Of LeBron James and his son on the sidelines at an Ohio State game. Of trick shots by teenagers goofing around. There are photos and short clips embellished with effects and graphics, along with captions penned in Gen Z-speak. Instead, it’s a slew of short- and long-form content made for viewers who didn’t just grow up digitially - they grew up inside of social media itself. (“The rights billions of dollars,” Porter says.) All of Overtime’s content goes out onto social platforms - TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, mostly, along with Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. There’s no website, no cable station, no single destination for its target audience. What Porter and Weiner have built looks nothing like traditional sports media. So in 2016, Porter and his co-founder, Zack Weiner, a sports media entrepreneur and, at 24, a member of the enigmatic demographic, launched Overtime - a sports network for the next generation. After that, he helped run one of the first-ever online ticketing websites, and later he pioneered mobile games. In the 1990s, he became the first president of Wendy Kopp ’89’s paradigm-shifting Teach For America. But Porter knew how to invent the future. He spent four years with the Princeton jazz band and weekends earning money playing piano at Faculty Club brunches. This despite the fact Porter isn’t “a huge sports person.” In college, he was known for his keyboard skills. “Somebody was going to figure out how to make sports relevant for this next generation,” he explains. “You could watch Monday Night Football in 1975, go into a coma, and watch it 50 years later, and it looks exactly the same,” Porter says. Sports haven’t changed much in the past half century. “When I got to college, all I did was go into the basement of Campus Club and watch MTV for hours,” Porter says. A kid in the ’80s wasn’t going to watch Bandstand, but they absolutely were going to tune into the latest Madonna and Michael Jackson videos. ![]() Each incarnation created its own aesthetic. And after that: Napster, Soundcloud, and Spotify. Take the ways they discover music: First there was The Ed Sullivan Show. “Every generation wants its own thing,” he explains. Maybe it was just that they weren’t interested in the way it was being served up. Maybe, he thought, the issue wasn’t so much that Gen Z wasn’t interested in sports. But to Porter, this gap spelled something else: Opportunity.
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