Signal › Contributors
Patrick O'Brien
I joined ESPN in 2017 as a product manager on the digital team, right when the company was starting to take streaming seriously. My first project was working on ESPN+ before it launched. At the time, Disney's streaming strategy was still being debated internally, and ESPN was caught between its legacy cable business (which was printing money but declining) and a streaming future (which was expensive and uncertain).
Over five years at ESPN, I worked on the streaming product, the fantasy sports platform, and the betting integration that launched after the Supreme Court struck down PASPA. The betting work was the most fascinating. We had to build a product experience that satisfied regulators, partners (the sportsbooks), and users, three groups with completely different incentives. The amount of legal review required for every UI decision was staggering.
I left ESPN in 2022 because I wanted to write about the broader sports tech ecosystem, not just the media side. Sports is a $500B global industry that's being transformed by technology in ways that don't get enough serious coverage. Everyone writes about the big media deals (the NBA's $76B rights package, the NFL's streaming contracts), but almost nobody writes about the infrastructure layer: the computer vision systems tracking player movement, the ticketing technology, the venue operations software, the athlete data platforms.
My writing for Signal covers the full stack of sports technology. I write about streaming economics with actual P&L breakdowns. I write about how betting companies acquire customers and what their unit economics look like. I write about the data pipeline from a camera in a stadium to a stat on your phone. The pieces that do best are the ones where I get access to numbers that aren't public, which happens more often than you'd think because this industry is full of people who want someone to tell their story accurately.
I'm based in Austin, Texas. I play pickup basketball three times a week, I coach my daughter's soccer team, and I have an irrational attachment to the New York Mets that I've decided is a personality trait rather than a character flaw.
Experience
- Senior Product Manager, ESPN (Streaming & Betting)
- Product Lead, ESPN+ Launch Team
- MBA, NYU Stern