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Exclusive live sports are coming to Roku, as the streaming platform plants a flag in the ground in the uber-competitive space that has traditionally been dominated by legacy TV networks.
Roku and CBS Sports have inked a deal to become the exclusive U.S. media partners for Formula E, the motorsport series featuring electric racing cars.
The deal expands CBS’ prior deal with Formula E (officially called ABB FIA Formula E World Championship), and will include five races per season on CBS, which will also stream on Paramount+.
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Roku, meanwhile, will stream 11 races per season on the Roku Channel. Both the Paramount+ and Roku Channel races will be accessible through Roku’s recently-launched sports experience, which is meant to surface live sports content for Roku users.
“I think it does mark a big new step for us,” Roku’s head of content David Eilenberg tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview, adding that up to this point Roku has focused on developing sports-adjacent programming like docuseries and The Rich Eisen Show.
“So we’ve been finding our way toward having our own offering from a sports standpoint for a little while now,” Eilenberg adds. “This just opportunistically was such a great sort of first step into actual live sports rights that we put a lot of energy behind getting the deal done.”
The deal makes Formula E’s races available for free through the Roku Channel, which when paired with the races broadcast on CBS and streaming on Paramount+, makes the series broadly accessible to the U.S. population.
“We were partners with CBS already, so we’ve had that partnership for some time and it’s been a really successful partnership for us, we love working with them,” Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds tells THR in an interview. “They’re pretty disruptive thinkers and pretty creative thinkers, so they’re good fun to work with.”
Dodds adds that his organization was thinking about how to expand its media presence in the U.S., and the deal with Roku came together naturally.
“We’re both challenger businesses,” he says, adding that the response Formula E received in its last race in Portland, Oregon over the weekend solidified the desire to make its product more visible in the U.S.
“We have massive, massive expectations of our products around the world in terms of its growth potential,” Dodds adds. “The world is moving towards electrified vehicles, so we know that so we have a great tailwind. What we need to do is to show people that electric vehicles still equals incredibly competitive racing, and therefore getting the right media partnership in the U.S. is incredibly important for us. And we’re really optimistic that that combination of CBS and Roku does that perfectly for us.”
Formula E is betting that the combination of a CBS and Paramount+ audience and a Roku audience will deliver the reach and exposure it’s seeking.
“Formula One’s been around for 70-odd years, it has a very traditional fan base that are the kind of diehard motorsport enthusiasts,” Dodds says. “So whilst we still have racing enthusiasts that love our product, we also have what we will call more of the electric generation, skewing slightly younger, slightly more generalist but also more interested in sustainability more generally. And when we talked to the folks over at Roku, we understood that’s exactly where their demographic is, as well as the audience they’re aspiring to bring to their platform. So we have this kind of this beautiful meeting of minds when it came to figuring out who’s the audience that we’re trying to cultivate.”
For Roku, the deal marks a first foray into live sports, but also a possible look at how sports deals could shake out in the future. Formula One, for example, recently inked a new deal with Disney, which will see its races available for free on ABC, but with many on ESPN or ESPN+, limiting their reach to paying subscribers.
“I think part of what’s going to be interesting about the sports landscape as it evolves over these next few years, is seeing which live sports end up behind a paywall and which ones don’t,” Eilenberg says. “In this case, it’s our pleasure to be able to offer the races to our viewership just as we do with everything on the Roku channel: Completely for free.”
“And so I think what you’ll see is many of these sports leagues trying to balance where they put their products in terms of what is going to be free, what’s going to be behind a paywall, in certain cases, what’s going to be pay per view,” he adds. “The economic modeling is going to be interesting, but I do I do think that we have something special to offer in the fact that the Roku channel is a completely free ad supported streaming service.”
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