FuboTV, a virtual MVPD focused first on live sports, could become more of a player for exclusive sports streaming rights in the U.S.
Speaking today at an RBC Capital Markets investor conference, fuboTV CEO David Gandler said 96% of his service’s overall audience watched live sports in September 2021 and that he expects his company’s revenues to hit $1 billion “at some point.”
“With a predictable revenue stream, I guess the question is, given all the data that we collect, could we or should we be ones to also look at acquiring some of these rights directly,” he said, adding that fuboTV’s acquisition of streaming rights for Conmebol’s World Cup qualifying soccer matches in April a test that’s “working quite well for us.”
Gandler’s comments arrive against a backdrop where ViacomCBS, Disney and Comcast are rumored to be circling U.S. rights for Premier League soccer. According to the Financial Times, those rights could go for about $2 billion, double what Comcast/NBCUniversal paid for them in 2015.
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FuboTV has been consistently adding subscribers and Gandler reiterated his view that the U.S. virtual MVPD space could grow to between 40 million and 50 million subscribers in the next five years. He previously told CNBC that his company held about 2.6% share of the market two years ago but has grown its share to approximately 6%. By that math, he predicted fuboTV will grow to between 3 million and 5 million subscribers by 2026.
With an estimated 70 million U.S. households still subscribing to traditional pay TV services, Gandler estimated that over the next seven to 10 years, that number could shrink down to about 20 million to 25 million. He said about 1.2 million traditional pay TV subscribers cut the cord during the third quarter and fuboTV picked up about 263,000 subscribers.
“That tells me that our own internal guidance has been, can we take 5% of them, as people churn out of traditional into virtual. We’re taking 20% of net adds now and the question is can we be 10% or 20% of the total vMVPD market over the next five to seven years. I’m very excited about the opportunity and with scale, you can imagine unit economics improve as well,” Gandler said.
FuboTV recently surpassed 1 million subscribers and now expects to close out the year with 1.06 million to 1.07 million subscribers.