Swerve TV chair Christy Tanner discusses the commercial and business appeal of women’s sport in the FAST space as her company launches dedicated channel Swerve Sports.
Christy Tanner
Tell us about Swerve TV.
Swerve TV is a multi-platform media company. Our core assets are two FAST channels. One is called Swerve Combat. In the US that’s now the number one combat channel for free, ad supported TV. And our second channel, which we just launched, is called Swerve Sports, and it’s exclusively focused on women’s sports, and that’s everything from basketball to gymnastics to softball to competitive cheerleading.
What have you taken from your first channel into the second?
I think the world of FAST in the US is different to the UK and Europe right now. The big players are Roku, Samsung, Pluto, Amazon and to some extent Tubi. My background is in live streaming and multi-platform digital. I ran streaming for CBS News for several years, and we launched some of the first FAST channels. What I knew from that experience, and what we then learned in the sports space with our first channel which started as a general sports offering, is that live events really drive engagement and viewership. And these distributors love live events because they’re competing in this very complex and fragmented US, streaming and connected TV space in which anybody can walk into a Walmart or a Best Buy and Buy $150 TV that comes pre-loaded with 500 channels and multiple services. In that world, live events carry a premium.
When we first started we found that of all the sports we were showing combat outperformed everything else. At a certain point, we pivoted that first channel to be all combat all the time, and started ramping up our live events to the point that in the past year, we’ve done 200 live combat matches in boxing and MMA primarily. That led to 215% year over year growth and 20 million viewers in the streaming space.
Once we became the number one combat channel a couple of distributors came to us and pointed out the tremendous demand for more women’s sports in streaming. Advertisers want to be around it but there just isn’t enough inventory to put it in the most boring terms. There is now a critical mass of women’s sport leagues in the US, with enough matches that you can programme a year-round women’s sport channels, and advertisers want to get in front of this audience which research shows is more engaged than other sport fans, more affluent and more likely to be loyal to brands that support women’s sport.
How do you pick what live rights you’re going for on your two different channels, and how do you compete against some of the behemoths in this business to secure rights to live events?
Well, we’re very practical, so we are not doing right now any deals that will break us as a company.
We’re looking at everything that comes along and finding there are more live rights than I think people realise. In the US right now you have two really massive sports leagues – women’s soccer and women’s basketball – and those get 80% of the attention. However, they’re probably not 80% of the sports market. We’re looking primarily at live and exclusive rights in that 20% of the sports market that right now is undervalued, so that that can be soccer and basketball games that are not being distributed on the big broadcast and cable outlets. These may be not necessarily the most in-demand games of the season, but they still have a demand among fans.
There are dozens of sports leagues out there and the US is big enough to support five or six football leagues for women, multiple soccer leagues, and then when you get outside of those two sports, gymnastics and swimming, and even something like competitive jet ski races. There are tonnes of things where people are competing, where there are really talented athletes, a passionate fan base and promoters and entrepreneurs who want to spread the word about these cool sports. I think in the media industry we can sometimes tend to get very narrowly focused on the big dogs, and we’re trying to play some smart bets elsewhere.
Women’s sport on FAST is an untapped market
Who’s backing the company? Where does the money come from?
Our initial channel was backed by the two founders, Steve Shannon and Dan Keston, who are entrepreneurs based in LA and over time we’ve brought in some other partners. Our second channel is funded by the first channel, so it took about 18 months for the first channel to become profitable, and we’re using those profits to reinvest in the second channel.
Can you talk a little bit more about the target audience?
In doing the research last year as to whether we should launch a second channel focused on women’s sports, we started taking a deep dive into the research that was out there and we commissioned our own research. What we found is the audience for sports played by women is – depending on the sport, depending on the day – much closer to 50/50 male female in gen Z than many people realise. And that’s across multiple studies.
There are a few differences, for instance, sports women like to watch other women play. In terms of the top women’s sports for men, it’s more football, basketball and then combat. I would say the biggest takeaway from all the work we did in questioning whether this would be a good business venture is that Gen Z’s media habits and sports preferences are quite different even from Millennial sports habits, but certainly significantly different from Gen X and Boomer sports habits in the US. For instance, baseball is not in the top five Gen Z sports. Over the years it’s become less popular among Gen Z – the games are long, slow, sometimes there isn’t that much scoring, and these are all things that play into Gen Z’s media habits. I would say also some of the leagues in the US are just more socially savvy than others. The NBA is probably the most socially savvy men’s league. What we are seeing now, though, with the WNBA is a league that is 10 times more socially savvy even than the NBA in terms of the players.
How do you distinguish from the other women’s sport channels out there?
In the US FAST marketplace, there are almost 1,000 channels. In total, there are 220 sports channels as of February, and three of them are focused on women’s sports. So, I think that there’s probably room for four of us. Is there room for 100 sports channels so that we can have gender parity? Until other sports channels have gender parity there’s more than enough content to fill four sports channels focused on women’s sports.
How we differentiate is almost too wonky and nerdy to get into. How FAST works here is not the way broadcast TV works in terms of how you drive engagement. It’s very much driven by what happens when you turn on your connected television. Their operating systems have a tremendous ability to drive engagement to specific channels. That means, as content creators, you have fewer tools to play with unless you have a big budget to spend on that home screen when it fires up. At the same time it means that there’s an opportunity to use some of the growth hacking tactics that digitally savvy companies have used over the years, but apply them to connected TV. How we’ll differentiate is in the execution, and we’ve done more than 200 live events. As I said, in the last year, there’s almost nobody doing live events at scale in FAST sports broadcast, Cable, yes, but in fast it’s not common yet.
What sort of content are you potentially in the market for to air around live events?
Right now we are casting a wide net. We’re trying everything from competitive cheerleading to freestyle trampoline and mixing in what we know will perform – basketball and women’s combat is going to be a big winner in this space. We’re looking at the data to see what performs and while it’s unfair to judge two weeks in and make any kind of pronouncement, women’s football is a winner, basketball is a winner, and live timber sports where people saw things with chainsaws and axes.
If somebody’s got sports documentaries and things like that in this area, should they be pitching those to you?
Absolutely. Sports docs do well. You don’t always know what’s going to take off. Having access to the data is everything, and we’re very data oriented. I’ve been in digital for more than two decades, and I can’t live without a data report daily to see how things are doing, because I’m not the focus group and neither really is our team. We really try to make fact-based decisions.
How do you expand further from here?
We’re already planning to expand internationally and the first countries that we’ll be looking to are the UK, Mexico, Brazil, the Nordics. Those countries tend to have stronger streaming and free streaming opportunities than certain other countries. You’ll see the combat channel expand internationally, probably within the next six months. And we hope that Swerve Sports will follow soon after.
