Formula E
Live sports exclusives are coming to Roku as the streaming platform makes a mark in the highly competitive space traditionally dominated by legacy TV networks.
Roku and CBS Sports have signed a deal to become the exclusive US media partner of Formula E, the motorsport series featuring electric cars.
The deal expands on CBS’ previous deal with Formula E (officially called the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship) and includes five races per season on CBS, which will also be streamed on Paramount+.
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 aims to bring live sports content to Roku users.
“I think it’s a big new step for us,” Roku’s content director David Eilenberg said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, adding that Roku has so far focused on developing sports programs like documentaries and The Rich Eisen Show .
“So we’ve been looking for our own offer from a sporting point of view for some time,” adds Eilenberg. “This was just such a great first step into actual live sports rights, opportunistically, that we put a lot of energy into closing the deal.”
The deal makes Formula E’s races available for free through the Roku Channel, which combined with races televised on CBS and streamed on Paramount+, makes the series broadly accessible to the US population.
“We were already partners with CBS, so we’ve had this partnership for a while and it’s been a really successful partnership for us. We love working with them,” Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds told THR in an interview. “They’re quite disruptive thinkers and quite creative thinkers, so they’re a lot of fun to work with.”
Dodds adds that his organization has been thinking about how to expand its media presence in the US and the deal with Roku came naturally.
“We’re both challengers,” he says, adding that the response Formula E received at its final race over the weekend in Portland, Oregon fueled a desire to make its product more visible in the US
“We have tremendous expectations of our products around the world in terms of growth potential,” adds Dodds. “The world is moving towards electrified vehicles, we know that and therefore have a lot of tailwind. What we need to do is show people that electric vehicles still equate to incredibly competitive racing and that’s why it’s incredibly important for us to get the right media partnership in the US. And we’re really optimistic that the combination of CBS and Roku makes this perfect 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 seeks.
“Formula 1 has been around for over 70 years, it has a very traditional fanbase that’s the kind of die-hard motorsport enthusiast,” says Dodds. “So while we still have racing enthusiasts who love our product, we also have what we will call more of the electric generation, a little younger, a little more general in attitude, but also more generally more interested in sustainability. And when we spoke to the folks at Roku, we understood that that’s where their demographic is and also the audience that they want to bring to their platform. So it comes as a beautiful meeting of minds as we try to figure out who the audience we are trying to reach is.”
For Roku, the deal marks a first foray into live esports, but also a possible glimpse of how esports deals might pan out in the future. Formula 1, for example, recently signed a new deal with Disney whereby its races will be available for free on ABC, but many will be available on ESPN or ESPN+, limiting reach to paying subscribers.
“I think part of what’s going to be interesting about the esports landscape that’s going to evolve over the next few years is seeing which live sports end up behind a paywall and which don’t,” says Eilenberg. “In this case, it’s our pleasure to offer the races to our viewership the same way we do everything on the Roku Channel: completely free.”
“And I think what you’re going to see is that a lot of these sports leagues are trying to balance the placement of their products in terms of what’s going to be free, what’s going to be behind a paywall, and in certain cases what’s going to be pay-per.” -View,” he adds. “The economic modeling will be interesting, but I do think we have something special to offer because the Roku Channel is a completely free, ad-supported streaming service.”
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