February saw the announcement of 120 Sports, a live-streaming platform dubbed as “a first-of-its-kind network partnership involving multiple leagues and media properties.” The launch includes equity investors such as Sports Illustrated and Silver Chalice with content partners that also include the NHL, NBA, MLB.com, NASCAR and Campus Insiders. The company will soon detail schedules and an official launch date but was designed to offer programming in two-minute segments on a platform created and powered by equity investor MLBAM’s technology infrastructure and mobile app development. Talent already includes former ESPN host Michael Kim along with Bryant McFadden, Ovie Mughelli, Dave Ross, Tim Doyle, Dylan McGorty, Ro Parrish, Alex Schlereth and Laura Britt.
Cynopsis Sports caught up with Jason Coyle, President of 120 Sports, to talk about the venture, what to expect and the backstory on how it all came together.
Coyle on the creation of 120 Sports: It’s been in development for a number of years. It really started out as a conversation of “what if” and we went and asked the leagues what they thought during the drawing board phase. So we just started working together loosely and diligently over the course of a couple years and everyone seemed to think it was a good idea to pursue it. We finally hit a stage in May of last year, where everybody was getting a sense that we would like to do something and it was about then when we had a conversation that was completely separate with Sports Illustrated, but it started to make sense that perhaps we should combine the conversations. It made sense editorially, from a sales perspective and a directional perspective of where they wanted to take their business and where we saw the opportunity for 120.
On bringing in the leagues: It really was less of a sale and more of a conversation and constantly looking to where we thought opportunities for fans existed. We were fortunate enough through our ownership structure to have great working relationships with the leagues. So we had ongoing dialogues, wondering “What if we did this?” Honestly, we knew that the only way it would work is if it was complimentary of all of their businesses and respectful of all of their television relationships. This was not pitched as the XYZ killer. We think that this is a great multisport digital compliment to their individual businesses. So when we come out you will see a deeply ingrained philosophy of promoting television tune-in, and offering deeper analysis for their sports. We won’t have live games, although we will be live with our news and conversation and will let fans know that a game has gone into the fourth quarter and they should check it out on XYZ network.
On why it’s a good idea: We knew that there’s this great big service we could build for the fans that is both fast and first in terms of real-time coverage of the trends that was digital from inception. It is uniquely social, interactive and allows any user on any device to always access this. It didn’t seem like there was anything like this out there, and we wanted to take something like that and offer it to sports fans in a way that would hopefully grow the overall pot for everybody.
On programming: We will be announcing programming specifics in the next couple of weeks, but it is talent driven. We’ve got a deep bench of eleven hosts/co-hosts/update reporters and a great group of league specific analysts that we will be announcing shortly. We will be pulling them in remotely from all over the country to add analysis and insight to their specific sports. We will also be pulling in Sports Illustrated writers through the week and throughout the day to add their own unique insight. So you start with this diverse and unique talent base and you add the fact that we’ve got a hundred people working on the productions themselves. We’ve got a fully staffed operation that allows us to produce in two-minute blocks and be live for a significant number of hours.