If live sports is the dominant form of live entertainment on TV, it is content around sports that seems to spark so much of the conversation about what people are watching. Athletes, after all, have millions of followers on social platforms themselves, and the story behind the event can be as compelling as the game itself.
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And sports content is at something of a pivot point: There are giants like the NFL, NBA and ESPN. But viewers are also seeing a boom time in new and emerging leagues, like the NWSL and Unrivaled, with the insatiable demand for sports content on TV and streaming only further growing the overall pie.
Overtime fits neatly into the current moment. Founded by Dan Porter in 2016, the company initially created content around sports, but has since become a league itself, with its Overtime Elite basketball league churning out NBA stars, a low-impact football league OT7 trying to create a new type of football viewer, and even a move into boxing.
And it is doing that as its core sports content business continues to grow, thanks in part to deals with the likes of the NFL and NBCUniversal.
“I would say in general sports media is about talking to you about sports, and I think Overtime is about listening to you,” Porter says. “It feels like this is your voice. It’s not about salary caps and judging all those things. It’s about culture. It’s about humor. It’s about going into the comments and responding to somebody.”
Overtime’s open-air office in Brooklyn is brimming with movement, samples from its clothing lines on one side, screens with live games on the other, and dozens of staffers at stations developing sports-related content and products in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.
It’s an employee base a couple of decades younger than Porter, but smack in the middle of the audience Overtime was created specifically to reach.
Porter, a serial entrepreneur, actually says Overtime had its audience segment before it had a product.
“All those young people who aren’t watching live sports, we’re gonna get that,” he recalls of the original pitch.
Overtime Elite now has a global media rights deal with Prime Video, which also streams its behind-the-scenes series One Shot . The show is set to return for season two on Prime on Oct. 24.
Watch the trailer below:
“I’d say the biggest difference between, let’s say us and the NBA or the NFL, is everyone’s already aware of the NFL and the NBA. They’re just trying to give you the characters to deepen your relationship,” Porter says. “Nobody’s like, ‘Oh my God, did you know there’s a professional basketball league in the United States?’ I think for us, we’re trying to do both. We’re trying to make them aware. ‘Oh my God, there’s a whole other basketball league, and I’ve got to fall in love with them.'”
One Shot , in that respect, is part and parcel with the larger Overtime strategy of creating new sports IP, and developing players and personalities that will resonate even after they leave the company and (hopefully) join the pros.
“Every league thinks about media rights, sponsorship and derivative IP, and traditional derivative IP tends to be anything from trading cards to a video game [like] NBA 2K,” Porter says. “For us, we chose a form of derivative IP that has, like video games do, a massive overlap with a young audience, is very global in nature.”
But the world of college and high school sports has changed dramatically since the last season of One Shot debuted two years ago. The rise of NIL (name, image, likeness) deals has transformed amateur sports, and has subsequently changed Overtime, a pivot if you will.
“Because of the nature of our business at that time, because season one was before NIL, every single player was on a journey to make the NBA, which is slightly more binary,” Porter says. “I think, in season two, you follow a bunch of journeys that are different. They involve official visits. They involve all these players going to the next level, which now, because of NIL, is going to play in college, and kind of making a college decision.
“In any one of these series, you’re trying to find a balance between how much storytelling and how much sports, like if you’re making Drive to Survive , how much racing are you showing versus how much of the other stuff,” he adds.
Porter is no stranger to a strategic pivot. His career has been defined by them.
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The son of college professors, Porter began his professional life as a high school teacher in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A friend connected him to Teach for America, which at the time was just starting up, and he joined to work on special projects. He would become the nonprofit’s first ever president in 1990.
It was that experience that kick-started an entrepreneurial streak.
“I’d be in Phoenix meeting with the CEO of the biggest bank to see if they could give us money to come there. It really taught me a lot about how to talk to people about money,” Porter recalls, noting that he would go from speaking to students one day to CEOs the next. “I remember just having this moment where I was like, ‘I’ve got to be on the other side of the table. I’m on this side of the table, and I have this kind of power to do these things and impact people, but these people who have all the money, they’re the ones ultimately telling me what to do.'”
Porter helped start an online ticketing company, TicketWeb, which sold to Ticketmaster; he started a mobile gaming company that sold to Zynga (there were also a few years in between spent in the music business, working for Richard Branson’s Virgin).
And in 2013, he joined WME as its head of digital, after being introduced to Ari Emanuel by the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, who had been an investor in his gaming company.
“I’m pretty much one of the only people in the entire WME at that point who didn’t come up through the mail room, I was like a freak,” Porter recalls, describing Emanuel as “driven, motivated and charismatic.” And just as the meeting with the CEO in Phoenix changed his perspective on money and power, his time working with Emanuel impacted how he viewed the relationship side of business.
“I understood what it was like to have creative firepower, and work with these game designers, but I don’t think I really understood what it was like to have so much interpersonal relationship-driven firepower, which I think is his specialty, connecting with people and stuff like that,” Porter says.
It was when he left WME in 2016 that he started Overtime alongside co-founder Zacz Weiner, seeking to carve out a piece of the underserved sports audience.
The company has since raised nine figures, with John Malone’s Liberty Media, Jeff Bezos, Drake, Kevin Durant, Blackstone and Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global among the investors.
And the sports marketplace has boomed since then, driven by live rights, but supported by shows like One Shot that let the athletes’ personalities shine through.
“If I were to take a macro view of sports, I think that a massive driver of sports is clearly bringing the fans closer to the athletes, to get to know them,” Porter says.
The rise of NIL in some ways makes that simpler, especially for a company like Overtime, which has been in the social video business since its inception.
“We’ve always created content with athletes, and they’ve always benefited through exposure, but now we’re actually able to treat them like professionals and have contractual relationships with that,” Porter says. “It’s giving athletes the opportunity to achieve what professional athletes get to achieve, and for the high school and the college athlete, we are actually their most likely partner in that.”
And Overtime has since expanded to leverage its social prowess to larger, more established sports brands, striking content partnerships with the NFL and with NBC Olympics, letting its talent go behind the scenes at NFL games and the Paris Olympics to generate content.
“They really have kind of two main goals that align with what we do: One is reaching a next-generation fan who might not be like a television first watcher or anything else like that,” Porter says. “And the second is helping their brand partners and sponsors get more digital distribution. And when you take the fact that we’re able to create a lot of fun Gen Z-oriented content around the sports without ever having to touch the actual rights or highlights … we’re also able to drive awareness and passion for those by putting them on our accounts.”
The result is a media company that blurs the line between sports, entertainment and culture, creating its own stuff but also working with other players to grow its share of the pie.
But it is also perpetually evolving and adapting, whether it is responding to NIL or the rise of streaming sports docs.
“To me a company is … it’s not a tunnel, it’s like a puzzle piece, but the outside pieces are constantly changing,” Porter says. “So you have to constantly change your piece so it fits in and finds its right thing, I guess. My form of music [when he played] was jazz. I was an improviser, that’s what I did. That’s what I studied. And in that creative improvisation mindset, you don’t want to get locked into anything.”
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