Overland Park was recently named one of the country’s hotbeds for the increasingly popular sport of pickleball, and now, one local business is making sure anyone can watch the action on their streaming devices whenever they want.
Overland Park’s Spacemob launched PickleTV in March
Spacemob CEO Loren Wilson says the growth of pickleball’s popularity in the Kansas City area is consistent with its trajectory around the globe, and they look forward to helping it continue to climb to new heights in the years ahead.
“There’s a real discussion about where [pickleball] could be in the next 10 years,” Wilson said, suggesting that it could one day be considered for an Olympic sport.
“You need a minimum of 75 countries playing a sport for Olympic consideration, and it’s in about 70 countries now.”
PickleTV is now on Sling, FuboTV and other streaming apps
While pickleball has roots going back to the 1960s, PickleTV only launched in March.
Spacemob has deals with multiple streaming platforms that show free, ad-supported content.
Sling, FuboTV, Plex and the Amazon-backed Freevee, will all be showcasing a sport that has exploded in popularity in just a few short years.
“You see courts going up everywhere, and everyone’s out playing,” Wilson said. “We could see success for Pickleball in the streaming space. PickleTV is about a year in the making.”
The sport is being broadcast on ESPN
A large portion of the tremendous growth for Pickleball began in the post-COVID world of the past two years.
ESPN has also recently begun broadcasting pickleball action.
Last month, the Pickleball Slam brought an average of 670,000 viewers to the network, with the event — which featured tennis legends Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, John McEnroe and Michael Chang — peaking at almost 800,000 viewers.
Those viewership numbers are on par with, and in some cases outperform, some recent Major League Baseball telecasts.
Pickleball has celebrity backers like Patrick Mahomes
Money continues to pour into the sport, with many celebrities rushing in to try and invest in the phenomenon, as well, including star Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
It’s reported that Mahomes is part of an ownership group with a professional team based in Miami with a personal stake in the squad of between $1 million and $3 million.
SpaceMob CEO Wilson sees parallels to pickleball’s current situation to the mainstream explosion of poker about two decades ago.
Spacemob wants to stream pickleball 24/7
Spacemob, headquartered in downtown Overland Park, started in 2017.
The company boasts a streaming library of some 2,500 titles and is also developing other original projects.
For pickleball, they’ve partnered with Championship Court, which helps produce all of SpaceMob’s pickleball content for PickleTV.
Spacemob Chief Content Officer Eric Keith says they defer to Championship Court, who will keep PickleTV filled with 24/7 content from hundreds of events throughout the year, along with a growing focus on behind the scenes “documentary” style programming that will allow the channel to become personality driven, as well.
Championship Court will be allowed to shape the broadcasts and won’t be getting interference or direction from Overland Park, he said.
“We’re just the ‘streaming people’,” Keith said. “We’re not here to tell you the rules of the game (and how to play).”
