“Cosm”, sports bars to watch football matches like at the geode

A giant 180-degree screen in a three-story dome to watch an American football match in total immersion, as if you were in a stadium. This is the new entertainment concept that is developing across the Atlantic.

What if we watched a football match at the Géode, this dome-shaped cinema located in the Villette district of Paris, next to the Cité des sciences? This is the experience offered by “Cosm” in the United States. The first one opened in Los Angeles in the spring of 2024, not far from the immense SoFi Stadium, where the local American football teams play. It is more of a performance hall than a sports bar. You enter a dome with three floors and, in front of you, a 26-meter diameter screen at 180 degrees, compared to 70 degrees for an Imax screen, for example.

The image quality, according to the creators, is 10 times more vivid than what a cinema offers today. The result is a “shared reality“, as Cosm presents it, aided by its own cameras installed near the field. Maximum immersion. You really have the feeling of being in the stadium with other spectators, without the vagaries of the weather or the sometimes complicated journey to the enclosure. The dome has 700 seats and very early on Saturday morning, Cosm Los Angeles fills up to broadcast a Premier League match, the English football championship, before moving on to American college football matches.

This is not a neighborhood bar. Cosm Los Angeles cost tens of millions of dollars. Cosm, a reference to Cosmos, located in Playa Vista, near the Pacific, therefore had to raise a lot of money, notably from the billionaire owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, an NBA team, and other very wealthy investors.

The CEO is Jeb Terry, a former professional American football player who has moved into the media industry. This helps to build relationships with networks like NBC and ESPN, which hold major sports rights, such as the Olympic Games for NBC and the NBA for ESPN. The company was created by acquiring Spitz, a specialist in technologies used in planetariums, and c360, whose cameras are used by the NFL, the National Football League, the number one sport in the United States.

Given the cost of the infrastructure, traditional sports bars don’t have much reason to worry, but Cosm has already opened a second location in Dallas. Atlanta is expected to follow. The goal is “50 Cosm“by the end of the decade with the possibility of serving as a plan B for the Olympics or other events such as the Super Bowl, when places are scarce. Cosm does not only have sports to offer. A Cirque du Soleil show is sometimes broadcast or documentaries, a bit like at the Géode, are other options.

That said, Cosm is very expensive, several hundred dollars for the most comfortable seats on the second floor of the dome. The other seats do not offer the same level of immersion. As a journalist from the site SF Gate, who tested the experience, writes, Cosm is the reflection of an access to professional sports that is increasingly expensive. There is always the option of watching your game on more classic giant screens in another room of Cosm. But at $20 admission and $10 for popcorn, it is expensive compared to a pub with cheap beer.