Dude Perfect. Kylie Kelce. Carmelo Anthony. Ilona Maher. Matthew and Brady Tkachuk. Paul George. Cameron Brink.
You know the names, and if you listened to some of the content coming from their shows, you’ve come across the work of Wave Sports & <a href="https://comicvibe.com/kakao-entertainment-ceo-says-fandom-underpins-k/” title=”Kakao Entertainment CEO Says Fandom Underpins K”>Entertainment. The media production and distribution company, which launched in 2017, rocketed to prominence a few years back as it helped bring “New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce” to the masses. While Wondery acquired that pod in 2024 (Wave still does its production), the learnings from the success with the Kelce brothers were huge for the company.
“We learned an athlete’s constraints really quickly,” said Ryan Jann, Wave’s chief business officer. “This goes for every athlete we’ve worked with since then, and every celebrity we’ve worked with since then — they have a really small amount of time in their week to fit in new things. So we wanted to become the place where the top talent … come work with us for two to three hours a week. We take care of everything else from development of a show. The production, the monetization, the post-production, all of the ads, all of the accounting and all of the extra stuff that goes along with it.”
As Jann puts it, Wave in 2026, with around 120 full-time employees, is set up to serve three different groups: the audience (young millennials and Gen Z, in particular), the talent and the advertisers. Across its 10 shows, there are now over 1 billion views per month, with 75% of the audience under the age of 35. Around 75% of the programming is video, with 25% audio-only. “We only want to work with shows that could break through,” said Jann. That includes the company’s biggest current commercial success, “Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce,” which launched 18 months ago around women’s lifestyle, but has obvious sports-adjacent ties.
While Jann understands why many view the podcast market as somewhat saturated, he believes there is still a ton of demand for top-of-the-pile content.
“It’s just picking the right talent who have the right motivation and something unique to say that really helps cut through,” Jann said. “Ilona Maher is a great example of what we look for in talent. She is an objectively great professional athlete. She’s an Olympian for the U.S. rugby team. She also happens to be a very charming and funny content creator. … Her new show, ‘Power Hour,’ that has been a big success recently. The other example I would use is Carmelo Anthony [and his show ‘7PM in Brooklyn’]. … Carmelo had never really spoken about basketball and culture in this way, so it was a new way for him to use his voice. So if you have all of those things coming together, you can still cut through.”
