The NBA is extending its relationship with one of the sporting world’s most intriguing start-up companies

By Kyle Feldscher, CNN

(CNN) — One of the sports world’s most intriguing start-up companies is renewing its long-term partnership with its first-ever major professional sports league partner.

The NBA and Cosm, the entertainment company that’s reinventing the sports bar with what they like to call “shared reality,” announced Thursday an extended partnership to air live NBA games in Cosm’s domes. The IMAX-esque experience allows Cosm’s customers to watch live sporting events on its unique 87-foot-diameter, 12L+ LED screens that have gone viral for offering a first-of-its-kind experience for fans.

The NBA was Cosm’s first-ever league partner long before the company opened its first location in Los Angeles in 2024. The two entities are now set to work together into 2030 and beyond.

“Our ambition is to give another option for fans that might be out of the marketplace or their favorite team is on the road, or they haven’t been able to get to those courtside seats or lower bowl seats,” said Jeb Terry, Cosm’s president and CEO, in an interview with CNN Sports. “So, it’s really complementary, I would say, to the NBA’s ambition of opening up access, giving fans more ways to celebrate the game, and providing other opportunities to lean into that action.

“And that’s why it was really an obvious opportunity from the beginning. Because not only is that the innovative spirit of the league, the tech-forward approach, but the same way we approach it by leveraging technology to augment that fan experience and give more optionality, so fans can just lean in and celebrate wherever they are, whether they’re in-market, out-of-market, wherever that may be.”

The extended partnership will allow Cosm to produce and distribute live NBA games at Cosm’s venues for at least the next five years. That means Cosm will be able to send its in-house production team, which is responsible for the unique views provided to viewers at their domes, to key national TV games, events from next year’s All-Star Weekend, the playoffs and NBA Finals.

Teddy Kaplan, NBA vice president and head of new media partnerships at the league, said working with Cosm has been a no-brainer for his team from the start.

Kaplan was on a ski trip to Park City, Utah, in 2022 when he got the opportunity to visit Cosm’s headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. He diverted from that vacation for a bit to see what the company was working on and was introduced to Cosm’s experience center for the first time, which gave him an idea of what the finished domes would be like.

He left that meeting wowed.

“I got there and I said, ‘Oh my God, this is, this is the future. This is what we need,’” Kaplan told CNN Sports.

He added, “Our fans are young, tech-savvy, diverse, and they push us to be innovative. And as you’ll see, across our portfolio of distribution points, we’re always looking for ways to innovate the way fans watch our game, whether it’s alt streams, whether it’s via virtual reality, whether it’s with our social partners. Cosm is the perfect piece in our broader network here.”

The initial partnership with the NBA, agreed to in February 2023, was an important inflection point in the company’s history, according to Terry.

That kind of high-profile partner gave Cosm – at that point about a year-and-a-half from opening its first location near SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California – much needed legitimacy as it entered into discussions with other leagues and broadcast companies that hold the rights to sporting events aired in the US.

“When you’re building companies, there’s always these pivotal moments along the way. You get the technology sorted. You’re like, ‘OK, it works.’ Then you have to work on getting market adoption, and there’s a lot of ways to do that with our business,” Terry said.

“Partnerships are paramount. They are critical to how we bring this to life with our fans. And so, having the NBA as our first, it was a great moment for our company to announce it … and then get that word of mouth trending within the industry and then pushing that forward. And so, you look to have all these credible moments along the way in this growth phase. And this was one of the big ones.”

The next move for Cosm is scaling up into more locations. It currently has domes open at that initial location in Inglewood and one in Dallas. Three more locations have been announced in Detroit, Cleveland and Atlanta.

That puts the company in five NBA cities and looking to expand to more, including overseas locations that could put international fans closer to professional American basketball in a way that’s much cheaper and easier than flying across an ocean to get into an NBA arena.

Given that Cosm is able to show its customers views that they would have to pay dearly to afford – the courtside view from the scorer’s table, underneath the hoops in the front row at either end of the floor – all from the comfort of a sports bar environment, Kaplan said the hope is that NBA fans will be able to approximate that experience from the domes.

“We like to use the stat that 99% of our fans will never make it to an NBA game, and that’s in the US. When you go global, it’s 99.99%. And when you think about sitting courtside, basically 100%, right?” Kaplan said.

“And so having Cosm as a tool to bring fans closer to the game and speak to those tech-savvy fans is really perfect for us.”

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