DAVID HILL
The Fox Sports mastermind opens up in a Q&A session.
David Hill last month received the careerspanning Pete Rozelle Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his pioneering work at Fox Sports and DirecTV. But at age 71, he’s as busy as ever on entertainment and sports projects on this continent and others.
The initial subject of a recent conversation with Hill was ESPN’s decision to launch a streaming service next year. But, given Hill’s accomplishments and innovations — the Fox score-and-time box, the first-down marker, producing “American Idol” and the Oscars, helping to sell billions of dollars of goods through China’s equivalent of Amazon.com — it’s folly to limit him to one topic.
Here, then, are highlights of his conversation with Chronicle writer David Barron.
What is the significance of the Disney streaming announcement for ESPN and Disney movies and the purchase of the technology company BAMtech?
A: It’s one of the most farsighted moves I’ve seen. Amazon and Netflix have gotten rich off everyone else’s content. It started and grew with Disney, and people loved it.
You don’t need a weatherman to see the way the wind is blowing. ESPN is worried about cord-cutting. As Einstein said, if you keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, you’re a lunatic. And so what (Disney chairman) Bob Iger has done is to buy the computer power and the server farms to create his own platform.
It’s the way of the future. This gives (Disney) the wherewithal to compete on an equal level with Amazon and Netflix. Not only have they stopped the people who were eating their lunch, they’ve taken the food off the table and created another table.
Is the significance of the ESPN streaming channel based on what it initially will offer or its future potential?
A: This gives the ability to do pay-per-view, which is what we did when we started Sky Sports in Britain. ESPN now controls the platform. They become a competitor now not just to HBO and Showtime but to Comcast, DirecTV and Dish.
It’s a brilliant tactical move by Bob Iger, and don’t forget that he got his start in sports, working for Roone Arledge at (ABC’s) “Wide World of Sports,” who created sports television and has always been my idol. I’ve never faced a decision without asking how Arledge would handle it.
Q: What sports are doing well in adapting to younger viewers’ tastes?
A: Ask yourself the question: If I woke up from a coma that had lasted 50 years, what would surprise me? You’d be amazed at football. You’d be amazed at baseball. Hockey would look pretty much the same. Tennis would look exactly the same. Golf would look exactly the same apat from one or two additions, and it would sound the same.
Sports need to be aware that just because they’re a sport, they won’t necessarily exist forever. Look at boxing. Velodrome was huge for years. It’s done. Short-track racing is done. The underpinning, which was television eyes, is eroding day by day, which is what makes Disney’s decision so smart.
If you look at what we did at Fox Sports, there were two key innovations: the box with the score in the corner, and the other was the first-down marker. That was produced and paid for by the broadcasters, and then we were able to apply it to other sports like NASCAR. But that was done by us. We had to eat the costs.
We are coming to a period of time when the broadcasters will have to shave their costs so much that the amount of money they put in to production is going to be watched like a hawk. So the sports have to take responsibility for their own enhancements. They need to invest. People like (Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban are pushing to have a skunkworks attached to every league looking at ways to make the viewing experience more inclusive and to create an emotional bond with the viwer.
Q: You’re known for saying that sports are tribal. Are they emotional as well?
A: The key ingredient in the emotional bond is the announcers. That is the human contact with the viewer. In the NFL, I think Joe (Buck) and Troy (Aikman) give the best call, and Al (Michaels) and Cris (Collinsworth) are fabulous. It should be interesting how Tony Romo does (with CBS).
The arrangement has been that you pay (the leagues) for the rights, and it’s up to you to use all your tricks to increase so you can get advertising and make a profit. I
’m saying that everything is changing, and the leagues have to look at their own enhancements and look at their own wants and needs to make their sports standout. And the people who are doing the best job at that at this moment is electronic gaming.
I got laughed at when I started Fox Sports and bought all these video games and made all the staff in our first year play 30 minutes of video games a day. It was regarded as ‘Oh, what is this idiot doing now?’ But video gaming provides an emotional attachment that two-dimensional sports did not. That’s why I added tricks like audio to make it a more emotional experience.
Q: Speaking of shows that covered a variety of sports, you caught quite a bit of flak in 1999 when you programmed a prime-time bass fishing tournament. Now BASS draws thousands
of people to events like one it recently had in Houston. Have events and technology finally caught up with your vision?
A: I love fishing. Everyone laughed at me when I did the (1999 broadcast), but it did a huge number. Fishing is the No. 1 participant sport in the United States. If and when a producer figures out how to utilize live cameras during a tournament, bass fishing will become as popular as a lot of minor sports. It will be bigger than soccer.
Q: You’ve also dabbled in televising poker and, more recently, darts, of all things. How did that come about?
A: I have a great friend in England named Barry Hearn who dreamed up an event in England called Fish’O’Mania, where he took 25 anglers around a muddy pond catching carp. Everyone said it would never work. It’s been going for 26 years, and they get 50,000 people paying 10 quid (roughly $13 in U.S. dollars) to watch.
Barry has a Midas touch with blue-collar sports. He came to me in 1997, when we were first getting the Fox Sports Net regionals up and running, with a million-pound poker event. I wanted to give the boys time off on Thanksgiving Day so they could have dinner with their families, so it was a four-hour show that was perfect for us. That was the start of poker.
Then, 10 years ago, Barry got control of darts. I laughed at him, stupidly. Darts is now the second-most popular televised sport in Britain. It has outrated soccer games.
Virtually everything that has come from Britain, including “American Idol,” people have said it will never work here. They said the same thing about Fox Soccer Channel. So when Barry asked me to partner with him for a U.S. tournament, I did it. It outrated all those talk shows they have on Fox Sports 1, and now I have agencies asking me how to get into darts.
We will be talking with Barry and the Professional Darts Corporation about creating an American darts tournament, so darts could be coming from your local bar to a television screen near you.
Q: So will darts be the Next Big Thing?
A: It won’t be the next big thing, but it could be the next thing. The reason I say that and was so keen to experiment is that millennials are not watching TV the way their fathers and grandfathers did. The sports that are changing the world are video games.
I am employed by a German company (ESL) that does 20,000 hours of product and makes a lot of money. I’ve always loved video games. A video game takes seven minutes to play. Drag races are over in 3½ seconds. A darts game takes about 3½ minutes. A play in football takes seven seconds. It’s perfect for the millennial mind which is being changed because of access to video.
FOX SPORTS ARCHITECT DAVID HILL HAS NO LACK OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS OR INNOVATIONS TO HIS NAME