Episode Sixty-Six - Islands in the Stream

NBC's excellent EPL studio cast: host Rebecca Lowe, and analysts Kyle Martino, Robbie Earle and Robbie Mustoe. 

NBC's excellent EPL studio cast: host Rebecca Lowe, and analysts Kyle Martino, Robbie Earle and Robbie Mustoe. 

With some sports media news in the headlines, we are pleased to be joined again by Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) from Sports Illustrated.  We recorded on Operning Day for the English Premier League, so we chat about NBC's near-universal popular coverage as well as their paid app and whether people will purchase.  That seques into a discussion of The Athletic, the paid content sports writing site, their successes so far and would their model work in a city like New York. We talk about ESPN and how necessary they are for a fan whose favorite sports are undercovered (like hockey and soccer). We also discuss where ESPN fits in with Disney's new streaming strategy. We end with some brief wrestling chat, what Richard is enjoying with the current WWE product and being able to wrestling from around the world online. 

We are working lining up some guests to discuss the Premier League and the other European leagues starting up, but were not able to get them in time for today's podcast. Hopefully, they will be on the next episode. Thanks for listening. 

Episode Forty-Two - Hitto-ō

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It's a celebration of Ichiro's 3000th hit, tempered by the passing on the day of recording of longtime ESPN anchor John Saunders. On the podcast today are Joe Lucia (@Joe_TOC) from Awful Announcing and The Comeback and former ESPN producer Gus Ramsey (@GusRamsey)'

Joe talks about John Saunders (1:29), Ichiro's 3000 hits and his amazing MLB season (5:07), the rash of retiring players this week (15:33), the August 1 trade deadline (21:26), the Aaron Sanchez soap opera in Toronto (22:42), rooting for bad teams (26:46), NBC's Rio Olympics coverage (33:08) and televising internationl futbol in the US (37:45).

Gus discusses John Saunders (48:34), Ichiro (53:00), retiring players (58:10), the Dan and Kieth years on Sportscenter (1:01:06), Sports Night and other depictions of newsrooms in TV and Film (1:05:29), working on the WWE Network's Edge and Christian Show (1:12:24), the state of current WWE (1:26:50), his new Talent Coach service for broadcasters (1:31:31) and the new Madden and other video games (1:39:15).