ENTERTAINMENT
Iger says industry should stay on pace
Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co. chairman and CEO, had an interesting response when he was asked about how sports should approach innovation. Iger spoke at SportsBusiness Journal’s IMG World Congress of Sports conference in Los Angeles last week. This is an edited version of his response:
“Sports has to continue to think about engaging with young people. How can leagues keep it exciting and engaging and entertaining? Pace is definitely an issue. It’s an issue, by the way, in movies and television shows, too. Length is also interesting. Four or five years ago, we pulled out a lot of the old Mickey Mouse shorts that Walt Disney did, with the idea that we would clean them up and put them on the Disney Channel. When we played them, they were six minutes long. They felt like miniseries to us, they were so long. We cut them down to three minutes, which, by the way, was blasphemy. And that was too long.
“I’m not suggesting that we turn baseball or NBA games into three-minute games. But you have to think about length. With all of the different distractions that people have today, will someone sit down for three hours and watch anything? I guarantee you that if they’re going to do that, they’re going to have a device in their hand doing countless other things. I do that.”
