While it may not have the name recognition of some other live TV streaming services, fuboTV says it’s been growing quickly — it was “approaching” 250,000 paid subscribers in September, more than doubling the 100,000 subscribers it had a year ago.
For the entire third quarter, fuboTV says it saw a net addition of 30,000 subscribers. The company is also sharing details about its revenue, with an annualized revenue rate run rate of $102 million in September 2018, compared to $28 million September 2017. Plus, time spent per subscriber has grown 364 percent, to 51 hours.
The service first launched in 2015 as a soccer-focused streaming service, but it has expanded so that it’s not just offering live games from the NFL, MLB, NCAA, NBA and many others, but also carrying networks like AMC, CBS, NBC and FX. Co-founder and CEO David Gandler said it’s now “a sports-first cable replacement product.”
“People come in through the sports and they stay for the entertainment,” he said.
Gandler acknowledged that there’s one big, missing piece — ESPN. But he added, “As a startup, we obviously are talking to everybody … At some point in time, when it makes sense for both sides, that deal will come to fruition.”
Competing services have been making growth announcements with bigger numbers — Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV now seem to be in competition for the top spot, while Hulu’s live TV service recently topped 1 million subscribers.
However, Gandler said fuboTV is doing quite well “relative to our brand penetration” — in other words, when you compare how many people have heard of Sling or DirecTV, versus how many people have heard of fuboTV, the startup’s numbers are “just remarkable.”
He also argued that fuboTV has been punching above its weight class in other ways. With a team of fewer than 150 employees, “We built a cable platform in 18 to 24 months,” he said.
It hasn’t experienced significant downtime, it recently launched a live recommendations product and this summer, it was the first live TV streaming service to launch a 4K HDR feature in a beta program that included NCAA college football, MLB playoffs and English Premier League soccer.
“We’re as a small startup, but we execute very well,” Gandler said. “The reason why, I believe, is that this is our only product. It’s not being used to sell other products. We have to be very good at what we do.”