Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is kind of a crazy future. But it’s also one that – and this is the next thing that kind of happens in the history and facts here. One that doesn’t make a lot of sense, like it doesn’t make sense for the collective 30 teams of Major League Baseball to own basically the future of internet television. Totally. And that hamstrings them because they can’t really issue stock to employees, they don’t control their own destiny as much. And this has become a tech company at this point and so they’re competing with engineers and executives with Facebook and Amazon and Netflix, all of whom are issuing stock compensation. But BAM can’t do that. So they realize that they need to fix this. And so immediately after the announcement of the NHL deal, Major League Baseball announces that they’re spinning Advanced Media out into its own separate company called BAMTech and that they’re going to start talking to investors to buy a stake in the company and finance it and they’ll retain a large equity stake, Major League Baseball will. But it will finally become its own independent company. And so they worked on that deal, takes a whole year and then finally in August of 2016, it’s announced that they have found that partner, that investor that’s going to help spin the company out and it is – surprise, surprise – Disney which of course found ESPN and ESPN which for 20 years at this point has been the largest part of Disney.…

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