What’s on the New Sports Illustrated TV? Shaq, ‘Teen Wolf’ and a 25-Episode Docuseries About the Swimsuit Issue

Sports Illustrated is a venerable magazine at a time when magazines no longer want to be venerable. Rather, they want to be brands. They want to have blogs and web shows and podcasts and media conferences and streaming services. They want to be on your iPhone and your living room TV. If you’re not reading the magazine, they want to be on whatever it is you’re watching, reading and listening to.

Rather than dodge its own gravitas, though, Sports Illustrated leverages that reputations in its new Sports Illustrated TV streaming service. One of the signatures shows is The Vault, and the first episode is Shaquille O’Neal and longtime SI basketball writer Jack McCallum talking about — and actually watching — Shaq’s first game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

The service launched a few weeks ago on Amazon Channels and will likely expand soon to other platforms and possibly even be included as a VOD option on streaming bundles like Sling TV and PlayStation Vue.

If you just want to read McCallum’s new profile of Shaq, you certainly can — in print or online — but watching them talk about that game is a different experience entirely. Shaq is deadpan and charming the way you’re used to seeing him, but he’s introspective in a way I had never seen him. He talks about how losing a pair of expensive diamond earrings between the jewelry store and the car broke him of profligate spending. He speaks emotionally about the loss of his step-father, who never got to see him inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame.

SI TV has the beginnings of appointment viewing — weekly shows about basketball and soccer, a weekly show that expands on a story from that week’s issue — and there’s a catalog of sports movies. Some original documentaries will come to the service in 2018.

There’s also a series about SI’s big non-sports brand. (A free toaster with a one-year subscription? Uh, no.) Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, a series of original documentaries about the annual Swimsuit Issue, is a prominent feature on SI TV. There’s a 45-minute episode about every shoot for the last 25 years — from Kathy Ireland and Rachel Hunter in 1994 to Ashley Graham in 2017 — and a look ahead to 2018.

Josh Oshinsky, VP of programming for Sports Illustrated TV, sat down with Decider to talk about what’s on the new service and how sports is fast evolving on streaming video.

You’re launching initially on Amazon Channels. Are you planning to launch a freestanding app or launching on other services?

We’re exclusive with Amazon Channels for launch, and we’re exploring other distribution models. We’re in very active conversations with other outlets, and we’re considering a direct-to-consumer model.

What kinds of outlets — streaming-bundle services like PlayStation Vue and YouTube TV?

We’re exploring a lot of options, and we’re definitely exploring the skinny bundles. We want to get the service to the widest audience we can.

You launched on Amazon Channels. Some services are on Amazon Channels and have an app on Amazon’s Fire TV platform, and some services are just doing one or the other.

Audiences right now are still figuring out what the best way for them to consume media is. As people learn more, they’ll figuring out their own style of watching TV. It’s still so new right now, which is exciting for us as content creators. I don’t think there’s a roadmap. I think it’s being paved every day.

You announced several shows at launch. Is there a particular one of those that’s a good illustration of what premium means for SI TV?

Sports Illustrated sits on a mountain of intellectual property. We have 60 years of the most high-impact journalism in sports, and a lot of of it hasn’t been converted yet to a medium that audiences today can enjoy. The Vault is an opportunity to dig into that well and bring up stories that people may not know. The first episode is Shaquille O’Neal and Jack McCallum revisiting Shaq’s debut at Madison Square Garden. That was 25 years ago, and it put him on the cover of SI for the first time, and it gave us an opportunity to reunite the writer and the subject in a very cool way.

So will The Vault watch more like a documentary or more like an interview show?

That will depend a lot on the story. The Shaq episode is a conversation, and you’ll actually see some of the game and see them watching and reacting to the game. Other episodes will be more purely documentary — catching up with a figure from the past that we haven’t seen in a while — so there are a lot of opportunities within The Vault to do some other things. That will be a monthly show and hopefully something we can expand as we go.

SI: Under the Cover will be a weekly series pegged that that week’s print issue?

Right. That’s a premium docu-style show that dives deep into a different story each week. That series allows us to leverage a marketing opportunity with the 3 million print subscribers and use the magazine as a way to drive readers to check out more about a story from that week’s issue.

And you’ve got weekly sports-specific shows, which right now are basketball and soccer.

The Crossover is a basketball show that features SI talent and special guests, and that’s a fun series with lifestyle and culture components. There’s nuts-and-bolts coverage too, but it’s a show that casual fans can watch and been entertained. Planet Futbol is hosted by Grant Wahl, who is one of the biggest names in soccer, and the show is built around him and his rolodex of contacts in that space.

And you’ve got a show called The Line about betting and fantasy sports.

The Line is a new step for Sports Illustrated. It’s a show for the casual fantasy player who wants to step into betting on sports. Gambling on sports is ubiquitous. Scott Van Pelt, Al Michaels, Bill Simmons — they all refer to it on a day-to-day basis. People are already talking a lot about it, and we wanted to lean into that and create a show that didn’t really exist in this space.

You’re carrying catalog movies, which seems like an odd fit with new, original programming. Why are you doing that?

We actually think movies will be a big driver. We want people to come to SI TV when they’re in a mood for sports, and that might mean sitting down with the family and watching a sports movie. We have Teen Wolf. We have Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. We have Ladybugs. Many of those titles will change month to month, and we’ll have an announcement every month for what the new titles will be.

Are you doing live or live-to-tape programming around big events like the Super Bowl, the Final Four, etc.?

Sports Illustrated TV is one of many outlets for us. For something like the Super Bowl, we’ll be on Facebook Live that night talking to athletes and influencers, and we’ll also capture content that night that we’ll put together for our SI: Under the Cover series and for other shows.

PeopleTV, which is also part of Time Inc., is free and ad-supported. That’s a completely different business model that what you’re doing for SI TV, which is ad-free and $5 a month. Is that a reaction at all to PeopleTV’s experience over the last year?

Time Inc. is always looking for new ways to extend our brands to offer new storytelling experiences. This is just another, different step.

PeopleTV has told me they’re exploring something like a premium tier to go on top of the free, ad-supported model. Do you consider something like that?

We looked at a lot of different models, and we’re still looking. Time Inc. has a diverse set of brands and a lot of different products within those brands. We’re trying to get to a big, diversified audience, and that means looking at a lot of different distribution models.

CBS has a sports service launching soon that’s going to be a 24-hour talk and news format. Do you see SI TV in competition with that?

We think we’re something new and different and powerful in this space. We’re a content aggregator and a premium storyteller, and we think that is unique. I’m excited as a sports fan to see the other things that are out there, but we think we have a unique, premium offering.

You already have a lot of video out there on SI Now, the YouTube Channel, etc. How much does SI TV differentiate from things you’re already doing?

It’s an extension of Sports Illustrated and what people have come to expect from the brand, and it will be a premium version of that. We have feature films. We’ll have original documentary films. We have original shows. It’s a lot of content that isn’t available anywhere else.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

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