in into one place and be like a portal where you could get all this sort of stuff, but whenever any of these big companies try to dip into UGC, they’re scared. They don’t want to have the controversial opinion, is that just sort of the limiter there, it’s too risky?
JK: It’s a real limiter. We did a lot of work on trying to set up sort of community features on ESPN, and each of them were disastrous in their own ways.
(laughing) Everyone who tries to do community online realizes how hard it is very quickly.
JK: We had comments on Bill’s page and I could still pick out the email he sent me, he was so mad about it, there’d be all this racist terrible stuff. I used to be relieved that no senior managers ever looked at that section of the website because I just thought it would be the end. Nonetheless, the way things have evolved on Twitter or on all the different group message features that fans use is such a part of the fan experience, and ESPN doesn’t really participate in that at all.
You know what? My take is that’s actually probably fine, I go back on my recommendation. I think you got to do what only you can do. This goes back to things like documentaries, things like leaning into your production capabilities, the stuff that fans can’t do, I think is more compelling.
Fixing the NBA
One quick question on the NBA. There’s a lot of angst that you sort of hit on. The All-Star ratings were way down, the rights negotiations are coming up again, players asked for trade demands, et cetera, et cetera. You knew David Stern better than almost anyone. What would David Stern do today? I’m in some NBA group chats, and they would kill me if I didn’t ask you this question, so here it is.
JK: Well, I mean, David would be very, very unhappy about the All-Star game. I was at the All-Star game, and it was a low point in a lot of ways, just in terms of the apparent effort from the players, and it was a desultory exhibition. Now, Adam isn’t frequently as public in whatever his point of view is as David is, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel similarly or hasn’t had some communication behind the scenes.
I think it comes down to the incentives that are out there, and what it takes to motivate people to do different things. The fact is the All-Star game has this rich history and tradition. Even when the ratings are down, it still gets a very significant audience, it’s a very profitable game for TNT. I’ll also say, the reality is this is a game that’s exclusively on TNT now, so how much of the country is that still really attracting? So the ratings are down. Well, okay, but you’re putting it on a platform now where you’re only reaching a certain set of sports fans. You’re not necessarily reaching young fans who just getting into the NBA. I just felt that there’s a certain expectation that fans have, there’s a certain expectation that people who paid to be in the arena have, as to what they’re going to get at the All- Star game and I think almost everybody would agree that that’s not what was delivered. All that said, I’m bullish on the NBA and what’s possible, and where I think their media rights are going to go up. I think I’m more bullish than you are.
Well, I mean the number one thing the NBA has going for it is they are good inventory for a relatively dead time of year. If the NBA season was in the fall, that would be big problem.
JK: Yes, totally. Think about it: in a subscription world, which is I think where we’re headed to, months matter. So you have an NBA regular season, that’s October through March, let’s say. You get into April, you have the Play-In Tournament, you have the playoffs and Finals and the Draft takes you through June. You have Summer League ball now, which is a more popular feature, in July you have international competitions.
And from the network perspective, you carried us to the NFL. Thank you, we appreciate it.
JK: Correct. So I think the real delivery of value or increased value for the NBA is about the regular season. What’s the biggest difference between the NFL and the NBA? It’s the fact in the NFL the regular season matters, and there are far fewer games. But to me, this is also a model, and what I mean by that is in the playoffs, every game matters, every game is nationally televised. There’s something amazing that happens in almost every game. Not all the games are great, but there’s always something at stake.
In the regular season. I would make an argument that something amazing happens almost every night, we just don’t know where that’s going to be. Okay. Last night, Damian Lillard hits 13 three pointers, scores 71 points in a game against the Rockets. I can guarantee you there’s no scenario on Earth where TNT or ESPN in their summer NBA schedule would’ve selected that game. So what I think is coming is going to be more like an NBA nightly approach.
Think about it, think about just the commoditization — you write about this all the time — the commoditization of subscription, VOD, and free ad-supported VOD. Everything now has been reduced to a series of horizontal tiles that you scroll through and on those horizontal tiles, you can have The Godfather and you can have Cocaine Bear and everything is available anytime you want to watch it. Whereas I believe a real alternative is, “Let’s watch the NBA tonight”, but let’s watch it in a way that you have a bunch of choice and there’ll be a curation function that will make sure you see something that’s really unique. I mean, the cool thing about the NBA is just this ongoing soap opera. You talked before about programming by Twitter and the limitations of that. This combined effect of modern media is you have a nightly soap opera. So who knew that Kyrie and Luka Doncic were going to be teammates, but I want to watch them play.
Right. But the schedule is already made so they can’t come back and remake it. That’s interesting. So you’re basically saying they need to shift to instead of, “I’m going to tune into X, Y, Z game.” Maybe that happens once a week because it’s clearly a big game, but the rest of the time it’s like the nightly NBA show and it’s like Red Zone or something and there’s commentators bouncing around.
JK: And my point is that today, I would argue sports is linear television.
Yeah.
JK: Sports is, specifically the NFL, and I believe when the NFL is not playing, the leading product for those sets of months, I think is the NBA and has room to grow, and that’s an alternative. I remember Must See TV and we had to watch 60 Minutes at seven o’clock on Sunday, but that’s largely gone now. The only thing that generates tune-in at a specific time are big sporting events.
Is this an area where the RSN collapse could be a benefit going forward? One of the limitations on just bouncing any game into the national TV slot or dipping in for ten minutes or fifteen minutes is RSNs have these exclusive rights, and if that goes away, on one hand, it’s going to be very painful for a lot of teams because that’s a third of the NBA’s television revenue, on the other hand, it does give much more latitude and freedom of movement to make it a destination. This is the sort of thing — I meant to have an article out before we talked to you, so I’m previewing it now — but the big shift you’re seeing generally in sports as an example of this is it used to be you just had to be there and get space, like the old model. If you were just in the cable bundle, you made money.
Now customers have to actively choose you and that’s a much harder business, but maybe the NBA because of the RSN collapse is coming along just in time so they can at least start building that.
JK: There’s an important distinction too, which is that this RSN collapse affects NBA baseball and hockey, but baseball and hockey have already made their national TV agreements, and those are in place through 2028. The NBA is still to negotiate theirs, which will start in ’25, ’26 so they have more flexibility as to what they might do than those other two leagues now. It feels a little to me, Ben, and I’ve read your coverage, it feels to me a little bit like what happened in the music industry is now going to be visited into sports media. What I mean by that is we come out of an era with the best of all possible models.
Everybody’s paying for the games, even if they’re not watching the games.
JK: Everyone’s paying for the games, that gives birth to a robust ad business around it. I’m very optimistic about what will come in time, but that has to be built and it’s not built now. Even when new things are built, there’s a period of time it takes for sports fans to adopt to that. Young sports fans are much different than when I was growing up. One of the conundrums, I think, with the RSNs is the product itself —
Is terrible.
JK: Is mediocre.
No, it’s terrible. I’ll say it.
JK: But it hasn’t changed in 20 years. Now maybe YES Network or the Dodgers or the Cubs, the big market teams, maybe they’re investing, nobody else is investing. And how do you take a product like that and make it interesting and relevant to young fans? It’s not compelling.
The Next Generation
You wrote an article about Amazon streaming the NFL. You called it We’ve officially crossed the sports media Rubicon, and that was after the initial broadcast where the numbers were phenomenal. I think those numbers did come down a bit over the season. On net, the Thursday Night football was less watched than last year. But on the flip side, there were more young people watching it. Do you still feel the Rubicon was crossed, and why was that so important?
JK: One interesting note is that Amazon submitted to having Nielsen rate their games, I think, in part to generate ad sales. But you had that odd modern moment of comparing the Nielsen sample, which has been a staple of sports TV since I’ve been in, with the actuals that Amazon was purporting to share. When you talked about Bill Simmons before, you could see the actuals.
Right.
JK: So I thought for one thing it was interesting, somebody’s wrong. I figured that the Amazon rating this year was going to be considerably lower because it was new, because there was some subset of fans for whom Prime Video, “What’s that?”
They’re just not going to watch it, it’s too much work.
JK: So the audience was lower. One of the points in that piece is that Amazon, unlike the sports media networks that I worked at, Amazon knows who the viewers are. There’s a connection between the viewers and the program that never existed before, Amazon did this on a scale in terms of their production values, not matched in a normal regular season context.
It basically showed that, look, big sporting events can be streamed. That was basically an open question before, and that’s the most important takeaway.
JK: It was an open question certainly of that size and scale. I believe that if you had asked NFL people, people in the league office before they made that deal with Amazon, I think they would’ve expressed a bunch of skepticism that it would’ve happened. I also feel like Marie Donoghue, who’s a former ESPN colleague and now the person who runs Prime Video Sports, I thought it was shrewd for her to make the deal with Al Michaels — as unhappy as he seemed to be at some of those games — just because they got off to a really — and they had Fred Gaudelli in the truck — they got off to a really good professional start.
There was a level of familiarity. If you’re already changing so many other things, let it at least feel like a normal game.
JK: Right. Everyone would’ve been wait to criticize them if they didn’t do that, so I thought that that was a success. I’ll make two points, and I’ll make them in reverse. The important thing about Amazon and YouTube and Apple is that while they all want into sports, they don’t have to be in sports the way companies like ESPN and others that I worked at. It’s this a symbiotic relationship.
Right. It’s like Turner, no one believes David Zaslav when he says, “Maybe we won’t get the NBA.” It’s like we see your debt load, you need the cash flow, you’re going to be buying the NBA. That’s the big question and people in tech are certainly looking at this. I mean, you see everyone’s like, “Oh, look at Apple and MLS.” Well, it’s like, “Well, no one watched MLS, so Apple’s not really paying anything”. They get to prove out their model X, Y, Z that’s not necessarily applicable to these big sports.
On the other hand, you clearly have someone like Adam Silver hoping and praying that the tech companies will come in to bid up the rights. At the end of the day, because of that, when it comes to the biggest sports, given the fact that the tech companies don’t need it, does that mean that we’re probably not going to get many more deals? On the other hand, how much do sports executives need to be worried about the next generation of fans? I mean, that’s why the Amazon young people numbers are interesting. The scale of these streaming services, Netflix has way more US subscribers than cable generally does, right?
JK: Yeah. Right, and Amazon Prime video, its reach will exceed broadcast within this NFL deal. Keep in mind, one big factor with the NBA that will play to their benefit is it’s truly a global sport. That actually matters a lot more to tech companies than it does to US sports media companies.
Yeah, we’ll see. I feel like that’s been the pot of gold at the end the rainbow for the NBA for a long time and it’s worth remembering, they still make all their money in the US and it’s an important point.
One final question that has nothing to do with sports, but it’s a fascinating story. You have to tell me the story of your son becoming the most unexpected rockstar in the world. How does that work?
JK: So thanks for asking. My son Walter has a band and they’re called The Walters and in 2014 in Chicago, they wrote a song called I Love You So and they posted it on Reddit and it developed a following. The band got to tour, the band got to play Lollapalooza, and then they broke up. My son was driving an Uber in the summer of 2021, out of nowhere, high school girls started doing covers of I Love You So on TikTok and everything for them exploded.
So they reformed the band.
JK: Yeah, the band got back together. I Love You So is a platinum song. They got a record deal with Warner. Last year, last summer they played before 34,000 people in Jakarta. I sent you stats before, they have a bigger following on your side of the world than they do here and I bring it up only because it’s something that’s only possible —
Well, you bring up number one because you are an appropriately a proud father. But sorry, tell me number two.
JK: But number two is it’s something that only the Internet makes possible. You talk about your career and that you live online, only the Internet would make that possible. Lots of fantastic musicians all over the world, but this specific thing cracked for them. One of the funniest things is that the band members are all late twenties, early thirties and it was my son, Luke, who’s now 15, who actually found it on TikTok.
None of them are on TikTok. Yeah, that’s amazing, it’s an incredible story. It almost brings your story full circle in a way. You’re starting out wanting to create this polished product and then realizing actually we have to have live sports or live sports scores and then dealing with the issues of abundance and talent and all these sort of things. Then you circle all the way around to your son where it was because of abundance that he was even out there and then talent can really come from anywhere. That has implications for competition, for what resonates, for what things that are out there.
I mean, I guess the big existential question, just to wrap it up here, is sports has been such a defining feature of your and my life, and I think anyone of GenX or early millennials, there was nothing else to do, so you watched a lot of sports. Today, I love watching sports because there’s the inherent drama in it, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You might sit down to a big game and it might stink, but that’s because it also might be incredible. But in fifty years, is that still going to resonate or is the media environment going to be so fractured and people are going to all be in their little AI bubbles or whatever it might be that it just won’t mean anything anymore? Or will that make it even stronger? Which arguably has happened with the NFL.
JK: My answer is the parade in Argentina after the World Cup where everybody was in the streets, that sports is the only thing that unites people for all the reasons that you mentioned. I just feel, and this is a passion of my career and a bunch of the brilliant people I got to work with, is you have to create better, more compelling products. I believe everything is now aligned to get the sports leagues, the networks, the tech companies to combine to do that. That’s what I believe. I’m optimistic about technology. I’ve had ups and downs and I’ve experienced different things, but I’m optimistic about what’s possible. I believe that sports is going to be a huge beneficiary of all this. Even if the progression is not necessarily linear, we have ups and downs.
It’s clear where it needs to go, the question is how do we get from here to there? But that bit about products, I completely agree. It’s about this shift in customers have to choose you, you don’t get stuff for free anymore. The sooner that leagues and networks figure that out, the better off they’ll be.
JK: But the sports algorithm is coming and there’s now real reason to build it and if we have a chance to do another one of these in another couple years, I think we will be impressed at some of the new services that we see.
Well, we will have to do that. I look forward to it. John Kosner, thank you for coming on. As demonstrated, I could dive into the history of ESPN for easily hours, but I appreciate you putting up with all the questions. Yeah, we should definitely talk again soon.
JK: Thank you, Ben.
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