Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Direct-to-consumer, yeah. This is serious. This is the business model innovation I was talking about in the Clippers on our last show. Okay. So August 2016, the spinoff happens, Disney is the partner. Very shortly thereafter in November of 2016, BAM announces that they’re expanding beyond the US and they’re coming to Europe. They’re partnering with Discovery Communications, the media company that owns the Discovery Channel and many other forms of content to buy the rights to stream the Olympic Games in Europe. So, big announcement, they’re going global. And then shortly thereafter in December, this is really interesting going back to Twitch, they do a direct rights deal with Riot Games, the owners and publishers of League of Legends, for BAM to have the rights to stream all official League of Legends competitions through 2023. Yup. And that is a big, big deal. That is a guaranteed $50 million per year deal that BAMTech is going to pay Riot. And in the e-sports space right now, we’re all wondering what does this mean because right now, you go and you can watch a league championship series game with millions of other people for free that’s ad supported on either Twitch or YouTube. And there’s this company, BAMTech, that's paying $50 million to Riot per year and so far, nothing. Like they have these rights but we haven’t seen anything with it, and we’re really going to see something, I would assume, in the next six months where there’s a direct offering that is built by BAMTech that is maybe the one and only way to go and watch these League of Legends matches, and I think we will probably get into e-sports in future episodes but that, Disney/BAMTech is making like these big bets throughout their history on things that are before their time, and that's shown here yet again with a big purchase of these rights. In fact, some of the biggest dollars that are moving around in the entire e-sports space probably years before most people have any idea that that’s even a thing. And this is something for BAM to be able to start do this, they really need a partner. This is another reason why Major League Baseball, you know, you couldn’t finance doing this but with Disney and the balance sheet that Disney brings to this, they can really start to be a player in this rights space. So the last thing that happens just a couple of months ago in February 2017, Bowman after a 17-year run as CEO of BAM, steps back from day to day operations as CEO and they hire a man named Michael Paull to be the new CEO. This is really interesting. Paull had been the VP of video at Amazon and was the person responsible for the development of Prime video, Amazon’s Netflix competitor and of course was super involved with Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch. And before Amazon, he had been a TV exec at Sony and Fox and Time Warner. But this is really interesting. When you think about the rest of Disney’s streaming catalog, Netflix is obviously a big partner of theirs as is Apple and others. But Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, all the Disney videos. And now you have the guy coming from Amazon who built their Netflix competitor, you can start to see how BAM and Disney together could really be the full service, a very compelling full service video provider to consumers over-the-top on the internet.…

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