ESPN’s Burke Magnus Cracks Open Network’s Content Plans for New Audiences and Sports Bundles: ‘We Just Want to Reach Fans’

When you’re listing people who forever changed the sports media landscape, ESPN’s president of content Burke Magnus is towards the top of that last. Over the course of his nearly 30-year career with the network, he’s reshaped both ESPN and how the entertainment industry thinks about sports. And it all came from a passion to be as close to the field as possible.

“I like to say sports was really the only thing I ever cared about as a kid,” Magnus told TheWrap. Magnus was able to leverage that passion into a career dedicated to optimizing the space for fans. After graduating from Holy Cross in 1988 — a college that has ironically never hosted ESPN’s College GameDay — Magnus spent his post-graduation years pursuing what he called “a more conventional profession.” That was until he went to grad school with the goal of trying to make a career in sports.

That stint at the University of Massachusetts led to an internship at CBS Sports, a job that “hooked” Magnus on the media business, and eventually an entry level job in programming at ESPN. Magnus has stayed at the Disney-owned network ever since.

During his time there, Burke paved the way for huge brand efforts like the network’s now-iconic College GameDay franchise, the launch of ESPN+ and the boom of ESPN Films. He has done this while also shepherding cross-platform agreements with the NFL, MLB, NHL, SEC and LaLiga. He’s done so by paying attention to what fans actually want and by making efforts to capture the magic of live sports on TV.

“To me, [College GameDay] represents the best of what ESPN does right. That’s a show that hits on everything that we’re looking to to accomplish,” Magnus said.

He noted that the “secret sauce” of that show really kicked in once it went on the road. That’s when the great cast of this analysis show met the passion and unique flavor of fans around the country. More than a show about college football, College GameDay became an extension of the experience — “a badge of honor for schools to host the show.”

It’s this insight from spending so many years working on college sports that Magnus has tried to bring to the network as a whole. Recently, he’s done so by taking Monday Night Countdown before Monday Night Football on the road and setting up studios on location for major live events such as the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Finales. Here is how Magnus is continuing to evolve in the increasingly chaotic sports landscape and what he envisions both for the future of ESPN and this industry at large.

As someone who has seen both, how closely do you think the streaming boom mirrors the cable explosion in sports? And what are your predictions for this space?
In a way it feels reminiscent of the cable boom, but in reality, it’s completely different. Back in the day of cable, the town you grew up in essentially had one cable company servicing that town, so the optionality that you had as a consumer was limited. Then along came satellite and eventually the [telecommunications] companies and then eventually streaming. Now it’s all about choice and options as a consumer. That is a great thing from where we sit.

Back in 2002, you were part of leading the charge on ancillary sports content thanks to your role on the ESPN Original Entertainment team. Can you talk about diving into this secondary sports content and their importance when it comes to ESPN strategy?
ESPN has always been in the 24/7, 365 sports business. Of course, the games are at the top of the food chain in terms of reaching a mass audience of sports fans. But we’ve always looked at the game around the game as a priority to keep sports fans engaged with ESPN for longer periods of time. In the television ratings business, ratings are a component of two things: how many people you get and how long they stay. If you have a great portfolio of rights, which we’ve always had, that’s fantastic. You bring in a lot of people for those big events, and then you try and hold them for as long as possible, before the game, in the game and after the game.

EOE back in the day was way ahead of its time, relative to making the supposition that sports fans care about storytelling. You look at how many sports documentaries are being made now, across so many different companies, streamers in particular, and that was really something ESPN had way before anybody else. It’s still a big part of what we do, with “30 for 30” in particular. But storytelling, news and information, SportsCenter, the pregames that get the debate and conversation going from shows like “Get Up,” “First Take” and “The Pat McAfee Show” — it’s a full array of content you hope appeals to as many sports fans as as possible over the course of the day, a week, a month, a year.

You’ve also had a long history of acquisitions and programming. What can you say about the NBA rights deal that’s currently ongoing?
I can’t confirm anything, and this has been widely covered by everyone, understandably so because the NBA is a significant property. What I can say is we have an unbelievable relationship currently with the league. I feel good about an eventual positive outcome for us here. We love having the NBA. It fits perfectly into our portfolio. We think that Adam [Silver] and his team are very forward-thinking and are successfully navigating the pitfalls of the modern media environment. It has a couple inherent advantages over other leagues and other properties. It’s extremely young, it’s multicultural, it’s global … So we’re very bullish on the NBA, long-term.

On a bigger level, there have been a lot of record-setting deals when it comes to live sports acquisition rights. What’s your response to that? Why do you think people are so bullish on live sports at this moment?
It’s a combination of both consumers and advertisers. It’s not terribly complicated. But in a really fractured and complicated media environment, live content is cutting through like no other. If you’re not a sports fan, you can be perfectly served by your entertainment programming on an on-demand basis on your schedule, however you choose to get it. The urgency of live events — whether that be sports, news falls into that category to certain degree, special events like the Oscars or or New Year’s Eve — live sports are probably the highest form that have that [urgency]. Then, from a sponsorship perspective, you can guarantee that your advertising or sponsorship element is seen by an audience at a time-specific moment, so it has a bunch of advantages in today’s media environment. For that reason, media companies see the value and pay a premium for the highest echelon rights. We balance that out by also investing in emerging properties that we think will be a much bigger deal than they are today.

I’ve spoken a bit about emerging investments with ESPN’s vice president of women’s sports programming and espnW, Susie Piotrkowski , especially regarding the investments you all have made into women’s sports and women’s basketball.
Women’s college basketball, the WNBA, now the NWSL — we’re very bullish on the growth of women’s sports. We think, in particular, basketball has permanently left the launchpad and is a legitimate audience aggregator in and of its own right. But there’s many things on the women’s portfolio that I think are right behind and are poised for similar growth, things like volleyball, gymnastics, softball. A lot of these are college sports, too. We get to invest in and distribute that as well.

How are you thinking about Gen Z and catering content to the younger generation?
Jimmy Pitaro established this when he first came to ESPN. We have a couple of guiding priorities for the company overall, and audience expansion is one of them. When we talk about audience expansion, we really talked about three things in particular: growing our younger audience, growing our female audience and growing our multicultural audience.

As it pertains to the younger audience, we find a couple things. First of all, I have kids who are 25 and 22. For the last decade, I feel like I’ve had this focus group living inside my house of how younger avid sports fans behave, what they care about and how they consume content. It’s been really eye opening. I’m more convinced than ever that there are certain things that are true with this group of people and they behave accordingly. One of them is that they really treasure access. Some things you see us do that are unequivocally access plays — I’ll give you a perfect example. On Sunday Night Baseball, we mic the players in the field during the game … I’ll give baseball a ton of credit because it always gets the rap of being an older sport, but they’ve done a bunch of things that are really friendly to younger audiences. That’s one of them. Speeding up the play of the game — the pitch clock and everything else — is another one.

So we lean into access, big time. The other thing that’s always informed our strategy is college sports. College sports is an interesting audience because it’s simultaneously young and old, and the alumni impact will carry people through their lives. But college sports is a big area of emphasis for us to help grow new fans.

And then social. Social is so important, and when I say social, it’s really social and digital. It’s our on-platform digital efforts to reach fans through the app and ESPN.com that are incredibly important. Then it’s our off-platform, branded social, so ESPN’s presence on Instagram, TikTok, X, whatever it happens to be. That is a lever we use to reach younger fans that’s critically important in today’s environment.

How are you thinking about the Venu streaming option , ESPN’s partnership with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery?
That effort goes back to something I talked about at the top. We believe that making ESPN available in a variety of different ways, in a variety of different price points, on a variety of different platforms, in an environment where it’s still uncertain as to what’s going to win or lose, is the play. We don’t really care how we reach fans; we just want to reach fans. If you’re a cable subscriber and you’re happy with your big bundle cable subscription, great, we’re there for you. If you have a problem with price or you’re at a different stage of your life where you don’t want a multi-channel subscription, great. You can buy a Venu and get the vast majority of national sports through the three partners.

A year from now — not this August but next August when Venu’s a year old — we’re going to launch what we’ve been referring to as flagship, which is the ESPN networks presented as a streaming product. Maybe you just want the ESPN networks. That will be at a different price that you might find you like. Then ESPN+, which we currently offer direct-to-consumer, which is complimentary to everything on ESPN networks and is a great value currently at $10.99. So we’re looking at price and platform and trying to be everywhere that a consumer might want to to buy or access ESPN.

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