INGLEWOOD, Calif. — It’s halftime in the Cotton Bowl between Miami and Ohio State. Christopher Lanier, a pilot from San Luis Obispo, sat in his seat at Cosm, an immersive sports and entertainment venue in Inglewood, watching the 87-foot-wide planetarium-style screen playing a Cosm commercial. The site touts the sports experiences the site offers, showcasing various video clips including Freddie Freeman’s grand slam in Game 1 of the 2024 World Series. Lanier looks at the angle from behind home plate.
“Where else can you see a scene like this?” Lanier asked. “Except in the stadium, in the thousand-dollar seats.”
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The scale of Cosm, and the way it seems to immerse audiences, is hard to fully appreciate without visiting one of their locations — they currently have two locations, one in Inglewood near SoFi Stadium and another in suburban Dallas. This all-encompassing experience is exactly what founder Steve Winn and President and CEO Jeb Terry had in mind when they launched the company in 2020.
“I worked with Steve before building this business as a thought partner and leader of the organization, and he had a lot of fantastic ideas and always understood the planetarium,” Terry said. “Then what I do in sports, and what I think about the future of sports, is bring them together and then, of course, build teams and expand the horizons.”
To build its technology base in its early 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 stores opened, a startup funding round raised over $250 million.
Cosm partners with the four major North American sports leagues, the NCAA, UFC, the Premier League and most major sports television networks. All of these networks have large numbers of cameras, but due to the unique nature of the Cosm demo, they offer their own technology.
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They use specially designed convex lens cameras that feed images back to the production area outside the stadium. The signal is then transmitted to Cosm’s headquarters in Playa Vista, where it is sent to be displayed on a dome screen made up of thousands of individual LED lights.
“That’s why the dome looks so beautiful,” Terry said. “Attention to detail and care behind.”
Attention to detail permeates every part of the presentation. Film operations manager Ariel Harris said the game footage was delayed 40 seconds so her team could prepare graphics and sound for key events like touchdowns.
For football games, Cosm has a camera under each goal post, a high-angle sideline camera, and a low-angle sideline camera controlled by a rolling cart, known colloquially as a Chapman, named after the company that makes the cart, Chapman/Leonard. According to Sam Jimenez of Cosm, who drives the carts, they have 42 carts in their arsenal.
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Technology is fickle, but Frank LaSpina, senior director of production operations, firmly believes that by putting in the work ahead of time, he can preempt problems before they arise.
“We work very hard to try to mitigate problems before they occur,” he said. “So there are a lot of different layers of redundancy in production. So whether there’s backup fiber or not, just in case something breaks or gets stepped on, sometimes it’s connectivity, power, weather, people can always touch the camera or something. So we really try to anticipate problems and make sure we put the redundancy in the right place to stop them before they happen.”
On this particular occasion, Laspina was overseeing the setup of the Rose Bowl stadium the day before the Alabama-Indiana game. When it rains, he copes with the rain by fitting the camera with a custom-designed cover, a recent innovation that the company sees as an example of their willingness to keep evolving.
“We’re in this business to win, and with a competitive mentality, we’re always looking to continue to build, grow, innovate and take Cosm to the next level,” Terry said.
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Cosm’s venue may be miles away from the action, but it still allows fans to immerse themselves in the stadium experience. For example, during the Cotton Bowl, Miami and Ohio State fans flocked to Inglewood, and even though the Buckeyes played significantly more games, Cosme still managed to create an atmosphere for both teams.
“I really think [my] “The favorite part is actually the people in the dome with you, in that area around you,” said Lawrence Rolle, a Miami alumnus now a physician at UCLA Health who was at Cosm for the second time in as many weeks and watched the team’s victory over Texas A&M in the first round of the College Football Playoff.
“We’re blessed to have some Texas A&M fans, but also a lot of Canes fans. I really feel like I’m in Miami watching a Canes game.”
This collective experience is a major part of Cosm’s appeal, but questions remain about whether it’s truly for everyone.
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Cosm Tickets for Miami’s next game at the Dome, the Fiesta Bowl against Ole Miss, range from $29 to $138, but the option to purchase multiple adjacent seats at once costs well over $100. In some cases, tickets are more expensive than admission to the actual stadium in Arizona. The cheapest arena ticket for the national championship game is $443, well below the price of a ticket at Hard Rock Stadium, but not cheap either.
“From a diverse audience perspective, are there some intentional things they can do to cater to people who have historically been left out of the market in terms of collective sports viewing?” wondered Kellie McElhaney, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “I thought it would be a fun grassroots fan experience and it would be cool to make them think about it.”
As a Bay Area resident, McElhaney cited the differences between fans attending Warriors games and Valkyrie games. Both take place in the same arena, but the latter is cheaper and more family-friendly, something she thinks Cosm could learn from when it comes to marketing and showcasing women’s sports to women.
“One of the things I observed when I looked at their materials and thought it was a huge missed opportunity is that everything seemed to be focused on men’s sports,” she said. “female [are portrayed] Like the drinkers in their pictures or something like that. It’s a very masculine business model and when I looked at their materials, [their brand] It just feels very classically male-oriented. I wouldn’t be surprised if the leadership of the company is mostly male. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but given the zeitgeist of this particular moment in women’s sports, I think they could really gain some competitive advantage by focusing exclusively and consistently on women’s sports. “
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Cosm has big plans for the future, opening locations in Atlanta and Detroit later this year and another in Cleveland planned for 2027. Terry believes there will be no problems with future expansion.
“We are really entering a high-growth phase of the business and now that we have our first two venues up and running, we have three more in the pipeline,” he said. “The issue now is scale. How do we transition to the global vision we are pursuing [have] Happens, how do we do it by maintaining our quality standards?
“That’s the promise we’re building on, if you can’t make it to the stadium, we’ll always be the best place to watch.”
But sometimes, maybe that’s not the best place for everyone.
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Lanier brought his family, including his college-age son Michael and Michael’s girlfriend Kaden Kitchen. Kitchen suffers from vertigo, and the low angle of the seat made her feel nauseous. The couple found the higher seats empty at halftime, but the experience made them consider some of the drawbacks.
“If I’m down there and closer to the screen, it’s a lot harder,” Kitchen said.
However, once they got into their new seats, these issues seemed to disappear. Kitchen reacted to the brilliant second half, then turned to her boyfriend.
“Wait a minute,” she told him. “I forgot we were looking at a screen.”