Apple paid $750 million for F1 live right, Sky 6.7B£ for the 2025-2029 Premier League. The Overlap never bid on live rights. Not because of a clever strategy, Scott Melvin is clear on this, but because the cost is prohibitive. You either go all in or you can’t play. So they built a business around what live rights don’t give you: the cold open where Ian Wright walks in and spends 15 minutes on Toy Story 3, the kind of football conversation that makes you feel like you stumbled into the right pub.
5 years later, their bet paid off. 1.7 million subscribers, the Bundesliga came to them with a live rights deal and then Global took a majority stake in January. This week, Evan Shapiro and I bring Scott Melvin, Executive Director of The Overlap, on the pod to walk us through how that works in practice. What the Bundesliga actually handed over, what happened when they looked at the social numbers against the live and what Scott made of the gap. The numbers are not what you’d expect.
He also gets into what Global’s capital made possible, why The Overlap acquired Mark Goldbridge’s channels rather than building new ones from scratch and why growing a YouTube channel to a million subscribers today is a different exercise than it was five years ago.
The World Cup kicks off tonight. The Overlap is in Brooklyn without a single match right. I'll be watching both.
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That’s it for today but before you go:
🗳️ Poll time
We’ve made predictions on this episode as to who will win the World Cup, it’s only fair that we ask you too 👇🏻
