Happy Wednesday,
Barrick Prince is making a bet. After spending years in international television, he went to Twitch, where he helped put creators on live NFL broadcasts. Now he runs Creator Sports Network, a company trying to get live sports rights into the hands of streamers.
But will his bet pay off?
Today, we got into how he decided cable was a dead end, why he thinks creators (not new channels) are how live sports reach younger viewers, and what stops Netflix and YouTube from doing the same thing he’s trying to do.
Why try to change the audience’s behavior? Why not take the content to where they already are?
How He Got Here
The start: An international television career, buying and selling TV shows worldwide.
2017: He reads an article saying cable box subscriptions fell in the US for the first time in 2016, marking the peak of television in 2015. His takeaway was that TV would become like radio in his lifetime. It was just a question of how fast. He deliberately pivots into gaming and esports, which leads him to Twitch.
The realization at Twitch: A live viewer is worth exponentially more than a viewer who watches on demand. A million people watching between three and five o’clock today are worth far more than a million spread over the next month. He also saw that gaming fans were no different from a kid watching an Odell Beckham catch and recreating it in the backyard.
2020 and 2021: Amazon gets a “prove it” deal with the NFL for Thursday Night Football. Twitch broadcasts it with creators like TimTheTatman and Nickmercs, and Barrick sees the data: the Twitch broadcasts lowered the median age of the Thursday night NFL viewer by 11 years.
His early mistake: He assumed Twitch should build owned-and-operated channels, like Twitch Rivals and Twitch Sports, starring its biggest creators. It didn’t work. Their audiences didn’t follow them to a channel that wasn’t theirs. That failure is what changed his thinking.
2022: Amazon signs a 10-year, $10 billion exclusive deal with the NFL for Thursday Night Football, and the creator casts end. He describes it as having his obsession taken away from him.
Early 2023: He leaves Twitch to start Creator Sports Network. At the time, when he pitched brands and leagues, a common response was “what is a creator?”
The first break: A partnership with ONE Championship (MMA). Two creators sat cageside in the judges’ chairs and streamed from their point of view, while streamers at home broadcast that creator feed. The numbers: over a million viewers, with a watch time of around 32 minutes, which is rare online. That data opened the next set of doors.
The Big Idea: Creators Are the New Local Affiliates
Barrick’s television background gave him a different lens than most in the creator space today. When Fox airs the NFL on Sunday, it doesn’t put the game on one channel. It airs on about 220 local affiliates, and the national audience is the sum of all of them. So what’s the difference between a local TV station and a creator with their own channel? Infrastructure. A station needs real estate, electricians, and satellites on the wall. A creator already owns the audience and the relationship.
That’s the model for Creator Sports Network. CSN acts as the national network, and creators are the affiliates.
Creators sign up with one click, hit a “watch now” button on game day, and broadcast the game from their home computer. Barrick says they can place themselves on screen however they like, call the game, react to it, or bring a friend on. Where the feed allows, they can choose between audio options too. On the Brazilian Serie A rights, for example, there are four audio channels (Portuguese, Spanish, English, and natural sound), and some English-speaking creators switch to the Spanish call when a goal goes in.
The business trick is that CSN isn’t bidding against ESPN for rights to put behind a paywall or on a website. It created a new category: live social creator rights. For leagues, that’s a new broadcast window and an additional revenue stream, plus young viewers they aren’t reaching today.
5 Tactical Takeaways
Act on behavior, not announcements. Barrick saw a single data point about cable subscriptions in 2017 and changed careers. He didn’t wait for the industry to confirm it.
Be willing to be wrong in public. His first plan for Twitch, owned and operated channels, failed. The failure showed him that audiences follow people, not platforms, and that insight became the foundation of his company.
Take the content to where the audience already is. Changing consumer behavior is expensive and slow. Meeting people on the channels they already trust is not.
Create a new category instead of fighting for an existing one. By defining live social creator rights, CSN avoids bidding against the giants and gives leagues something additive instead of a substitute.
Use one undeniable proof point to open doors. When nobody knew what a creator was, a million viewers and a 32-minute average watch time did the talking. Early numbers can be your best sales tool.
Why It Matters
Barrick’s bet is simple: a generation raised on phones won't turn 30 and go back to flipping through cable channels. If that’s right, the question isn’t whether live sports move to creators, but who builds the infrastructure to make it work.
He may be early, and the money in the old system will keep it slow. But his pitch to creators is the part I keep thinking about: a three-hour live stream sounds daunting until you realize it’s just hanging out on the couch with your friends, watching the game.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake