Season 4, Episode 1: ESPN

And David, I'm kinda sick of the old theme music, and to be completely honest, I never really liked it. Welcome to season four, episode one of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal, and we are your hosts. Today we are covering a company that is absolutely synonymous with sports. ESPN. Indeed. And as they say in the very first moments of their nineteen seventy nine broadcast If you're a fan. If you're a fan.

What you'll see in the next minutes, hours, and days to follow may convince you you've gone to sports heaven. Indeed, It was obligatory. For longtime listeners to the show, you know that we cover um, you know, typically one acquisition and then we talk about it and we grade it, and we have a pretty standard format. This episode covers not one acquisition, but three, each one sort of fairly monumental, and I wanna outline what that's gonna be so that uh the story has a little bit of structure to it.

as I mentioned, the first broadcast was in seventy nine. Uh ESPN was acquired by ABC in nineteen eight four. Just one year later, in a surprising events, the smaller Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation incredibly bought. took its name and got ESPN along with it. And then finally, in nineteen ninety six, ninety five, ninety six, ninety five, yep. There was a nineteen billion dollar buyout of A B C by the one and only Disney.

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