On Friday night, Arizona will play its first Big 12 Conference football game at Kansas State. While the game in Manhattan, Kans., is sold out, the price to get in the building is fairly modest, as low as $30 on some secondary markets.
But in Los Angeles and Dallas, some college football fans will be paying double or triple that to watch the prime-time contest.
That’s at Cosm, a new domed, immersive venue company that opened its first pair of three-story, 65,000-square-foot locations this summer after raising $250 million, and it is quickly gaining popularity thanks to its ability to make fans feel like they’re in the front row of a stadium that’s thousands of miles away. Last weekend, scenes from Cosm Dallas, which was showing the Texas-Michigan game from Ann Arbor, set social media on fire.
Cosm pays broadcasters like Fox Sports—which just signed a two-year deal to put select college football and basketball games in the “shared reality” space—an undisclosed rights fee to license game content and charges its guests expensive fees for the premium experience.
For Arizona-KSU, booths in Cosm that fit up to five people have been selling for nearly $400. For Saturday’s Texas A&M–Florida game, which comes by way of a separate deal with ESPN, some luxury packages at the Dallas venue were selling for more than $1,000.
A New Way to Watch
Working with Cosm is not a tough ask for broadcasters. In Fox’s case, the network’s production crew operates as normal, and gives Cosm’s five-person team the necessary access and sideline space to capture additional game footage.
“It’s a wonderful relationship for us because it allows us to strengthen our position in this immersive space without having this heavy lift,” Michael Bucklin, SVP of digital content for Fox Sports, tells Front Office Sports. Cosm uses game audio from its broadcast partners but has its own producers to showcase the unique on-field camera angles.
Fox’s college conference partners have been fully supportive of working with Cosm, and the network is eager to work with other sports leagues it holds rights to, which includes the NFL. “We’re looking at everything right now,” Bucklin says.
Just the Beginning
Beyond the venues in Texas and Southern California, Cosm hopes to have 10 locations open by 2026, and 50 within the next 10 years. “We have ambitions like Topgolf,” Cosm SVP of media and content Peter Murphy tells FOS. “We want to be in every major [media market] we think there’s an appetite.”
Cosm currently has live sports deals with Fox Sports, ESPN, NBC Sports, TNT Sports, the NBA, and UFC. “We’re actively working towards adding more programming with current partners and additional partners,” Murphy says.
