Versant Media USA Sports President Matt Hong on How Versant Has Best of Both Worlds: a Start-Up Mentality and $7 Billion RevenuesBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Monday, November 24, 2025 - 12:20 pm
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When Comcast NBCUniversal announced plans last November to spin off most of NBCUniversal's U.S. cable networks into a separate company, Versant Media, it raised some eyebrows and plenty of questions as to how it would impact events like the Olympics next February. Earlier today NBC Olympics announced that USA Network and CNBC, both part of Versant, will be involved in the coverage and when Matt Hong, president of Versant Media USA Sports, took to the stage at SBJ's Media Innovators Summit he offered up more thoughts on the strategy and plan to continue to make Versant Media USA Sports a powerhouse.
Matt Hong, president of Versant Media USA Sports spoke with SBJ Publisher and Executive Editor Abraham Madkour at SBJ's Media Innovators conference in New York last week.
Topping the insights? Discussion the choice of USA Sports as the division name, a move he says was a strategic lean in to the network that we're most associated with: the USA Network.
USA network and all of the programming on USA network will continue to be branded USA network golf channel will continue to have its separate identity, he explains. And there's so much brand equity in Golf Channel that I don't think would've been advisable to try and remove that or replace that new brand.
Hong says Versant views itself as an excessively well-funded startup ready to pivot its revenue mix through strategic investment in digital and emerging sports properties.
All told the cable networks and digital businesses of NBCU about $7 billion in revenue, and over $2 billion in EBITDA which is a good position to be in if you're starting a new company, he says.
The robust financial position is acknowledged to be built on a linear television business that he acknowledges is not a growing business. But with the $2 billion war chest affords the company a chance to take that free cash flow and figure out where we're going to reinvest it, whether that's organically or whether that's inorganically.
The core portfolio includes highly valuable sports rights under the new USA Sports division, which serves as the brand wrapper and the division name for sports on USA and golf. And programming diversity is key with rights to things like NASCAR, the PGA TOUR, the LPGA, the Premier League, the WNBA, and the WWE. And USA's sports offerings will be pretty robust in 2026 and beyond.
The 1,400 hours of live sports that we have on USA in 2026 is four hours of live sports a day, he says. That's a lot of live sports for traditional entertainment network, and then we have 3,200 hours of live golf on the Golf Channel. That's our value proposition as a sports programmer in terms of the properties that we'll have on our networks. At a minimum we will maintain that and I'd like to continue to play offense in that regard.
A key goal is to transform the overall business to be similar to golf-related revenues which are an even split between Golf Channel advertising revenue, Golf Channel subscription revenues, and revenues from the Golf Now property.
That's the model for the rest of Versant: to continue to invest in the core business, which is linear television and sports programming and to grow the adjacent businesses so that the mix of revenue is much more like the golf vertical, he adds.
A key differentiator in Versant's content investment strategy is its aggressive pursuit of growth properties, specifically in women's sports. Hong acknowledges that while they will continue to look for top shelf marquee properties, the investment focus is built around leagues with significant upside
A disproportionate number of sports leagues that we think have a lot of growth ahead of them still, even though one of them, like the WNBA already is already quite large happened to be women's sports properties he says. And we'll continue to invest. We'll have a new WNBA studio show that we'll announce in the coming weeks and we'll continue to invest in the same things from a studio and production standpoint at USA sports that we previously did as part of NBC.
Despite the death of live sports narrative, Hong remains unequivocally bullish on the linear product. When asked about the continued applicability of the cable bundle model, he stated: We are obviously very long on and continue to be bullish about that model for sure.
In addition, the live audience figures continue to be attractive.
The audience numbers continue to be good, very good for popular sports and the fact that there is social media and you can watch highlights 24/7 in between games or even during games just means that people are spending a higher percentage of hours viewing sports content, he says.
The belief in the enduring value of live rights does, however, lead to one concern: the cost of rights which continue to grow.
Everyone predicts that the continued growth in the cost of live sports is going to slow down or flatten or go the other way, Hong says, But that doesn't seem like that's going to happen anytime soon.
The finalization of the spin-off, expected by early January, involves a monumental logistical effort. Hong detailed the six months of intense focus on building the new company:
A lot of what the team was working on was really preparing the company for January it was a bit of a lift but a privilege to figure out who was going to come over. And it was a unique opportunity to sort of pick a team from scratch.
The process included establishing a new corporate office for USA Sports in Stamford and fina
