Name: Disney CEO Bob Iger Talks About Creating Future Entertainment, Today
Uploaded: 2016-07-12
Duration: 21 min 31 s
Description: He joins Fortune from Brainstorm Tech 2016

[ MUSIC ] I want to switch gears a little bit and also go to you guys in just a couple of minutes, but on the east PM side, because if you're talking about technological transformation, there's definitely a lot of that going on in the sports world. So you had phenomenal ratings for several live sporting events recently. The NBA finals was the highest rated, I think, on ABC or ESPN since 2006. At the same time there's been a slight slip in subscriber numbers on the ESPN side. So how od you think about what's going on? Is this an exciting time to be in the sports broadcasting business, it is a challenging time? I think I actually spent 13 years of career at ABC Sports working for a guy named Red Arlage who was known as someone who embraced technology and He adopted slow motion and rear- angle camera and live satellite technology, etc. and so on. And he was quite inspirational to me. I think this is the most exciting time in sports media for a variety of reasons. It starts with the power of live and the power of sports and the power of the brand ESPN. But Live and sports today has never been more popular. And then when you think about technology and just what I was talking about, first of all, the technology that can be now used to tell the, now we don't tell the sports story as much as show the story. Sometimes we tell it, but if you talked to Draymond Grangers here, you'd say well he tells the sports story and we cover him telling that story. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] But the technology that is now available for us to do that is unlike any we've ever had before, and that makes the experience of watching the sport, I think, even better. Secondly, just think about the different places you can now consume sports. So you talk about losing some subs Were ratings being down. We had the highest number of people streaming Game 7 of the NBA Finals than we'd ever had before, and what's great about the technology that's available today, particularly mobile technology and the technology that enables us to stream at a higher quality without the interruption and basically better fan experience. It's unbelievably exciting. The number of people yesterday, I didn't get home in time to watch Portugal- France match, I got home to watch, you don't want me to talk about it? No, you didn't miss much, I was gonna say. [ LAUGH ] So I got home in time to see the overtime periods But I was in a place where people were watching on Iphone all over the place. That is incredible because back in my day if you wanted to watch something on sports, you had to go home and watch it on a fixed television set on a wall or you had to go to a Sport Bar, those existed back then. Now you can watch wherever you are. By the way, some of the technology that Ronnie's invested in, that others invested in, you'll put some kind of glasses on and you'll just look up and there'll be a gigantic screen in front of you with an ESPN, hopefully ESPN, live sporting event on So I think it's a great time to be in that business, I think we're going through a transition it involves the distribution side of that business, but one that I'm convinced that since sports is so great, I mean you can't, when you think about storytelling you can't tell a better story. Then the NBA finals. Seven games. The team that won the most games ever Jerry Mountain probably doesn't want me to talk about this but, breaks the record for the most games as the guy who wins the most valuable player award unanimously playing Lebron James rematch of the series a year earlier. Goes to game seven. no idea what the outcome is. Goes down to the last shot of the game. That's a great story, so you think about content and IP, fantastic. Fortunately we have the NBA rights for a long time. [ LAUGH ] Yes, and you're paying for it. We're paying a lot of money but I think for a good reason. It says a lot You pay money for things that are of value that other people want. So we're paying a lot of money for a very good reason. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ BLANK AUDIO ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ BLANK AUDIO ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

He joins Fortune from Brainstorm Tech 2016