Inside the Cosm/NBC Sports Deal and What It Means for the Future of Immersive Experiences

The entertainment/tech company is developing two venues with 8K+ LED domes

Immersive video is having a moment, and it’s not just the Apple Vision Pro VR headset. The U2 shows at The Sphere in Las Vegas have proved that a new live experience can find success, and last week Cosm, which this year will open two immersive venues that have 87-ft.-diameter 8K+ LED domes, announced a content deal with NBC Sports around events like Big Ten football, the English Premier League, and premium horse racing. Cosm SVP, content and media, Peter Murphy discussed the deal and more with SVG.

Where do things stand in terms of construction of Cosm venues?
We have two in development and are targeting the first, in Los Angeles, to open at the end of the second quarter, which is coming up quickly. The second one is just north of Dallas in Colony, TX, and that one will be opened in the third quarter of this year. We hope to announce more in the coming months to keep the momentum going.

How did the deal with NBC Sports come about?
We’re layering in premium partners as we get closer to open, and that started last year with the announcement at the NBA All-Star Game. That was followed by the UFC pay-per-view announcements and TNT Sports for nationally broadcast basketball, playoff basketball, playoff hockey, and U.S. men’s and women’s soccer. We are trying to add to the breadth and depth of the sports that we had.

First, NBC has been a phenomenal partner with great people who have really leaned into what we offer, and NBC adds more sports to our portfolio. Their productions are championship quality, and they have an incredible portfolio and a rich heritage. It will be our first foray into college football, which is exciting.

EPL fans will be able to experience matches in a whole new way, thanks to the deal between NBC Sports and Cosm.

But the core of the deal is the Premier League. Part of our thesis as a business is to democratize access to fans. For EPL fans, it is prohibitive to get overseas to catch a game at a stadium in England. But now we can bring the experience of being at those stadiums to Dallas or Los Angeles. Fans can wake up in the morning on the weekend, come to Cosm, and feel like they’re sitting pitchside in England, which is really exciting.

The other part of the deal that’s exciting are the other blockbuster events, like their incredible portfolio of horse racing. We can turn those events into an affair at Cosm, which is not just about experiencing the content itself but also about trying to supplement the hospitality experience. You can imagine serving thematic drinks, you can imagine people dressing up in attire that brings them to a particular sense of place, and that is coming forward as part of this agreement with NBC. We’re excited to focus on what we’ve announced with them last week.

 The demonstration I saw last year was very immersive with the C360 cameras. Will you have your own production or just take a feed?
The value proposition of our technology is being immersive, so we will be doing our own production but working very closely with the leagues, broadcasters, and the networks that we have the deals with. We will typically have four to six cameras, depending on the event, that are locked off and unmanned and connected to a flypack that has a production crew embedded on the ground. It’s very lightweight in terms of presence.

We’ve been working over the last decade, particularly when you include our legacy companies, with the big producers, and we know them well and how we can fit within their production. We will work closely with them to deliver on the promise of what I think is unique to our technology and will be exciting and new for fans.

 Will you have your own commentary?
We will typically try to pair our feeds with the broadcast commentary being produced by the broadcaster or the league. That will give a sense of familiarity to the storytelling and narrative but layered into a production that makes you feel like you are on the sideline, making it the best of both worlds.

Between TNT and NBC, there are a lot of potential events. Do you have an idea of the schedule?
We want to be an always-on option for fans to come experience, and the anchor is live sports. We want to try to fill our calendar with the best live sports 365 days a year, and one of the beautiful things about EPL is that it’s a morning program for the most part. International sports work well in that window, particularly during weeks and early on the weekends.

Our goal is to have events, certainly seven days a week, multiple events a day, and I think you’ll see layering a little bit more of the puzzle pieces. There are certainly more deals to come to fill out that robust calendar.

What about outside of sports?
We have a Studios division of Cosm [formerly Cosm Studios], which is a robust development team focused on content acquisition. We have a multidisciplinary community of filmmakers, artists, contributors, creators that are creating content for us, and we’re partnering with a number of premium entertainment brands like Cirque de Soleil, which is going to be really exciting. We anticipate that we will have a full docket by the time we open, and it will be appealing to not just sports fans but people interested in fandom. Whether you’re a fan of sports, whether you’’re a fan of movies, musicians, comic books, whatever it might be, we are providing a destination for those fans who self-select and want to celebrate with other fans.

I wanted to mention The Sphere because it appears that people are reacting well to that immersive experience and you don’t hear things like people getting sick after two hours. Does that make you and the team feel more confident?
I’d say we’re excited as, at the highest level, we and The Sphere believe in the same experience thesis, which is that people want to be immersed in large-scale LED domes. They want to be together; they want to be celebrating fandom, whether it’s U2 or Darren Aronofsky or, in our case, all these phenomenal sports brands and other entertainment IP. I think it has been exciting to see the reception although I certainly think we have a different proposition market from a form-factor perspective. We aren’t necessarily as much of a specific destination or a one-time event. We want to establish a behavior like coming out every weekend to watch the EPL. We are in L.A. next to SoFi Stadium, the Forum, and the Intuit Dome, so we will have established sports fans circulating in that area. In North Dallas, there is a similar entertainment retail district that has millions of visitors a year and suburban fans that can’t access downtown stadiums or arenas. So we’re bullish on our proposition and market and also certainly excited to see that fans generally are learning more about immersive LED technology. And we own our own technology business, so we are excited for the world to see us later in 2024.