Sports livestreaming platform Playback announced on X on March 17 that its team had joined Disney Entertainment and ESPN, three months after shutting down in December 2025. The team will work within ESPN’s product and technology division, focused on building interactive sports media.

The move follows a December shutdown in which founders RJ Halperin and Ari Borensztein disclosed they were in active talks to sell the platform’s technology and team to a larger media company. “We believe this will give us the best shot to solve our key structural challenges and allow us to continue transforming the way fans and creators consume live sports,” the founders wrote at the time.

Playback launched in 2020 and built a creator-driven live sports watch-party platform, securing official partnerships with the NBA in 2023 and MLB in March 2025, the latter alongside a $22 million fundraising round. The platform allowed users to authenticate League Pass and MLB.TV directly through the service.

The complexity of the broadcast rights ecosystem ultimately proved prohibitive, according to the founders. “Even with league partnerships, blackout rules, and the variety of ways people watch severely limit the slice of the market we can actually authenticate,” Halperin and Borensztein wrote in their shutdown announcement. “Despite a monumental effort from our small team, we haven’t been able to break out and achieve the runaway growth necessary to continue to compete.”

Playback invited former creators interested in future collaboration to reach out directly following the Disney and ESPN announcement.

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