A look at Cosm's unique sports viewing experience

INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- It’s halftime of the Cotton Bowl between Miami and Ohio State. Christopher Lanier, a pilot from San Luis Obispo, sits in his seat at Cosm, an immersive sports entertainment venue in Inglewood, watching the 87-foot-wide planetarium-style screen which is playing an ad — for Cosm. Advertising the sports experiences available at the site, it shows a wide range of clips, including one of Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in Game 1 of the 2024 World Series. Lanier observes the angle from behind home plate.

“Where else are you gonna get that view?” Lanier asks rhetorically. “Other than at the stadium, in thousand-dollar seats.”

The scope of Cosm, and the way it seemingly puts the viewer right in the action, is hard to fully grasp without visiting one of their locations — they currently have two, one in Inglewood near SoFi Stadium and another in the suburbs of Dallas. That enveloping experience is what founder Steve Winn and President and CEO Jeb Terry had in mind when they started the company in 2020.

“I was working with Steve prior to building this business, and as a thought partner, leader in the organization, he had a lot of fantastic ideas, and had always known about planetariums as well,” Terry said. “And then what I was doing in sports, and what I thought about the future of sports, is combining that, and then, of course, building the team and expanding the vision.”

To build up a technological foundation in its first few years, Cosm acquired several companies in the computer graphics and virtual reality industries, including Evans and Sutherland, LiveLikeVR and C360. In July 2024 — around the same time their first two locations opened — a round of startup funding raised over $250 million.

Cosm has partnerships with all four major North American sports leagues, the NCAA, UFC, Premier League and most major television networks that show sports. All those networks have plenty of cameras, but due to the unique nature of Cosm’s presentations, they provide their own technology.

They use specially designed cameras with convex lenses, which feed back to their production area outside the stadium. The feed then travels to Cosm’s headquarters in Playa Vista before being sent to the screens displaying it, on a dome consisting of thousands of individual LED lights.

“That’s why the dome looks so good,” Terry said. “The attention to detail and the care done in the back.”

The attention to detail goes into every part of the presentation. According to Manager of Film Operations Ariel Harris, the game footage comes in on a 40-second delay so her team can prepare graphics and sound for key events such as touchdowns.

For football games, Cosm has a camera under each goalpost, a high-angle sideline camera, and a low-angle sideline camera controlled by a rolling cart colloquially referred to as a Chapman after Chapman/Leonard, the company that makes it. According to Sam Jimenez, who drives these carts for Cosm, they have 42 of them in their arsenal.

Technology is a fickle thing, but Senior Director of Production Operations Frank LaSpina is convinced he can preemptively avoid problems by putting in the work ahead of time.

“We work really hard to try to mitigate the problems before they happen,” he said. “So there’s a bunch of different layers of redundancy within the production. So whether that’s having strands of backup fiber, in case something were to get broken or trampled, sometimes that’s connectivity, power, weather, people could always touch cameras or things. So we really try to anticipate the problems and make sure that we’re putting redundancies in the right place to head them off before they happen.”

On this particular occasion, LaSpina is overseeing the setup at Rose Bowl Stadium the day before the game between Alabama and Indiana. It’s raining, something he stays on top of by fitting cameras with custom-designed covers, a recent innovation which the company points to as an example of their willingness to always grow.

“We’re in this business to win, and that competitive mindset, we’re always looking to continue to build, grow, innovate, take Cosm to the next level,” Terry said.

Cosm’s venue can be miles away from the game, but still immerses fans in the stadium experience. At the Cotton Bowl presentation, for example, fans of Miami and Ohio State have flocked to Inglewood, and while the Buckeye presence is noticeably heavier, Cosm has still succeeded in creating an atmosphere for both teams.

“I really think [my] favorite part is actually the people in the dome with you, in that area around you,” said Lawrence Rolle, a Miami alum who now works as a doctor for UCLA Health. He’s at Cosm for the second time in as many weeks, having attended the team’s win over Texas A&M in the first round of the College Football Playoff.

“We had the luxury of having some Texas A&M fans, but a lot of Canes fans. And I really felt like I was at a Canes game in Miami.”

That collective experience is a major part of Cosm’s appeal, but questions remain over whether it’s truly accessible to everyone.

Cosm’s tickets to watch Miami’s subsequent game — the Fiesta Bowl against Ole Miss — in the dome ranged from $29 to $138, but any option to buy multiple seats next to each other in a single purchase cost well over $100. In some cases, the tickets were more expensive than the get-in price to the actual stadium in Arizona. The cheapest available dome ticket for the national championship game is $443, far less than the get-in price at Hard Rock Stadium but not exactly a bargain either.

“From a diverse audience perspective, could they do something intentional to cater to people who have been historically priced out of the market in terms of collective sports watching?” wonders Kellie McElhaney, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. “There’s an interesting grassroots fan experience that I think could be cool for them to think about.”

As a San Francisco Bay Area resident, McElhaney cites the difference in fans attending Warriors games and Valkyries games. Both occur in the same arena, but the latter is less expensive and skews far more towards families, and she thinks Cosm could learn something from that in terms of marketing to women and showing women’s sports.

“One thing that I observed when I looked at their materials and thought was a huge missed opportunity, is everything seems to be focused around men’s sports,” she said. “Women [are portrayed] as the wine drinkers in their photos and whatnot. It was a very male-forward business model, and when I looked at their materials, [their brand] just felt very classically male-oriented. It would not surprise me if the leadership of the company is mostly men. And I don’t mean that negatively at all, but given the zeitgeist of this particular moment of women’s sports, I think they could really capture some competitive advantage by specifically and concertedly focusing on women’s sports.”

Cosm has big plans for their future, with locations set to open in Atlanta and Detroit later this year and another planned for Cleveland in 2027. Terry believes nothing is off the table for future expansion.

“We’re really entering this hyper growth phase of the business, where now that we have our first two venues up and operating, we have three more in the pipeline,” he said. “Now it’s about scale. How do we transition into this global vision that we’re looking to [have] happen, and how do we do it by maintaining our quality standards?

“That’s the promise of what we’re building, that we’ll always be that best place to watch if you cannot get to the stadium.”

But occasionally, perhaps it’s not the best place for everybody.

Lanier has brought along his family, including his college-age son Michael and Michael’s girlfriend Kaden Keech. Keech suffers from vertigo, and the low angle of their seats is making her sick. The couple found empty higher seats at halftime, but the experience has them considering some of the downsides.

“If I’m down below, and I’m closer to the screen, it’s a lot harder,” Keech said.

Once they’re settled into their new seats, however, those problems seem to go away. Keech reacts to a notable second-half play, then turns back to her boyfriend.

“For a second,” she tells him. “I forgot we were watching a screen.”