Nearly two years after ESPN abruptly canceled its ambitious Global X Games series after losing more than $30M, the action sports property is wading back into the overseas markets. ESPN today announced that it has licensed the X Games Oslo, set for Feb. 24-28 in the Norwegian capital, in partnership with local broadcaster TV2, event production company SAHR Concepts and the Oslo city government. The five-day event will include snowboarding, skiing and skateboarding events -- the first X Games event to include both summer and winter sports in the same city -- along with a major music act yet to be identified. ESPN is taking on far less risk in this latest experiment, weary of repeating the failure of the Global X series, conceived in ‘11 and canceled in ‘13 after just one season. The Oslo city government is paying the approximate $5M, or 42M Norwegian krone, operational costs and will retain ticketing and other event revenue. TV2 and ESPN will handle TV production and sell advertising against the event, TV2 domestically and ESPN internationally. TV2 will have the primary sponsorship sales duties. That model contrasts sharply with the Global X series, which was given a $100M budget, made three-year commitments to cities and priced global sponsorships at $15M, three times the going rate for action sports at the time. It only sold three global sponsorships, half of its initial goal, and drew poor American TV audiences. Nevertheless, strong in-person attendance drove the net to keep trying, said ESPN VP/X Games Tim Reed. He said, “We learned a lot about a lot of things that year, and I think one of the biggest things was that the appetite for X Games events around the world was really strong. There were plenty of people who came out to the events, and the events were exciting and a lot of fun. The hard part was the business of it, so I think this is an evolution developing the X Games events around the world, just in a different fashion.”
UP IN THE AIR: TV2 will air 21 hours of competition live in Norway, and ESPN also will air 21 hours of live coverage in the U.S. However, ESPN’s live programming will be limited to ESPN3, with the only linear distribution coming via the World X Games anthology series on ABC. The skateboard street competitions will be held at the Skur 13 Harbor warehouse at Flipstad Harbor, where the city will build a permanent skateboard street course that will remain open to the public after the event. The winter events will be contested at the Oslo Winter Park and Toyen. American snowboarder Kelly Clark is confirmed to compete, along with Norwegian X Games standouts Stale Sandbech, Tiril Sjastad Christiansen and Kjersti Buass. The government’s contribution was crucial to the Oslo arrangement, Reed said, and there has been no commitment beyond this single event. ESPN will evaluate whether the deal structure could work in other cities, too. “We’ll see how it goes,” Reed said.
