John Skipper

Look, David, there were a group of people, and Bowman was the one I knew the best, who believed that the advent of delivering games over digital, over broadband internet, would allow the leagues.

It's the same time period that the MLB network was started, which probably screwed ESPN.

The MLB network and the NFL network and the NBA TV, they were invented with the idea, one, it's basically a counter to ESPN getting too powerful.

If they actually don't buy our rights and pay us enough money, we just put them on our own network.

And then Bob actually had the vision to go.

He told me one time, I said, Bob, I'm not doing this.

He said, well, it won't matter because there won't be a next rights deal.

We're going to bring everything in house and create a subscription service called MLB something.

And people will get all the baseball they want directly from us.

I remember specifically having conversations with Bob and Larry Murphy and the other Disney board members.

They're like, could this really happen?

And I said, no, this can't really happen because these are not corporations.

They are aggregations, by the way, monopolistic aggregations of owners that will never go, we're going to do it, but it requires to do what Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos did at Netflix, undergo years and years of

People complaining, why aren't you performing better?

Why aren't you making money now?

Why isn't this good?

And the owners would have had to say, yep, it's going to go down.

We're going to have to lower our payrolls.

We're going to have to make less money for some number of years.

But then we'll control our destiny.