FuboTV Puts Live Sports Out Front Without Skimping on Entertainment Channels

Are you ready for some football? Australian rules football, that is? Imagine American football with no pads or helmets, fewer timeouts, and punting to advance the ball. Or, if you’d rather, think of it as soccer with more contact and scoring. Until NFL games start in a few weeks, the FuboTV streaming service has plenty of Australian Football League, tennis and cycling to tide you over.

“We’ve got rugby,” FuboTV CEO David Gandler says, “we’ve got Australian football, we’ve got New Zealand football, the Spanish basketball league, a lot of different soccer leagues, and a lot of other stuff. There’s all kinds of sports out there.”

Whether it’s The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, Taylor Swift’s channel on DirecTV Now or YouTube TV with its YouTube Red shows, streaming-bundle providers that carry similar lineups of cable channels like Bravo and FX are distinguishing themselves with originals. FuboTV has a similar core lineup (A&E, HGTV, etc.) and price point ($35 a month) as its competitors but is distinguishing itself with sports — lots and lots of sports.

Gandler sat down with Decider to talk about FuboTV’s sports-first approach to assembling a lineup of broadcast and cable channels — and recently adding CBS — while carving out an identity for itself with U.S. and international sports.

DECIDER: Who’s watching international sports? Is it expats in the United States who grew up on these sports? People who grew up playing those sports?

DAVID GANDLER: We are positioning the business around the idea that there are a few tentpole sports like the NFL, Major League Baseball, local sports and major soccer events. From there, you expand out. Your kids may play lacrosse, or you may be into some other sports. The main reason we haven’t seen American sports fans engage more in these other sports is that they haven’t been readily available.

You don’t have ESPN. Is that something you’d like to see in your package before college and pro football start this fall, or is that not very likely?

It’s not likely. We’ve been in talks for some time with Disney, but we have to make choices. We’d love to have everything and we’ve got other networks that we’ll be announcing over time, but ESPN is a tough play for us given how expensive it is. We’re not sure the market can handle a $60 price point for a streaming package.

The companies who own the broadcast and cable channels are pretty diversified across sports, news, lifestyle and scripted channels. For your focus, though, it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense for your to buy a company’s full line of channels. How have you approached that?

If you look at our bundle vs. other bundles, we have networks that a lot of other services don’t have. For example, we’ve got the Olympic Channel in our basic plan. We’ve got Big Ten Network and FS2 in our basic plan. We’re in the process of adding some independent channels. Hulu and YouTube TV’s plans are more general entertainment, and we’re more sports-centric. Once we build out our bundle with more sports content — hopefully before the end of football season — you’ll see us carrying four or five more sports networks.

You have, I think, three Spanish-language channels in your base plan. Is that a big distinguisher for your?

We have Telemundo and NBC Universo Sports, and we have Univision Deportes in some markets. Our goal is to differentiate on two fronts — more sports content than anybody else, which we have with our basic bundle, and enhancing the features that sports fans like, which we’re continuing to build out with enhanced picture in picture and finding new ways to leverage the metadata from programming.

You’re calling your base $35 package an introductory rate, and most of your competitors are at $35 or $40. Can you realistically push your base price beyond $40?

We can if we can provide enough value. It’s tough to understand right now what the market will bear. The technology is improving, but we still have a ways to go before streaming is 100 percent buffer-proof. For sports fans who are paying $200 for cable, $60 could be a very good deal for certain packages.

You could drop your Scripps and A+E networks without losing any sports and pick up ESPN for a few dollars more per subscriber. Wouldn’t that make more sense for you than lifestyle programming?

Lifetime has some women’s soccer, but you’re largely right. You’re starting to see the bundles break, and I think you’ll start to see general entertainment bundles for $10 or $15 with no sports to compete with the $35 and $40 streaming services. As we and other bundlers start getting into our next cycle of negotiations, I think you’ll see a lot of networks coming in and going out. I think you’ll start to see us move some things around next year, so you’re on the right track.

Do you see that entertainment bundle as an add-on for FuboTV or something other services?

Discovery, Scripps, Viacom, A+E and AMC are looking at ways to put bundles together that would cost $10 or $15. By the first quarter of next year, I think you’ll be seeing major media companies making a lot different offerings available. In our case, if we have you watching sports on FuboTV and can offer you an entertainment bundle on top of that, that seems like an easy thing for us to do. It’s not core, but it’s something we certainly could do.

You have NBC, FOX and CBS in some local markets. What’s the roadmap for expanding those networks to additional markets.

The NFL is key. We should be able to get to 70 percent of the country on FOX affiliates by the beginning of football season. We’re a little further back with NBC, which will be more like 40 percent of the country. We’re just starting with CBS, and we’re hoping to eventually get to a deal with all of their affiliates.

None of the services have announced coast-to-coast CBS carriage yet. Is CBS’s bargaining deal that it has with its affiliates something that just hasn’t worked its way into negotiations with the different services yet?

I can’t speak for CBS, but I can say that we’re hoping to have a large portion of the country before the beginning of NFL season.

Are you an exclusive U.S. distributor for some of the international sports channels in your add-on packs?

We always advocate for non-exclusivity. Sports is so expensive — tens of billions of dollars a year for all of these different league deals — that it’s not cost-effective to pay for exclusivity. It’s more realistic for a fan to enjoy the services of a full bundle with the Olympics and the NFL and some soccer, so we’re trying to maximize the number of sporting events that we can get onto the platform. Even without ESPN, we’ll have 90 percent of NFL games on our platform.

There’s some soccer in your base tier and some in the add-ons. How do people watch soccer? Do they tend to watch one league? Several leagues?

For us, they key leagues are the English Premier League, La Liga in Spain, and Bundesliga in Germany. Those are the three leagues that most soccer fans watch. And then there are smaller leagues that you can add on for the Brazilian, Argentinian, Venezuelan and a few other leagues. With soccer, you have players who play in multiple leagues throughout the year. Cristiano Ronaldo plays in the Spanish La Liga for Real Madrid. In the Euro Cup or World Cup he’ll play for the Portugal national league, and he’ll also play in the UEFA Champions League. People will follow particular players, so we try to make those different leagues available.

There’s been some discussion in the analyst community about whether mergers among the smaller cable groups actually makes any sense. Does it make sense for Discovery and Scripps to merge if you don’t actually want a big combined package from them but might want one or the other if they weren’t merged?

If you want one a particular channel, you have the work with the company who owns it. We have avoided working with some network groups because we can’t afford their channel package. I’m sure a combined Discovery and Scripps will try and leverage the breadth of their content as one group.

HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and Starz are becoming available as add-ons to a lot of streaming bundles. Is that something you’d expect to see FuboTV do?

We’re going to add the availability for Showtime in October, which is part of our deal with CBS. It doesn’t hurt for us to have additive things that aren’t in the basic bundle, so we like to have premium channels that people can subscribe to.

Are those premium channels desirable for streaming services because they add another level of strength to the relationship between you and the subscriber?

It’s too early for us to say at this point for FuboTV. Based on the data we’re seeing, we think premium channels will be a great edition. People like single sign-ons and having things in one place, so it makes sense to make those other things available. We’re primarily focused on providing the largest sports package for the best price and having features that engage those customers.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.