David Rosenthal

This is just pure, like, non-strategic overhead costs that they're offloading.

Similarly, though, it's not like Disney and ESPN are just taking this off their hands as a favor.

They also know that they need to shift out of the linear cable TV business.

And so the timing of this coincided right with launching the full ESPN direct consumer over the top streaming service, ESPN Unlimited.

Yeah, it was like a neutered version of ESPN.

Yeah, no SportsCenter, no live NFL games, blah, blah, blah, no Monday Night Football.

Yeah.

So this is now like a whole dumping all of the NFL media rights for some games, but also all of this ancillary content and NFL films content.

Right as Disney is now going out and making the pitch to consumers, hey, in addition to Disney Plus and Hulu, also subscribe to ESPN Unlimited and your new digital streaming cable bundle, essentially.

Now here's where it gets really interesting for the NFL.

Already, their rights partners were moving to much more of a tech company digital mix than cable networks and broadcast networks with Google, Netflix, with Amazon, etc.

in doing this deal, they're now essentially helping stand up another digital bidder for future media rights with this new ESPN standalone streaming service.

Like it is vastly in the NFL's interests for a standalone digital ESPN streaming service to be viable, to then also be a bidder on their future media rights.

So they're helping make sure that that happens.

And they're getting a 10% equity stake in the whole thing, too.

So this is a great deal.

And to be clear, it's not like the NFL is just getting a 10% stake in the new ESPN streaming service.

They're getting a 10% stake in ESPN, the whole thing.

This is everything we talked about in the episode.

The NFL is the most perfectly designed league, maybe with the exception of IPL now that we've done that.