Entrepreneur Alleges ESPN ‘Copycat’ Her Tech to Help Sports Fans Find Games

ESPN in August of last year tried to prove its utility to all fans by unveiling a “Where to Watch” search feature in its mobile app and website that would do something every sports aficionado has craved since Amazon nabbed rights to stream portions of the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” in 2017: help die-hards increasingly frustrated in their efforts to find their favorite teams as sports began to stream across new broadband giants, league-owned outlets and regional venues.

Lydia Murphy-Stephans believes she did this first — and thinks Disney couldn’t have done it without her.

In a suit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, Murphy-Stephans, an entrepreneur who was once a programming executive for ABC Sports and president of a now-shuttered TV network devoted to Pac-12 Conference schools, alleges ESPN and Disney spurred her to reveal the inner workings of a sports-search product she had created at her own company, SportsBubble, then launched its own version of the product. Murphy-Stephans is seeking a jury trial, as well as damages that could total more than $600 million.

In the suit, she alleges that in 2021, ESPN “feigned interest in a partnership with SportsBubble (and signed a nondisclosure agreement) to induce SportsBubble to share its confidential trade and business secrets with ESPN,” but instead “misappropriated SportsBubble’s confidential information to develop a copycat product after stringing SportsBubble along for months in fruitless ‘negotiations,’ sidelining it from other lucrative partnerships.”

ESPN declined to comment.

“When I introduced SportsBubble to Bob Iger and ESPN executives years ago, they claimed to be excited about working with us and partnering on our flagship product, WatchSports. But, while under NDA to evaluate WatchSports for a business partnership, they publicly announced a copycat product as if we magically didn’t exist,” says Murphy-Stephans. “We firmly believe the ‘Where To Watch’ programming guide on the ESPN platforms is the same product SportsBubble presented to ESPN, and that they copied it, and put their own name on it.”

The legal imbroglio spotlights the growing importance of tracking sports as rights deals become increasingly spread out among different venues. With sports standing as the only TV format that seems able to continue the large, simultaneous audiences that advertisers and distributors crave, the fees to keep them on air have gone from eye-popping to exorbitant. With prices so high, media companies are narrowing their packages, leaving some big leagues like the NBA spread across more networks and streamers. Add a shifting landscape for local rights into the mix and it’s little wonder sports fans are often stymied in their efforts to quickly find the right game at the right time.

Stephans-Murphy thought she had come up with just the solution. While watching an NBA Finals game in 2018, she left her living room to get the snacks ready in the kitchen – and set about a task that she felt should have been a lot simpler: trying to stream the match on her iPad. Instead, she spent precious minutes trying to navigate authenticating into Comcast and then getting back into ESPN.

She launched the WatchSports app in 2021, after working on it for four years. The service — a live sports guide for the streaming era — helped consumers find their game and navigate the various outlets required in order to see it. She got paid by referral fees paid when consumers took out a subscription to watch a match.

ESPN was interested, she alleged. By February of 2022, ESPN and SportsBubble had struck a deal in principle that would list approximately 40,000 sporting events from the ESPN+ streaming service in WatchSports, and allow the app’s users to connect directly to ESPN’s platforms. During these negotiations, Stephans-Murphy alleges, ESPN requested confidential technical information about how the WatchSports app actually functioned. SportsBubble said it would do so under a non-disclosure agreeement.

In 2023, ESPN announced its intent to launch its own search product. And the Disney sports giant informed SportsBubble it no longer had any interest in any strategic partnership, nor had it been interested in one since conversations commenced in 2021.

“ESPN not only stole SportsBubble’s business model and product, but it also stymied SportsBubble’s growth by stringing SportsBubble along for months with false promises of a partnership, resource-intensive talks, and manufactured delays in the consummation of that partnership,” the company alleges in its lawsuit. “While SportsBubble focused on its prospective partnership with ESPN, it put
partnership discussions with the other major sports networks and event stakeholders on hold,
losing valuable time it could have spent capturing more of the market through other
opportunities.”

ESPN’s search technology could go much further in weeks to come. The company is about to launch a new stand-alone streaming app that gives subscribers all the content from its many cable networks, and, soon, it could offer the feeds from NFL Network as well as the NFL’s RedZone highlights service. In October, ESPN intends to offer a bundled service with Fox One, a streaming service from Fox Corp. that offers all of that company’s content in a single venue.

During a recent call with investors, Disney CEO Bob Iger talked up a potential search service for sports fans as quite the game changer. “”As a devoted sports fan, I often have to work to try to find what platform sports are on,” he said. “If we can help consumers in that regard, we’re certainly going to try.”