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Sports Innovation Conference @ Stanford GSB (2015)

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Last week, I was invited to moderate an hourlong conversation at Stanford as part of the business school’s Sports Innovation Conference. You can link through and see all the great panels, speakers, and topics. While I wasn’t able to stay the whole day, what was clear to me from the energy around the event is that entertainment is a huge, huge business and the management of sports talent and rights within that is a major driver of it. Perhaps that’s obvious to some, but the angle to tech and Silicon Valley isn’t often discussed. (I’ve made one investment related to sports, but what attracted me to this company was their unique approach to mobile.)

My panel was titled “The Future of Sports Content,” and we had Karen Brodkin (WME/IMG), Marie Donoghue (ESPN/Disney) and Dan Reed, formerly of the NBA and now Head of Sports Partnerships at Facebook. Let me say up front that while some folks in the Valley “know the business of sports,” these three blew me away with their breadth of knowledge around the intersection of sports, media, and technology. Here are my high-level takeaways from the panel and Q&A:

  • Live vs Virtual: I proposed whether VR could dampen the live-sports experience for spectators, especially those who pay through the nose for nose-bleed seating. We discussed how a few people will ever have a courtside NBA experience in their lives, but now with VR, they could. It’s early days, but everyone — the leagues/teams, the networks, and tech companies — are gearing up for this.
  • Snapchat & FB Mentions vs Instagram/Twitter: An audience member wondered how an athlete/celeb could manage discussions on Facebook (with Mentions) versus being able to easily reply 1:1 on Instagram or Twitter. I’ve got a friend in the NFL who says he only uses Twitter for broadcast but not interaction because, in his opinion, fantasy and trolling has ruined his experience. Instagram works a bit better, but there are still trolls. He hasn’t experimented much with Snapchat yet, but feels like this is where the world is moving for mobile broadcast. (Currently, ESPN produces their daily Snapchat Discover piece, but are looking for ways to create more and automate them over time.)
  • Talent Management in Sports: I did not wholly appreciate all the various rights associated with sports talent and content.
  • A New Sports Category? An audience member inquired about “Participatory Sports” as they relate to current sports networks. Clearly on Facebook, people share and organize around sports, but it was interesting to hear WME and ESPN discuss more recreational sports (like this, maybe?) and how they could become mainstream phenomena in the future — I mean, a while ago, it sounded silly to watch people play video games, right?