On September 8, 2026, Genius Sports put out a press release announcing a new sports media company with Chris Paul. Most of the coverage focused on the obvious part: a 12-time NBA All-Star is starting a production venture with Connor Schell, the producer behind The Last Dance and ESPN’s 30 for 30. That’s a good story. It’s also the least interesting sentence in the release.
The interesting sentence is this one: Genius Sports is the exclusive commercialization partner for the venture. Before a single episode exists, the company already knows who sells its advertising. Paul didn’t build a studio and then go looking for revenue. He brought the revenue in at formation and gave it equity.
That detail separates the athlete media companies that compound from the ones that burn cash. And it matters well beyond basketball, because the same structural fork shows up in every creator business that tries to turn an audience into a company.
An athlete-owned media company is a production or content business founded and equity-controlled by a professional athlete rather than licensed to a network, meaning the athlete keeps the intellectual property, the audience relationship, and the upside instead of collecting a fee. In 2026 there are enough of them, with enough public financials, to see which versions actually work.
Last updated: September 2026
Quick answers
What is an athlete-owned media company?
An athlete-owned media company is a content or production business founded and equity-controlled by a professional athlete instead of licensed to a network. The athlete owns the IP, the audience data, and the profits. Examples include Kevin Durant’s Boardroom, Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, and LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill.
Who owns Boardroom?
Boardroom was founded in 2019 by NBA champion Kevin Durant and his business partner Rich Kleiman, who runs it as CEO. The company covers the business of sports, music, and entertainment through newsletters, video franchises, live events, and a membership club, and says it reaches more than 52 million unique visitors a month.
What is PlayersTV?
PlayersTV is an athlete and fan-owned sports media network owned by more than 70 athlete investors across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, and MLB, plus a community of more than 2,200 fan owners. It reaches over 300 million households through DirecTV, YouTube TV, Sling TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Philo.
What is an athlete-owned media company?
An athlete-owned media company is a business where the athlete holds equity in the content operation itself, not just a talent fee for appearing in someone else’s show. That distinction is the whole game. Stephen A. Smith is a media star with a contract. Peyton Manning is a media owner with a balance sheet.
The category has three recognizable shapes in 2026. There’s the production studio, which develops films, series, and documentaries and sells them to distributors like Netflix, ESPN, or Apple. There’s the owned-audience brand, which publishes directly to its own newsletter, YouTube channel, and events calendar, then sells advertising and memberships against that audience. And there’s the network, which owns distribution outright and monetizes ad inventory at scale.
Most of the attention goes to the first shape because it produces Oscar winners and prestige documentaries. Most of the durable money sits in the second and third.
This is the same fork that creators publishing on Substack hit at a smaller scale, and the same one behind the shift from endorsement deals to team ownership. Athletes stopped renting their names out. They started underwriting assets.
How big is athlete-owned media in 2026?
Researchers at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center identified 33 athlete-owned production companies producing more than 370 media properties, in a first-of-its-kind report called Owning the Narrative published in October 2025. That’s the first real census of the category, and the numbers under it are large.
Athlete-owned podcasts in the study had collectively pulled more than 7 billion views on YouTube, 725 million TikTok likes, and 37 million Instagram followers. Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights signed a $100 million deal with Amazon’s Wondery. Pat McAfee licensed The Pat McAfee Show to ESPN for $85 million. USC valued SpringHill at $725 million and Omaha Productions at $400 million at the time of the report.
Omaha has moved fast since. In March 2025, a platform run by former Endeavor executive chairman Patrick Whitesell bought roughly 10% of the company at a valuation above $750 million, nearly double what the USC report had it at. ESPN pays Omaha in the range of $60 million a year and signed a nine-year extension running production into 2034.
USC Annenberg Dean Willow Bay, co-principal investigator on the research, put the shift plainly: “Athlete-owned media isn’t just driving billions in value with a new business model, it’s rebalancing power and reshaping culture.”
The players’ union caught up in 2026. On June 22, the National Basketball Players Association launched PLYRS UNTD, a consumer-facing commercial brand that markets the collective name, image, and likeness rights of NBA players, replacing its older business-to-business arm THINK450. The launch campaign, called “Own the Game,” was narrated by Kyrie Irving and featured Stephen Curry, Jalen Brunson, and Jaylen Brown, and the brand opened a performance center in Los Angeles alongside a content partnership with Enjoy Basketball.
That’s the category growing a second floor. Individual athletes built companies first. Now the union is packaging 450 players as a single negotiating entity, which is the collective version of the same insight: a group that owns its audience rights can sell them directly instead of waiting for a league or a network to allocate a share.
The studio model sells production and eats the risk
The studio model is the hardest version of this business to run profitably, and SpringHill’s numbers show why. The company LeBron James and Maverick Carter founded in 2020 reported a $28 million loss on $104 million in revenue for 2023, following a $17 million loss the year before. Reporting on those figures noted the company had not posted a profit since launch.
That’s not a failure of talent. SpringHill produced Two Distant Strangers, which won an Academy Award, and the Apple TV series Swagger. It’s a failure of structure. A production studio spends money years before it earns any, carries development costs on projects that die in committee, and sells its output to a small number of buyers who set the terms.
Carter has said as much publicly, pointing to rising costs, slower buyer decisions, and the industry strikes as reasons the company wrote off underperforming projects. In November 2024, SpringHill merged with British production company Fulwell 73 in a merger of equals where no cash changed hands, with existing shareholders including Nike, Epic Games, RedBird Capital, and Fenway Sports Group putting in $40 million.
Read that again. A company valued at $725 million needed a merger and a $40 million top-up. The studio model demands scale before it produces margin, and scale costs money the founder usually doesn’t have.
The owned-audience model keeps the customer
Boardroom took the opposite path and it shows in the growth rate. Rich Kleiman and Kevin Durant built a daily newsletter, video franchises like Boardroom Talks and Cover Story, and a live events calendar tied to the Super Bowl, NBA and WNBA All-Star Weekend, F1 Miami, and the U.S. Open. The company reaches more than 52 million unique visitors a month, and Fast Company reported its average monthly reach grew 74% in 2025 while revenue was on track to nearly double.
The difference is who owns the relationship. A studio sells a finished show to a buyer and then has to sell the next one. An owned-audience brand sells the same audience over and over, to advertisers, to members, to event sponsors, to a distribution partner.
Boardroom then stacked a second revenue layer on top. In June 2025 it launched the Boardroom Members Club, a paid membership offering private networking events, VIP access to its flagship activations, and a members-only digital platform. Kleiman told Fast Company he wanted a community that actually benefited members’ careers, describing the gap he saw in existing membership clubs: “I didn’t think that there were actually communities there that benefited your career.”
The payoff arrived a year later. In June 2026, Amazon’s Wondery signed a wide-ranging deal giving it exclusive distribution and ad-sales rights across Boardroom’s podcast and digital series slate starting in early 2027. Boardroom kept its YouTube channel and Boardroom.TV. It sold distribution, not ownership.
Sequence matters here. Boardroom built the audience first, then sold access to it. SpringHill built production capacity first, then went looking for buyers.
Who owns Boardroom, PlayersTV, and the rest
Five companies define the category in 2026, and each one answers the ownership question differently.
| Company | Athlete founder | Launched | Model | Notable metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SpringHill | LeBron James and Maverick Carter | 2020 | Production studio | $104M revenue, $28M loss in 2023 |
| Omaha Productions | Peyton Manning | 2020 | Studio with an anchor distribution deal | Valued above $750M in March 2025 |
| Boardroom | Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman | 2019 | Owned audience plus membership | 52M+ unique monthly visitors |
| PlayersTV | 70+ athlete investors, chaired interest from Chris Paul | 2020 | Owned distribution network | 300M+ households, 1B+ monthly ad impressions |
| Ohh Dip!!! joint venture | Chris Paul with Genius Sports and Words + Pictures | 2026 | Studio with a built-in commercialization partner | First programming slate due Q4 2026 |
PlayersTV is the outlier worth studying. It’s owned by more than 70 athlete investors across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, and MLB, plus more than 2,200 fan owners who bought in through a public raise. In December 2024 it acquired Cloud Media Center, an AI-driven sports adtech company, picking up technology responsible for more than a billion combined monthly ad impressions. It reaches over 300 million households through DirecTV, YouTube TV, Sling TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Philo.
PlayersTV didn’t buy a content library. It bought the ad stack. That’s a founder deciding the margin lives in monetization infrastructure, not in the shows.
What Chris Paul’s venture does differently
Chris Paul’s new company solves the studio model’s revenue problem by making the revenue partner a co-founder. According to the Genius Sports announcement, the joint venture pairs Paul’s Ohh Dip!!! Entertainment with Connor Schell’s Words + Pictures, and Genius Sports takes on exclusive commercialization while supplying official data and AI tooling through its GeniusIQ platform.
Three things get solved at once. Schell handles production quality, the part SpringHill proved is expensive to build from scratch. Genius Sports handles brand sales, the part that usually takes a studio years to staff. And the GeniusIQ data gives the programming a format nobody else can replicate, since Genius Sports holds official data rights across leagues including the WNBA and the English Premier League.
Mark Locke, CEO of Genius Sports, framed the bet around access: “Fans increasingly want to hear directly from the athletes who know the game best.” The first slate is scheduled for Q4 2026.
The structural lesson is cleaner than the sports story. Paul gave up equity to a partner who brings a specific, expensive capability instead of raising cash to build that capability himself. Founders do the reverse constantly, raising a round to hire a sales team when a revenue-share partnership would get them there faster and cheaper.
What founders outside sports should copy
The transferable playbook has four moves, and none of them require being famous.
Own the audience before you own the production. Boardroom’s newsletter and YouTube channel came before the Amazon deal. The audience is what made the deal worth signing. A studio without an audience is a vendor.
Add a membership layer once the audience trusts you. Boardroom launched its Members Club in June 2025, six years after founding. Memberships work when the community is the product, not when they’re a paywall bolted onto free content.
Bring your commercialization partner in at formation. Genius Sports has equity in Paul’s venture and a reason to sell hard. A sponsorship agency on a 15% commission does not.
Buy infrastructure, not inventory. PlayersTV acquired an adtech company instead of a content slate. Infrastructure compounds across everything you publish. A show depreciates.
Founders in sports marketing and athlete-adjacent commerce keep rediscovering the same thing: the athlete’s name opens the first door, and the structure determines whether anything is behind it. The same logic drives athlete co-ownership funds and direct investment in athletes’ future earnings.
Where the athlete media model still breaks
The clearest structural gap in athlete-owned media is who gets to host. USC’s content analysis of the 45 most-watched athlete-owned video podcasts found that only 22% featured any women as hosts or guests, even as women’s sports viewership climbed. That’s a market failure with an obvious arbitrage in it for anyone willing to fund the other 78%.
The economics make the gap stranger. Genius Sports holds official data rights for the WNBA, Boardroom runs activations at WNBA All-Star, and PlayersTV counts WNBA players among its 70-plus athlete owners. The infrastructure is already pointed at women’s sports. The programming mostly isn’t. Tennis player Coco Gauff’s iROC Media Group and the reality series Midge Purce launched on X are early exceptions, and both were built without the kind of anchor distribution deal Omaha got from ESPN.
Saturation is the second problem. Every athlete with a group chat now has a podcast, and audience attention hasn’t grown as fast as the supply. Format alone stopped being a moat around 2024. What separates the survivors is a business underneath the show: memberships, events, data rights, distribution.
The third risk is founder bandwidth. Running a media company is a full-time job, and an active athlete has another one. Manning launched Omaha after retiring. Durant has Kleiman running Boardroom as CEO. Paul brought in Schell to run production. Every company in the category that works has a non-athlete operator holding the wheel, which is the same reason solo creators burn out trying to be the talent and the business at once.
Athlete-owned media companies are no longer a vanity category. They’re 33 companies, 370-plus properties, and a handful of billion-dollar outcomes, and the ones that win in 2026 are the ones that treated distribution and monetization as the product instead of an afterthought. Anyone building an audience business, with or without a jersey, is choosing between the same two models.
