Roku launched a new look at top female athletes Thursday that includes a relative newcomer to the field.
Omaha Productions is best known for the programs it produces for ESPN — particularly the so-called “ManningCast” featuring Omaha leader Peyton Manning and his brother, Eli — but the company is making inroads into a slate tied to women’s sports.
“We are really encouraged by the appetite” for programming about female athletes,” says Colin Campbell, head of development for Omaha Productions, in a recent interview. “There’s a real interest here.”
The new series, “Gamechangers: America’s Top 25 Female Athletes,” is executive produced by Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, and Peyton Manning and features commentary from Olympic medalists Adam Rippon and Alysia Montaño, comedians Fortune Feimster and Jared Freid, WNBA announcer Ryan Ruocco, Fox Sports soccer analyst Stu Holden, sports media personalities Katie Feeney and Katie Nolan, broadcasters Cari Champion and Hannah Storm, and others. Bird and Morgan also appear in the special, which uses light banter and commentary to help viewers understand the athletes’ impact and achievements.
There’s an opportunity for Omaha to press into new production areas, says Eve Wulf, producer of current series for Omaha, during an inteview. “Gamechangers” shows the company using humor in a new way, enlisting comedians and others in a format that might hearken to VH-1 retrospective shows like “Best Week Ever” or “I Love The 90s.” “We really wanted to create something that was lighthearted and celebratory. Salvatory. We want people to watch the show or come away with a conversation,” says Wulf. “I think we know that any reasonable person will disagree with some of the rankings and disagree with some of the athletes on the list and say, ‘Why didn’t you include so-and-so?’ But what matters to us more is that it gets people talking about the athletes.”
Omaha, which was co-founded by Peyton Manning and longtime sports-media executive Jamie Horowitz and is backed by private-equity player Silver Lake and former Endeavor executive Patrick Whitesell, has been expanding its aperture in recent years. In 2026, it has released four different projects tied to women’s sports, including weekly game-of-the-week coverage of League One Volleyball for Versant Media’s USA cable network, which marks the company’s first foray into season-long live-sports coverage.
“The great thing about women’s sports is there are still a lot of stories that haven’t been told,” says Wulf. “There’s a lot of opportunity to go deep on different individuals. And I think that that’s where we’re going to spend our time.”
Earlier this year, Omaha had a hand in “The Final Third,” a three-part series that followed Angel City FC, Washington Spirit and Kansas City Current as the teams navigated their way through a season in the NWSL. A live one-hour special, “Celebrating Pat Summitt,” spotlighted the achievements of the legendary Tennessee women’s basketball head coach who won eight national championships, and drew a non-traditional sponsorship from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.
Omaha’s growing interest in projects tied to women’s sports mirrors the broader attention being paid to leagues including NWSL, WNBA and others. ESPN this summer is replacing its venerable “Sunday Night Baseball” with “Women’s Sports Sundays,” a showcase for women’s soccer and basketball that also requires new talent assignments as well as the production of new kinds of shoulder studio programming.
Campbell, the Omaha executive, believes the growing interest in women’s sports got a new boost after Caitlin Clark joined the roster of the Indiana Sun in 2024. The company realized “there’s clearly an audience here,” he says. “There’s an appetite from distributors. So we kind of doubled down.”
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