DAVID GANDLER is the co-founder & CEO of N.Y.-based online provider of live football content fuboTV. The company, which went live on Jan. 8 and has since signed up 175,000 registered users, announced earlier in the week that it raised $4M in Series A funding. Customers pay a subscription fee of $6.99 per month for access to a variety of football content including La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1. FuboTV drew more than 1.5 million visits to its platform in June, with Gandler estimating that 80-85% of the traffic came from inside the U.S. He emphasized the company's intention to expand to new markets soon, though, saying the goal is to open an int'l office around mid-September. Gandler spoke to SBD Global about his predictions for how consumers will access TV in the future, fuboTV's strategy for int'l expansion and his lifelong love of soccer.
On how fuboTV will use the latest round of funding ...
David Gandler: Obviously sports fans are very particular about sports viewing, so we want to make sure that from a technical perspective, they have very consistent viewing across all of our platforms. So it's building out consistent devices, apps for consistent viewing, as well as better features for sports viewers -- features that include hiding scores and things like that in case they decide to DVR. That's just one piece of it. The other piece is continuing to talk with rights holders and television networks about more content rights, as well as hiring key personnel to allow us to do this globally. We're starting to look at different markets, Latin America obviously being one. We're closely monitoring Europe and Southeast Asia and looking for the best opportunities that are out there in the short term. As those decisions are made, we want to be able to quickly hire up folks that can help us build out in those regions very quickly.
On the company's plans for int'l expansion ...
Gandler: The easy thing to say is obviously big countries like Brazil, but everybody is after those countries. We are looking at it from a different perspective because we're over-the-top. We're looking at countries that have high cable penetration rates, which means that people are used to paying for content. We're looking at countries that have downlink speeds that are fast, because when you're streaming sports you don't want to see a lot of buffering. We're not looking at this from what is the size of the market. We're looking for certain characteristics that would allow us to move in and make a difference in that market. So download speeds is certainly one, and then the level of pay-TV penetration, if it's high, that's another. Country-specific, there are countries that are interesting to us. Chile, Uruguay and Colombia are ones that we've highlighted as particular opportunities in the very short term.
On the challenge of building a subscription business ...
Gandler: It's really about understanding subscription businesses. It's pretty tough to build a subscription business, even if you're a large company that has a lot of money, just because it's so labor-intensive. Years and years of understanding how this works and A-B testing has allowed us to sort of go around ... we're not impacted by a learning curve, where most startups would be.
On how he expects the media landscape to change in the years to come ...
Gandler: Everything is cyclical in life. If you look at television alone, you'll notice that there were three or four broadcast television channels that carried local news, sports, soap operas, comedy. Then we got into a time where cable networks popped up and you started seeing news channels, sports vertical channels, women's channels, etc. I think what you're going to see in the next stage of cable -- and cable will never go away because for most people, I would say, it's probably great, I still subscribe to cable, by the way -- but I think what you're going to see is the same type of verticalization as you've seen in programming to now happen in bundles. I'm going to give you an example, if you are a news junkie, you're going to get a really deep channel lineup of news. If you're a soccer junkie, you should get a vertical bundle that's really deep in soccer. Because even in sports, somebody may not particularly like college football, which is very expensive, very popular -- they may just like winter sports or something else. I think the way the bundle is going to be is that folks will eventually choose how they want to bundle. But I think you will have no way of going around bundles, because they really allow you to get more content for your buck. The question is, again, how will they be bundled. I personally think that you'll see more vertical bundles as opposed to horizontal bundles.
On his favorite sport ...
Gandler: Obviously it's soccer. I grew up in New York City, so obviously I played as a kid. I played in college. I went to Boston University and played there throughout my college career. One of the reasons that I started this is I felt that I had every subscription known to mankind, but I always missed every game. I would get texts from friends saying, 'Hey, Manchester's up 1-0.' And I'm like, 'How do you guys know? Where are you watching this?' To me, it was very stressful that I never knew where to go to just find out about everything, all in one place. The world is really about convenience and mobile technology. Everywhere that you see tech moving, it's really providing consumers with efficiencies. There's a lack of efficiency when it comes to sports, not knowing where you can find things.
On his favorite football clubs to watch ...
Gandler: Just like a lot of soccer fans in the U.S., we're not like Europeans where we have one team we follow from our town. We haven't been as privileged as the Europeans or some of the Latin American countries to be exposed to that degree of soccer. So for me, I follow teams in several countries. In the U.K., it's Manchester United. When it's Champions League, I'm looking at three or four teams. In Italy, it's AC Milan. In Spain, it's Barcelona. And then in Portugal, it's Benfica. So that's kind of how I watch my soccer, based on four teams.
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