Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It’s not public exactly what the deal is but it has been announced they have an option to acquire a “majority stake” in BAMTech. I think could have it been anyone else, like we’re going to get into that in another section, but like, Disney is just the absolute perfect partner for this. Yup. To BAM and to baseball, yes, because they have a history of and it’s kind of what we saw with Lucasfilm, right? It was really important to George Lucas who the buyer of Lucasfilm was going to be. And for Major League Baseball, even though they have a different set of motivations, they are very motivated to want to retain an equity stake over time and Disney can say yeah, we’ve done that many times, we’re happy to do that. And so concurrently with the announcement that Disney is going to invest and have this path towards control ownership of BAM, they also announced that they’re going to start working on a direct-to-consumer ESPN subscription service powered again by BAMTech. But this is huge. This is going to be the first time that ESPN is going to be available directly to consumers outside of a cable bundle. And it’s been at this point years that ESPN is the only reason so many people continue to subscribe to cable, so this is Disney saying “Okay, now is finally the time we’re going to move past linear television.”…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.