Bomani Jones, known for his tenures at ESPN and HBO, is partnering with podcast company Playmaker to produce his long-running show “The Right Time,” according to Deadline. 

The New York-based Playmaker, owned by Danish digital sports media company Better Collective, has built a roster that includes “The Roommates Show” with New York Knicks players Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart, a bowling series hosted by Los Angeles Dodger Mookie Betts, and multiple Shaquille O’Neal projects.

“The Right Time” launched in 2018 under ESPN. Jones acquired the rights to the show in 2021 and kept hosting it after leaving ESPN in 2023, the same period he debuted as host of “Game Theory,” a late-night series that ran on HBO in 2022 and 2023. The show began daily production this week at a new, purpose-built studio in Harlem.

Jones told Deadline the audience relationship had already shifted away from any one platform by the time he left ESPN. “At this point, the audience is much more invested in the product itself than where it comes from,” he said. “I think that I could respond to people with a certain sort of resentment because to me at that point, I was only doing the podcast for them anymore. I wasn’t doing television.”

He also pointed to the production economics that now let independent creators compete with institutionally backed hosts. “Creators are just people, right? Just guys, just women who are able to put together something that looks very similar to the thing that you are putting together,” he said, citing YouTube’s role in lowering the cost of high-quality video. “There are a lot of people I’ve never heard of who are out here putting up really, really big numbers, and I’m the guy that has to figure out how to learn from them as much as vice versa.”

On monetization, Jones said subscriptions are still being worked out with Playmaker, but that the new studio was itself part of the appeal. He pointed to Pat McAfee’s show, “littered with all kinds of knickknacks” and visible sponsor integrations, as the kind of commercial packaging Playmaker could offer. “One of the draws for Playmaker for me was there appeared to be a creativity on their end about sales,” he said.

Jones framed the move as consistent with a longer arc of operating semi-independently of any single employer. “I have been doing this long enough now that I exist as a brand myself,” he said. “Not as big as ESPN, obviously. But I exist there… I am always looking to have partners who see my interest and their interests as being complementary.”

He raised one open concern about the broader media environment: with production barriers low and competition high, he said he has no clear answer for how a new voice “cuts through” the volume of content now available, comparing the dynamic to Neil Postman’s critique of unregulated television.

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