NBC Sports senior exec Jon Miller ’78 plays a key role in determining what content viewers want to see
The Miami University alumnus has had ‘a front-row seat to watch the world evolve technologically, from broadcast to cable to satellite to digital streaming’
NBC Sports senior exec Jon Miller ’78 plays a key role in determining what content viewers want to see
The Miami University alumnus has had ‘a front-row seat to watch the world evolve technologically, from broadcast to cable to satellite to digital streaming’
As president of acquisitions and partnerships for NBC Sports, Miami University alumnus Jon Miller ’78 has developed a keen sense for what content and coverage viewers want to see.
In 2008, he created the NHL Winter Classic, an outdoor hockey game the New York Times said “has stolen New Year’s Day.” NBC broadcast it for many years, beginning with the inaugural game in 2008 through 2021, before the media rights shifted to other networks.
Other career highlights include securing landmark rights packages for the Olympics, NFL, Premier League, and NASCAR, and creating perennial favorites such as the National Dog Show on Thanksgiving Day.
More recently, Miller was instrumental in bringing the new “Cradle of Coaches” documentary to NBCUniversal’s Peacock, where it reached No. 2 on the streaming service’s Top 10 movies.
Miller said they have more live sports than any other streaming service “and I thought this was good complementary programming that would be good to have on our platform.”
The 2-hour documentary about Miami’s Cradle of Coaches tells the story of how the university — known for being one of the top-ranked schools for undergraduate education — produced an extraordinary number of elite leaders who shaped professional and college football, including Paul Brown and Ara Parseghian.
“Jon’s extraordinary career at NBC has been filled with innovations and exceptional achievements,” Miami President Gregory Crawford said. “It is fitting that he helped guide one of his alma mater’s most cherished sporting traditions, Miami University’s esteemed Cradle of Coaches, into the public eye in such a high-profile way.”
A front-row seat
Miller has worked in multiple divisions of the National Broadcasting Co. (NBC), including local stations, national spot sales, network sales, and sports. Eventually he would settle on sports, which had been a passion of his since he was a boy.
While serving as executive vice president from 1978-2008, Miller was tested when then-new NBC President Dick Ebersol asked him to find programming to fill 30 weeks after NBC lost its broadcasting rights to Major League Baseball in December 1988. The loss brought an end to a historic 42-year continuous partnership that had seen the network televise baseball games every season since 1947.
“He put me in a position where I had to go out and create and find programming to fill 30 weeks, which was a very daunting task,” he recalled, “but it really enabled me to create and develop some properties that endure to this day.”
To fill the programming void with no additional money, Miller created the NBC Sports Ventures unit to find new events — a father-son golf challenge, pro volleyball games, the Dew Action extreme sports tour, and National Heads-Up Poker Championship, according to this 2007 Miamian magazine piece. NBC owns all of these entities, cashing in on event attendance, merchandising and cable, international and Internet rights — instead of paying rights fees to a league.
In the decades since, Miller has watched the tremendous growth in streaming. During the hourlong interview, he weighed in on the controversial current hot-button issue of betting on sports and prediction markets.
“We're all watching the betting and the digital and the prediction markets very closely to see how that impacts sports,” he said. “There are some storm clouds ahead if we're not careful and we don't keep an eye on the ball there."
Miller believes streaming will become even more prevalent than it is today.
“You know, a lot of people like to watch their sports on a big 50- or 60-inch flat screen TV but, if they need to, they'll also watch it on an iPad or a laptop, or a phone if they want to watch their teams,” he said. “So, we've made the sports available to people on as many different platforms as we can.”
He added, “I've had a front-row seat to watch the world evolve technologically from broadcast to cable to satellite to digital streaming and the way the business runs now.”
Choosing Miami
Miller, who works at NBC Sports Group’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. For college, he left the East Coast for the Midwest’s Miami, where he majored in Marketing with a minor in Finance.
“I really felt that Miami was going to prepare me for the business world, and they did a really good job with that,” he said.
He and his wife, Jan ’78, are Miami Mergers. Their sons, Jeff ’07 and Robby ’12, also graduated from the university.
Miller recalled being actively involved in a program his junior and senior years at Miami called Laws, Hall & Associates that later developed into Highwire Brand Studio. The innovative experiential learning capstone focuses on developing branding strategies and tactics to address opportunities faced by real-world clients.
“That really gave me some firsthand exposure to big companies like Wendy's and Borden and Marathon Oil, projects that I got to work on when I was at Miami,” he said.
In the Laws, Hall & Associates program, he was the lead account executive on a team of 36 students.
“There were a lot of different opinions and a lot of people who had different directions that they wanted us to go in,” he recalled, “but eventually, you become the guy who has to make the call, and it taught me you make the call and you live with it. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but you have to take responsibility regardless. And I think that's one of the things that Miami put me in a position to do.”
Miller enjoyed his time in Oxford, reminiscing about his first year living in Morris Hall, playing club tennis, and being a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity.
“Everything about Miami I loved. I loved the seasons. I loved the people I met. I had some great professors who were really influential,” he said, remembering how they encouraged students to ask questions and explore, and not be satisfied.
“At Miami, I don't think that complacency is something that you see a lot of,” he said. “You see a lot of people who are really trying to achieve bigger and better things, and they put me in a position to be successful.”
He returned to the East Coast after graduating and took a job in October 1978 as NBC’s first “maven,” someone trained in all the different aspects of television stations business.
The opportunity ‘to grow and develop and take risks’
This year, NBC celebrates its centennial. Miller has spent 48 of those years with the company, working in four divisions.
Looking back, he said it was the right choice for him to spend most of his career with one company.
“I worked for three different parents: RCA, GE, Comcast, and now next year we're going to go off on our own, so it's going to be the first time we didn’t have a big parent company overseeing us,” Miller said.
At NBC, Miller said he was given the opportunity “to grow and develop and take risks. I worked for some really smart people who, fortunately, gave me opportunities and saw something in me that made me feel like I could be successful here.”
Miller’s mentorship leads to ‘countless meaningful lessons’
Today, he’s doing exactly what he wants to do.
“In my current role overseeing acquisitions and partnerships, I get to work with a lot of junior-level executives who are coming up, mentoring them, training them, giving them an opportunity to spread their wings and eventually take over a lot of the stuff that I've been doing because the retirement is out there at some point. I'm not thinking about it yet, but I'm sure it's out there sometime soon,” he said.
Gary Quinn, vice president of partnerships and general manager of owned properties for NBC Sports Group, was Miller’s intern in NBC’s programming department in May 1995. He has worked for him ever since, for 31 years.
“Jon has taught me countless meaningful lessons, but the most important was building long-term relationships through treating partnership as a verb with consistent and collaborative communication and treating people the right way,” Quinn said.
He called Miller “one of the most accomplished sports media executives of all-time, and I’m so proud, blessed, and grateful to have a front-row seat for it all and benefit from the brilliant legacy he continues to forge.”
Quinn added, “Jon is approaching an unprecedented milestone of 50 years of a truly brilliant career. He is a master architect of building long-term partnerships, a world-class negotiator, and an entrepreneurial force whose legacy of creating events such as the NHL’s Winter Classic, American Century Championship, PNC Championship, and National Dog Show continues to transcend generations.”
The American Century Championship annual celebrity golf tournament featuring prominent active and retired professional athletes, including Steph Curry, Michael Jordan, and Drew Brees, now rivals some PGA Tour events in both ratings and attendance.
When Comcast bought NBC from General Electric in 2011, Miller was made president of programming for the NBC Sports Group, which encompassed all of their cable networks as well as NBC Sports.
One of his first deals in that new role was to bring the Premier League to NBC.
“The Premier League, which is the No. 1 soccer league in the world, had been on ESPN and on Fox, but had never really been showcased, marketed, or promoted the way it should have been,” he said. “And I went over to England, and I convinced, with the help of a lot of people at NBC, including my senior management, that we would be the right place for the Premier League to go. And now the Premier League is on a level with a lot of other major sports in this country.”
Miller is proud of that accomplishment, as well as the relationships with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball, now all part of the NBC/Peacock lineup.
“Those relationships have existed for a long time. And even though at one time or another in my career we've lost those properties — we lost the NFL in 1998, we lost Major League Baseball in 2000, and we lost the NBA in 2002 — they're all now back with NBC,” he said. “I'm fortunate that a lot of the people that I worked with when we had those properties the first time are still there, and those relationships really helped dramatically in helping bring those properties back into the NBC family.”
The Cradle of Coaches
Miller learned about the Cradle of Coaches as a first-year student at Miami, where he enjoyed attending football games on campus.
And, yes, he has a favorite coach whose statue is among those of 10 coaches displayed at Yager Stadium: John Harbaugh ’84, now head coach of the New York Giants, Miller’s team.
“To me, he really embodies how a coach should lead,” he said. He appreciates the example Harbaugh set with the Ravens and is now setting with the New York Giants — “the way he's just come in here and changed the culture and the attitude and the approach and the excitement that has come with it. Really, that to me is what a coach should be, so if I was going to describe my perfect coach, I think it would be Coach John Harbaugh.”
Miller said he and his wife have stayed in touch with many friends from Miami.
“I've got such good memories. I don't get back there as much as I would like, although I've promised (Director of Athletics) David Sayler and (Miami President) Greg Crawford that I'll come back, hopefully this spring for a few days,” he said.
He’d like to meet with students in the classroom setting.
“I really enjoy talking to students who are trying to make career choices and give them some ideas on career direction.”