NBC’s newly launched NBC Sport Next subdivision will have more than 30 technology products, services, and brands under the direction of Will McIntosh, NBC Sports’ new executive vice president of operations.
These offerings can be divided into three categories. Mr MacKinnon will oversee the youth and recreational sports area, including SportsEngine and Team Unify, in his new role.
All of GolfNow, TeeOff, and GolfPass will be under the supervision of Jerramy Hainline, the company’s senior vice president of golf. The Sports Edge and Sports Predictor products are located in the betting, gaming, and emerging media area, which is overseen by the senior vice president Nicolina O’Rorke.
McIntosh mentioned in the Sports Business Journal (SBJ) that the combined NBC Sports Next offering is and will be “the largest driver of revenue and profit growth for NBC Sports, both now and into the future.”
Around 1,200 people are employed in each of these three departments, and NBC hopes to streamline operations by combining them. The NBC Sports Next brand will also be fully integrated internally in areas such as finance, human resources, legal, marketing, and product development, which were previously separate departments.
Speaking in his interview with Ad Week, McIntosh expanded on what the future for NBC Sports Next will look like in practice.
“We’re always looking for expansion opportunities into new verticals, we’re not going to limit ourselves just to the three verticals we’re in today,” he said. “Opportunistically we’ll look at other sports verticals or just overall parts of the sports technology ecosystem.”
He added: “This is really part of a cross-company effort across all of NBCU and potentially Comcast.”
“All of our properties are aligning on the idea of a single user profile. The idea would be that I have a singular account with this entire portfolio of properties that could also extend beyond just NBC Sports Next into theme parks, Peacock, and other parts of the NBCU enterprise.”