David Rudolph and the games too small for television

David Rudolph was discussing a corporate acquisition while keeping track of a rather more urgent contest: his daughter’s last home soccer game. She was a high school senior. Her team was ahead, 1-0. PlayOn had just bought MaxPreps, and the executive explaining the deal was also a father using the service. There are polished ways to demonstrate a product’s relevance. Having a child on the field is a fairly persuasive one.

The scene, in April 2025, brought together two strands of a career that had been converging for years. Rudolph had spent his working life finding audiences for events that television could overlook. He had also built a business around something parents understand without a market study: a game can matter enormously to a small number of people. A modest audience does not make the occasion modest to those watching.

He later described his founding ambition in family terms. He wanted to be present for his children’s athletic careers. That ambition became PlayOn Sports, whose brands now cover watching a game, getting through its gates and following its scores. The distance between those two scales, a family’s calendar and a national business, is where his story gets interesting.

A television network at twenty-six

Rudolph graduated from Georgia Tech in 1996 with a degree in industrial engineering and joined Turner Broadcasting. By 1999, he was helping launch Turner South, a regional entertainment channel with a distinctly Southern accent. Its programming included performances from Nashville’s Bluebird Café, a television version of Southern Living and a movie strand called Kudzu Theater. Even the B-movies had been given local vegetation.

Turner South began broadcasting on October 1, 1999. Rudolph wrote its business plan and oversaw its development; he became its general manager at 26. The work involved programming, budgets and staff, the practical business of making a proposed network exist every day. The proposition was regional identity: people might want a channel that recognized the place where they lived.

He has credited Bill Burke with encouraging the idea and helping it through internal approvals, and Brad Siegel with giving him the general manager’s job. The experience also put him near Ted Turner, whose willingness to build for an anticipated change in television left an impression. Rudolph’s early opportunity came with people willing to listen, then willing to hand him responsibility.

The game missing from the screen

For a television executive, Rudolph’s next problem was pleasingly awkward: he could not watch the football game he wanted. Georgia Tech was playing at North Carolina. He was a Georgia Tech graduate. The game’s absence from his screen was an irritation with commercial possibilities.

Inside Turner, the streaming project included ACC Select, which put college events online. But college rights were becoming bundled into larger television and digital agreements. As the packages grew, the room for an independent streaming proposition narrowed. The same technology could serve another market, with a different set of rights and a great many games beyond television’s schedule.

In December 2008, Rudolph bought PlayOn’s assets out of Turner. He focused the independent company on high school sports. The move also answered a private professional question: how much of his effectiveness came from the large organization around him? Building outside it would provide a fairly demanding examination.

He went through Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center, graduating from its program in 2011. He has credited the experience with easing the learning involved in moving from corporate work into a startup. Knowing how a large broadcaster operates is useful preparation. Running a smaller company requires learning which parts of that knowledge travel well.

A national network of small audiences

PlayOn and the National Federation of State High School Associations created the NFHS Network in 2013. State associations brought a route into championship rights; individual schools mattered for regular-season events. A national offering had to be assembled through relationships with institutions whose loyalties and responsibilities remained local.

At the network’s organizational meeting that August, Rudolph and NFHS executive director Bob Gardner were selected as vice presidents of its board. The joint venture gave the project a structure in which the governing bodies of school athletics participated. Covering school sports required the schools’ world to be inside the arrangement.

Rudolph’s description of the early audience contained a useful detail. In 2013, he said roughly 20 to 30 percent of viewers were outside the state where an event took place. For those viewers, streaming could supply access they otherwise lacked. He also wanted the games available across screens, including connected televisions, rather than confined to a computer.

That geography makes a school game an unusual media product. Its emotional center can be one field, while its audience includes relatives scattered elsewhere. A national network can therefore be built from thousands of intensely particular attachments. The scale comes from adding them together.

A ticket, a score, a reason to stay

The expansion beyond streaming followed the fan around the event. In April 2022, PlayOn and GoFan announced a merger agreement, supported by an additional investment from KKR. KKR had already agreed to invest alongside existing shareholder Panoramic Ventures earlier that year.

Digital ticketing added another everyday encounter with a school’s supporters. A person buying admission has already shown an interest in the game. Bringing ticketing and streaming into the same company made those related activities part of one operation. The companies were dealing with the same schools and many of the same families.

Then came MaxPreps in April 2025. PlayOn acquired it from CBS Sports, adding schedules, scores, statistics and rankings to a group that already included GoFan and the NFHS Network. The financial terms were not disclosed. MaxPreps’ employees joined PlayOn, bringing the company’s reported headcount to 450.

B.J. Pilling, then PlayOn’s president, described MaxPreps as the “front porch.” It is an apt image for a service people visit before deciding what comes next. Who is playing? Where? Can we attend? Can we watch? Each answer can lead naturally to another part of the group’s services. Rudolph’s daughter’s soccer game supplied a particularly direct example of why those questions belong together.

The economics of keeping the camera on

“I’m a believer that technology doesn’t drive but it enables.”

David Rudolph / January 2013

The difficulty is producing coverage at a cost a small audience can support. An army of camera operators assigned to every school contest would make for an impressive staffing chart. Paying for it would require another plan.

Rudolph’s interest in automated production follows that arithmetic. By July 2025, he was discussing how artificial intelligence could help produce and extend coverage across amateur sports. His examples included turning game footage into clips and connecting individual players’ highlights with their statistics. The appeal to a parent is specific: finding the moments involving their own child.

A product announcement that May showed how those ideas were entering PlayOn’s offering. VidSwap became MaxPreps Advantage, with coaching analytics available free to coaches at NFHS Network member schools. At launch, the platform supported 11 sports across varsity, junior varsity and freshman levels.

The announced integration linked captured footage, breakdowns, verified statistics, scores and recap videos with automatic uploads to MaxPreps. Coaches could use game film for analysis while the resulting material also served students and fans. That creates several uses for one recording, a practical advantage when the original event has a limited audience.

Someone else’s idea, given room

Growth also brought the less photogenic work of joining companies together. In 2024, Rudolph described a first company kickoff gathering with more than 300 employees after PlayOn, GoFan and rSchoolToday had operated separately. The event made the enlarged organization visible to itself.

Employee ownership was another part of that work. After the GoFan merger, PlayOn granted equity ownership to all employees. Rudolph described a shared stake as a way to help people work across organizational boundaries. A combined company needs reasons for colleagues to care about what happens beyond their former business.

His appreciation for the labor behind an idea also surfaces outside PlayOn. In a public post celebrating his wife Kristine’s novel, The Twin Stars and the Soccer Superstar, he dwelt on the years of persistence involved in writing it. Watching a spouse bring an idea into the world, he said, felt different from seeing it happen professionally. The executive who had been given an early chance could also recognize someone else’s long effort.

Back to the part that started it

On October 22, 2025, PlayOn announced that Perkins Miller would become CEO in a planned transition. Rudolph had led the company for 17 years. He remained to oversee streaming and analytics; his current title is President, Streaming & Coaching Tools.

The change gave him a narrower brief inside a broader company. Miller arrived with experience at Fandom, StubHub and the NFL. Rudolph’s explanation centered on spending more time in the parts of PlayOn that had originally drawn him to the business. Stepping out of the CEO role allowed him to keep working on the underlying problem of access.

In August 2026, that work included a new 10-year agreement with the California Interscholastic Federation, making the NFHS Network its exclusive content distribution partner for regional and state championship events beginning in the 2026-27 school year. The agreement also added girls’ volleyball state finals to the television lineup alongside football and basketball championships.

Rudolph described the people he wanted to reach: a parent away for work, a grandparent elsewhere, an alumnus following a school. Those are familiar figures by now in his account of the business. The event is happening once. Someone who cares is somewhere else. Years after an unavailable Georgia Tech game annoyed him, he is still working on the connection.