FuboTV Wins EPL Rights for Canada in 3-Year Deal
Virtual MVPD fuboTV will be the exclusive streaming platform in Canada for England’s Premier League soccer league beginning this season as part of a three-year deal, it said Thursday. It will show all 380 Premier League matches live on fuboTV and on its linear channel, Fubo Sports Network, it said.
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FuboTV CEO David Gandler said on a virtual investor webcast Thursday the content offering is another differentiator for fuboTV, and one of the company’s strategies to pull subscribers from traditional pay TV. Inflationary trends in 2022 could accelerate cord-cutting to more affordable streaming options like fuboTV, Gandler said.
Other growth drivers for 2022 are the continued shift of advertising dollars from traditional TV to connected devices, Gandler said. The third is the online sports wagering opportunity. The company has received regulatory approval for Fubo Sportsbook in Iowa and Arizona.
Responding to a question on whether saturation in the online sports betting space is a threat to Fubo, Gandler said Sportsbook isn’t competing with the large betting companies like DraftKings but is targeting the “casual” sports bettor: “That to me is where the real money is.” The company is focused on “the overall experience,” with a goal of transforming passive viewing into active participation, he said.
In a casual environment, where half a million people are watching a college football championship game, giving fans a chance to place a bet on their team “is a very different experience than having people look at different lines across different sports books and looking to optimize promotions,” he said. Fubo's offering "is not a way to do robo-betting where people need to have in real time the ability to put all their bets in. We’ll let them keep that market," he said of DraftKings and others: "Our job is a little different.”
FuboTV is using features including free-to-play games and multi-view to drive growth in subscribers, revenue and streaming hours, with hopes for “better retention," Gandler said. On whether the retention is sustainable, Gandler said fuboTV continues to take market share from other vMVPDs via brand positioning, NFL and college football games, regional sports network support and 50,000 sports events.
Thirty percent of Fubo Sportsbook registrations in Arizona and Iowa are crossover customers who also have fuboTV, Gandler said, a higher percentage than the company had expected. A quarter of bets are from crossover customers, he said. The average Fubo Sportsbook customer in the first two months placed about 9.5 bets, he said, vs. 8.05 for crossover customers. “When we figure out how to drive subscribers into the wagering product with minimum acquisition costs, these should be highly accretive customers,” he said.
FuboTV wants to have as many entry points to its streaming platform as possible, Gandler said. “If people want to come in through the sports book and then realize the value of our TV product -- and the integration of features that allow them to experience sports in a better way -- that’s not necessarily a bad thing."