Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Media with Peter Kafka, powered by digital media.

Before we launch Recode Media as its own podcast, you may have heard Peter over at my podcast, Recode Decode.

Here's one of the fantastic interviews he did for Decode. Let's listen.

Recode Radio presents Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, powered by digital media.

Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about Silicon Valley's key players, big ideas, and how they're changing the world we live in.

This is our special weekly segment with host Peter Kafka, Recode's senior editor and producer of the Code Media Conference. Joining Peter each week are some of his favorite movers and shakers in the media world. And Peter, this week you talk to? Talk to Brian Rolap, who runs a... There's a sport called football. Yes, I've heard of it. It's a big deal.

He runs the NFL's media group.

The NFL is the biggest sport in America, which means he's kind of one of the most important people in media. The NFL is crucial to the way TV works and increasingly might be crucial the way the internet works. Right, they've been trying some things. Yeah, as you might recall, they did a, they streamed an entire game on Yahoo this fall, which seemed to work well.

So we talked to him about that and many other things.

Fantastic. I have a theory about media. It's not a really brave theory, but here it goes. Television is really big. Sports is really big on TV. Football is the biggest thing in sports. So it's the biggest thing on TV, which means my guest is one of the most important people in TV and media.

Yet no one knows who he is. His name is Brian Rolap. I'm going to call him the media guru of the NFL. Is that the correct title, Brian? Sure. You can go with that, I guess. So you are one of the most important people in football, one of the most important people in sports. I think if you walked into a stadium,

five people might recognize you? Maybe. Maybe if it's a game in New York where I know a lot of

people. Yeah, four or five people, including maybe like your driver or the guy. So let's explain to

the broad audience listening to this, what your day job is, why it's important. You run media

for the NFL. I do, yeah. That means you're the guy in charge of figuring out TV deals,

first and foremost, and figuring out every other kind of deal involving selling

NFL rights to different platforms. Am I summing that up correctly? Yeah, I think that's right. I think

I spent a large amount of my time creating the strategy for us how we distribute our content,

whether that's live games or other content online or on television.

But also I spent a good amount of time running our own and operated media assets,

whether that's NFL network, NFL mobile, NFL.com, those sorts of things.

So we'll talk about those other platforms, but I think of immediate import, both because

...