Paintball Magazine Paintball Magazine March 2019 Issue | Page 85

JA: How are you funding the league Every product we develop will be rolled
without the benefit of division teams out to the paintball world at large,
paying entry fees?
including the NXL. Our goal is to help
grow this sport and reach new heights.
It’s quite the departure from the traditional These ventures take time to build. People
paintball model. Our goal is to get away will start to see more of our product soon,
from the entry fee model entirely and we’ll get to the media test and showcase
eventually transition players to contracted our vision, and eventually we’ll hold NPL1.
employees. This will take time.
JA: The NXL is a well-funded organization.
Without divisional fields we’re opening Can you compete with that?
ourselves to risk. We’ll rely on viewership
and sponsors to fund the NPL itself. I’m a huge fan of Tom and the NXL.
We’ll have a pay-per-view show for the They’re more important today than ever
full experience. Most of our episodes before. I’ve attended World Cup for the
will roll to StreamPB and social for those past two year and the logistics behind it is
who need a lower-cost or free option. truly astonishing.
We’re confident the new experience will
be worth spend and that viewership will We’re not in direct competition with
exceed expectations.
the NXL. We can’t support the entire
professional division at one event nor
We are also embarking on a traditional can we support the divisional fields. Their
round of financing from strategic investors business model is fundamentally different
in the sports media and technology space than ours.
for the parent company.
Much of our product is complementary
It’s a very nuanced model. If we were just and will be rolled out to NXL events to
funding a league, I don’t think it would be better the fan experience for everyone.
possible.
If we needed to host an event the size
of World Cup this year, we could not
JA: How has the NPL been received by compete, no. But that’s not what we do.
players and the industry so far?
We’re spending very heavily in product
development right now. We’re incredibly
A new league has historically, not been happy with our streaming portal,
the best thing for the sport. I’m also an streampb.com so far. We have a new fan
industry outsider, so I need to forge engagement app, fanpb.com rolling out
these connections. Once we get to our shortly. We’re already having an impact
camera test later this year, we’ll be able to on the paintball world outside of the NPL
showcase all of this talk. Of course we have events and we’re just getting started.
our detractors, some more aggressive
than others. Generally, we’ve found most JA: You mention “unprecedented media
people are positive particularly as we support” several times and in several
start to work with other events. It’s not places. Can you explain what that entails?
about one league verses the other. It’s
truly about growth.
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