There are certain patterns forming in our business that truly excite me. The more I study them, the more I see opportunities everywhere to build. In fact, we are building some right now. But I digress…
I coined the phrase OpenVerse in a previous Substack to describe one of those patterns. And unlike most community driven ecosystems, it doesn’t need a creator at the center.
I now hear this word everywhere. It’s become part of our industry lexicon.
Okay, the last part is bullshit.
A friend of mine—who knows the creator economy probably better than anyone—pointed me to Teton and said: “If you understand how they did it, you understand the future of media. Its one of those open-thingies you referred to in an article…” (exhibit A: ‘OpenVerse’ catching fire!)
She was talking about Western culture being organized into Teton Ridge.
Teton Ridge: the Clearest Roadmap from OpenVerse to Media Empire
There are a few well-worn paths to scale today. Some media empires grew by broadcasting a single, undeniable core—call it DNA. It might be Wonder (Dude Perfect). It might be Morality (Dhar Man). It might be Ingenuity (Mark Rober). With a code that clear (and great content, timing, ruthless work ethic etc) it creates fertile growth for community.
Another path is when a creator fuses passion with commerce. Epic Gardening is the cleanest case: what started as a guy making gardening videos grew into a seed and supplies business, which turned the content into something durable, defensible, and wildly lucrative. Content feeds community. Community feeds commerce. And suddenly you’ve got a flywheel.
But there’s a third road, and it doesn’t require a creator at the center at all. It starts with what I call the OpenVerse: communities that already exist, thriving without a single owner. They’re cultural ecosystems—untethered but alive. The real opportunity comes when someone organizes them, carefully, and walls them into businesses.
And here’s why that matters if you’re a filmmaker or executive: Teton Ridge didn’t just build a business out of cowboy boots and rodeo. It built a studio roadmap. It’s already producing podcasts, live broadcasts, and sports events. Movies and scripted TV are next.
Which means if your passion is still storytelling—if you still believe in the magic of television and film—this path doesn’t take you away from it. It leads you right back.
The Unlikely Cowboy: Thomas Tull’s Founding Vision
Thomas Tull didn’t come out of the rodeo chutes; he came out of Hollywood and pro sports. He founded Legendary Entertainment—films that helped throw off more than $13 billion at the global box office—and he holds minority stakes in the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Yankees.
That combination teaches you two things: how to package passion for broad audiences, and how to operate where games, distribution, and fandom collide.
In 2019, Tull looked at the West and saw what he called the last frontier for sports innovation: rodeo and performance horse disciplines with multi‑generational devotion and massive latent demand, but consistently treated as regional curiosities.
The mission he set from day one was explicit—honor Western culture, elevate performance sports, and take it to a world stage—and the timing was no accident.
A Yellowstone‑driven renaissance had created a persuadable outer ring of new fans on top of the endemic base. With backing from heavy hitters, amongst them, Guggenheim Partners, Tull had the capital and the operator’s eye to turn a loose cultural current into a business spine.
And because Tull is a Hollywood animal, the language inside Teton Ridge was never just “events” and “rights.”
It was storytelling. Build human‑centered narratives. Create the myth layer that mainstream audiences can actually follow.
Before the Fence: Western Culture as OpenVerse
The Western ecosystem was a beautifully messy sprawl most of which I had never heard of until I researched this stack. Local jackpots and county fairs sat alongside the PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association), PBR (bull riding), NCHA (cutting), and NRHA (reining). Each floated in its own orbit. There was no single league spine, no unified calendar, no national production standard.
On TV, coverage came from rural‑focused networks like RFD‑TV and its 2017 spin‑off, The Cowboy Channel, which pioneered 24‑hour rodeo broadcasting. Reach was real—over 100 million across platforms—but compared to ESPN, it still lived in the niche lane. Plenty of events were never televised. Production value varied. Rights were scattered. Meanwhile, estimates put the rodeo fan base at around 40 million Americans. Passion was high; monetization was not.
For a guy like Tull, the problem was the opportunity.
The Land Grab: How the Pieces Snapped Into Place (2019–2025)
To build the fly wheel Teton Ridge began acquiring the keystones, in sequence, and let the structure reveal itself.
2019: Incorporation. Plant the flag with a simple idea: elevate America’s Western culture without sanding off what makes it matter.
2021: Start where the credibility lives: buy the crown jewel event, The American Rodeo. Then build a pipeline by acquiring grassroots competitions that bring new riders into the sport. Give fans stars to follow by signing the top athletes under your own banner. And even invest in a ranch with world-class horses—not because breeding horses scales as a business, but because in rodeo, legitimacy comes from being in the arena, proving you belong in the culture you’re commercializing.
2022: Expand from sport to lifestyle. Buy Cowboys & Indians magazine, a heritage voice. Take a majority stake in Hyer Boots, a historic brand. Acquire the Arizona Ridge Riders in PBR to pull bull riding’s fervent base into your gravity well. Start making shows: the six‑part docuseries “Window to the West” and athlete‑driven audio like “The MauneyCast”. You’re not just airing events; you’re building character and context. And your holding that community in through storytelling.
2023: Invent television‑native formats and bring in an operator who knows the modern stack. Launch The American Performance Horseman, a broadcast‑friendly fusion of three horse sports that reads clean on TV. Hire Deirdre Lester (ex‑Barstool CRO) as CEO to wire content to community to commerce.
2024: Wall the garden. Cut a multi‑year FOX Sports deal that puts The American’s championship weekend on a major network. Partner with DAZN and strike what the company called the largest international rights deal in American Western sports, pushing marquee events into 200+ territories. Then buy the distribution hub itself: The Cowboy Channel, The Cowgirl Channel, and Cowboy Channel+—with an exclusive PRCA media‑rights package covering 600+ rodeos annually, including the National Finals Rodeo (NFR). Overnight, Teton Ridge becomes the largest rights holder in Western sports.
2025: Own the myth and tighten the P&L. Acquire film/TV rights to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and the Louis L’Amour library—control of the genre’s narrative spine. Sell the performance horse program. The horses did their job (credibility); now capital moves toward the scalable core: media, distribution, and live events.
Threaded through those moves is a single throughline: take a fragmented OpenVerse and quietly assemble a walled garden—without choking off the roots that made it grow.
Crowning the Gatekeeper: Why The Cowboy Channel Was the Hinge
Buying linear TV in 2024 sounds insane—unless your fan base lives on satellite and rural cable. Carriage matters where rodeo lives. Teton Ridge wasn’t trying to turn back the clock; it was buying distribution leverage while simultaneously owning the direct‑to‑consumer pipe (Cowboy Channel+).
From there, it did the unglamorous work that signals respect: hardening the app so it doesn’t crash during the NFR (National Finals Rodeo— Super Bowl of Rodeo), improving capacity, and delivering broadcast polish that makes the sport legible to casuals. Internally and externally, leadership called the network the “ESPN of rodeo”—not as a metaphor, but as an operating goal: centralize viewership, set production standards, and own the narrative cadence of the season.
The payoff showed up fast. In 2024, FOX windows for The American Rodeo and The American Performance Horseman delivered a combined 5.7 million viewers. Cowboy Channel+ converted diehards into reliable subs. And DAZN put Western sport on screens in countries that know horses but don’t know rodeo yet.
Story Is the Multiplier: From Docuseries to Lonesome Dove
Tull’s native instrument is narrative. So Teton Ridge doesn’t just televise—it frames. Window to the West is a six-part docuseries of short portraits that introduce the Western world through its people—horsemen, craftsmen, musicians—shot with intimacy and polish. They launched it in two places at once: at New York Fashion Week, where Western style brushed up against high fashion, and back in Texas at the ranch, where the culture carries its weight. That balance—mainstream visibility and elegance without losing authenticity—is deliberate.
The Mauney Cast, named for bull rider J.B. Mauney, works the other side of the spectrum. It’s raw, made for insiders, and refuses to explain itself. Listeners hear the injuries, rivalries, and day-to-day grind straight from the athletes. Together these projects make the sport legible without watering it down, giving audiences both an accessible entry point and a window into its unvarnished core.
Then they reached for the canon. Buying Lonesome Dove and the Louis L’Amour library wasn’t about looking backward. It was about anchoring the culture in stories with weight and recognition—narratives that pull in new audiences while giving longtime fans a broader canvas. And it’s the bridge back to scripted film and television. The culture feeds the stories; the stories recruit the next wave of fans into the culture.
Maybe that feels like a long road if you’re a producer, waiting for the chance to get back to making movies or TV. Or maybe it’s the point—that building this kind of business was producing all along. It’s always been about storytelling. These new challenges don’t replace the craft; they stretch it, make it sharper, maybe even more interesting.
We are not all geniuses like Thomas Tull (and people who surround him clearly). And I will forever, or until one if I meet him, never fully understand how an outsider was able to wall this garden… but I found perhaps a hint in this chapter of their story.
Trust Is the Toll: Paying the Authenticity Tax
An East Coast billionaire consolidating cowboy culture stirs the pot for those who birthed it: are you buying the soul of our sport? Apparently skepticism flared when Teton Ridge moved to sell off its horse program—some read that as proof of corporate opportunism.
Two things could explain it. One: performance breeding is capital‑intensive and low‑scale; it was never going to be the profit center. Two: it bought the credibility dividend the company needed to be taken seriously. The pivot to media and events isn’t betrayal; it’s the business maturing from asset accumulation to operational efficiency. Maybe there is some cynicism in that move or maybe you have to pay attention to what they did so right.
To keep the compact with the community, Teton Ridge has paid in visible ways: record‑topping, life‑changing payouts at The American; keeping prayer, anthem, and amateurs in the arena; retaining familiar broadcast talent; hiring respected insiders; and fixing the fan pain points (streaming reliability) that had long made people feel unseen. The message is consistent: we are stewards, not carpetbaggers.
From Community to Customer: The Closed‑Loop Fan Journey
Here’s what the walled garden looks like from a fan’s point of view. You read Cowboys & Indians. You watch The Cowboy Channel on satellite or stream Cowboy Channel+. You travel to Arlington for The American (attendance cleared 40,000 in 2024). You buy Hyer Boots in the concourse. You draft your squad on Pro Fantasy Rodeo. You listen to athlete pods on the drive home. Next season, you do it again with higher stakes.
That loop is engagement and revenue at every turn: ad sales and carriage fees on linear; subscriptions on digital; ticketing, concessions, and merch at live events; integrated sponsorships that span broadcast, digital, and venue; product sales cross‑promoted through owned media; and, soon, licensing and production fees flowing from scripted adaptations. It’s also data—the kind that makes a single contract with a national sponsor far more attractive than a fragmented county‑fair buy.
Watch that fly wheel spin.
Why Filmmakers and Legacy Execs Should Care
If you miss making films and shows that matter, this is the path back. Teton Ridge didn’t start with a pitch deck for a Western series. It started with people—boots, barns, and arenas—then layered distribution, then story. By the time scripted projects roll, they’re not Hail Marys; they’re logical outputs of a system that already works where you know there is a hungry community (think of the leverage you have negotiating licensing deals with platforms with the data YOU control).
This is the inversion legacy media keeps resisting. You don’t buy “creators” and hope. You start with community. You own the spine (rights and distribution). You pay the authenticity tax (money, continuity, competence). And you control the myth layer so story amplifies, not replaces, the culture.
Do that, and TV/film stop being a separate business. They become the most powerful inputs in your flywheel.
Where It Goes Next (and What Could Break)
International growth is the obvious near‑term play: DAZN already opens 200+ territories; touring exhibitions test foreign demand; the 2026 multi‑city American could turn a single tentpole into a national calendar. Betting integrations and interactive broadcasts are sitting there too, if regulators and partners line up.
The fragility is equally clear. Rights durability is existential—PRCA/NFR renewals are the crown jewels. Linear economics have to be managed while digital adoption rises in rural markets. Over‑centralization can read as control, and I imagine this culture is pretty sensitive around that.
But the strategy shift in 2025—from asset accumulation to operational focus—suggests the company knows what game it’s playing and where the margin actually lives.
The Playbook in One Sentence
If you take Teton Ridge as a template, an OpenVerse worth chasing might share a few traits:
Deep roots — a culture or genre with real history, not a passing fad.
Fragmented but passionate — dozens of clubs, leagues, or festivals, but no unifying center.
Rituals and live stakes — moments that insiders already circle on the calendar.
Recognizable but under-exposed heroes — talent waiting for a spotlight.
Narrative DNA — blood, dust, longing, fear, grit—something elemental that makes stories inevitable.
If you’re making a slate of genre films every year, what if you thought about the business as an OpenVerse? Not just a production line, but a community already out there—living, breathing, waiting for someone to organize it.
Horror fans don’t need you to explain their obsession; they’ve already built the conventions, the podcasts, the Halloween rituals.
Action has its OpenVerse too—look at the gyms, the fight leagues, the gun ranges, even the parkour and stunt subcultures.
Romance? That world has been self-organizing forever, from fan-fiction platforms to romance book clubs that stretch across continents. Who ever marries fan fiction and microdramas and eventually live events in this space has a rocket ship.
The point is: the communities exist before the content. The trick is stepping into those spaces without flattening them.
That’s what Teton Ridge did with rodeo. They didn’t start by announcing a studio or a streaming service. They started by gathering a scattered culture into one place, building community first, then letting events, podcasts, documentaries, and eventually film and TV sit inside it.
The OpenVerse comes first. The content is what stimulates it.
For filmmakers, that’s the invitation. Instead of asking “how do I get this one movie financed?” the question shifts to “how do I tend this community so the movies become inevitable?” That’s producing, too—just at a different scale.
Yes, we don’t all have access to capital like Thomas Tull. But there are smaller OpenVerses out there like ChainFest that I wrote about and many more. Multiple readers of the stack have reached out to tell me about theirs and when they are ready talk openly about them, we can publish here.
What is your OpenVerse. Go get it!
Really enjoyed this one. As people pivot there is always opportunity and this was a great example of that.