John Skipper, ESPN’s former president, is back ... at a rival sports media company.
Skipper’s new goal is to make watching sports online a big business, starting in the U.S. with boxing.
The rumors of sports’ death have been greatly exaggerated, says former ESPN President John Skipper.
“I don’t think interest in sports has declined at all,” he said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “What you just have is a dramatic increase in the amount of content overall that’s available, the places you can watch it. And so consequently, the peaks of everything are smaller, right?
And Skipper is contributing to that content bounty in his new role as chairman of DAZN (pronounced like “da zone”), an online sports streaming service that launched in the U.S. in September. Already an established carrier of multiple sports in Japan, Germany and Italy, DAZN is focusing on boxing in the U.S. for now, with an eye on the rights to other sports that are currently locked up by companies like ESPN.
“Just in terms of buying the most popular live events in this country, those rights are tied up for a long time,” he said. “I do run into my own deals very often in this new job ... I have no regrets. They were the right deals to do, and we’ll do the right deals to do now for a new service.”
Although he declined to share specific numbers, Skipper said DAZN already has more paying subscribers worldwide than any other streaming service, including ESPN+, which announced in September that it had one million. And he’s skeptical that, when the NFL broadcast rights next become available, tech monoliths like Google or Amazon will necessarily be the ones to scoop them up.
“Every time I hear that they’re inevitably coming, I believe that I hear some commissioner of some big league in the United States whispering into a reporter’s ear that they’re coming,” he said. “... To have only bidders, broadcast and pay and cable television companies — who are facing very, very significant issues with their two streams of revenue — to have them as your only bidders, I don’t think is a comfortable position for them to be in. They’d like new bidders. I think they would like DAZN to be a bidder.”