Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [179]
After everything was looked over, it came down to Prodigy or AOL. Prodigy was offering to buy $10 million of our advertising time in addition to operating a little ESPN site on Prodigy and pay us a royalty, or really a share, of revenues that were generated. Steve Case said, “I don’t believe the way to promote these services is through TV advertising. I’ll buy some, but my plan is to get AOL software disks into everybody’s hands, basically give them out for free, so I can’t make an advertising commitment to you. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you warrants in our little company that’s just gone public.”
Bornstein and I liked the way AOL worked better than Prodigy, but ultimately, we said $10 million in advertising was something that we could really use. It was a very bad decision. We went with the wrong guy. A few years later, I think those AOL warrants we turned down were worth $200 million.
The good news was that the deal we did with Prodigy was only for a year. The year was not a particularly happy or successful one, in part because we always felt AOL was better. Ultimately the decision we made was to partner with Paul Allen’s Starwave. They saw the world as we did; they were huge sports fans and they were as comfortable in Bristol as they were when they were at their own headquarters.
Starwave had actually built a service called “Satchel,” after Satchel Page, and then they said that they wanted to call it “Sportszone.” So we said, “What’s the point of doing an ESPN service that isn’t branded ESPN? That makes no sense; we’ll never do that. Nor does it make sense for you.” So we agreed that it would be “ESPNET SportsZone,” and that if we broke up we would own “ESPN Net” and that they would own “SportsZone.” So that’s how it got named.
But the real key was Bornstein: he set the direction, and everybody in the industry knew we were marching to his beat. Inside the company, we would have a once-a-year big off-site gathering—not the entire company, but around 100 to 150 important managers. One of the last things was a Q&A with Steve, and somebody asked the question, “What are the one or two things that you see as being keys to our future?” And everyone in the room was certain that number one would be ESPN2, and number two would be sales, and Steve without hesitation said, “The Internet and international.” From that day on, I was important.
On April 1, 1995, ESPNET SportsZone was launched in Seattle, during the NCAA Final Four men’s basketball tournament, to coincide with both the tournament and Paul Allen’s location. “Microsoft is thrilled that ESPNET SportsZone will be part of the Microsoft Network when it debuts later this year,” said the GM of the online services group at Microsoft, Russ Siegelman. The group was bragging that Satchel Sports had already logged 150,000 fans and over a million hits a week.
PAUL BROOKS, Senior Vice President of NASCAR:
In our sport you have forty-three teams on the same field playing together at the same time. So there’s this constant action and interaction between these teams, and the data and information that is collected is just mind boggling compared to any other sport. We had timing and leader feeds that were very significant; we thought if we could just get those feeds on the Internet, and people could turn on their computers to get running orders and see the same screen that the pit crews were using at the racetracks, that would be the best thing in the world.
Bill and Brian France asked me to lead our effort in that area, and after making