When the sports world froze in March, fuboTV’s primary product vanished just as the company was preparing to go public. However, despite the blow, the sports-first television streaming platform in early October began trading on the NYSE under the ticker symbol F-U-B-O. On the latest episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” our Andrew Levin sits down with fuboTV co-Founder & CEO David Gandler to discuss the IPO, where fubo plans to allocate the capital earned on the public market and navigating the pandemic.
On why he wanted to take fuboTV public:
Gandler: We thought it was a young company growing quickly. We also felt that there was an enormous amount of appetite for streaming in the public markets and, given where we were and the current growth rate, which we were forecasting roughly about $240 million for this year and over $400 million for next year, we thought it was the right time to go public. It would allow investors to play the company early, get in early, which you don’t really see often. I think most IPOs today happen with companies that are really late-stage.
On how much money was raised through the IPO and plans for the funds:
Gandler: We raised $197 million of gross proceeds. That’s before commissions and fees. The game plan is relatively straightforward. We’ve doubled down on our technology platform, which is, obviously, one of the best in the world. We’re still the only platform that is able to stream live sports in 4K at scale, which is tough to do. The idea is we’ll probably spend some portion of our dollars on continuing to build out the technology team. We’re going to continue to make investments into our advertising business. ... We’ll continue to develop addressable technologies to drive CPMs. We’ll continue to invest in machine learning to be able to surface the most-appropriate content. … Obviously, we’ll spend that money driving subscriber growth.
On how the pandemic impacted the business:
Gandler: As we started to see leagues shutdown in Europe, obviously, that was quite concerning to us. The fear was that we were going to lose 70-80% of our customers on a short-term basis and maybe 30-40% of our customers for good. People cancel; they change services; they change their mind; they may not need it anymore. It was clearly an issue for us, but our strategy was "come for the sports and stay for the entertainment." The one positive thing for us, with respect to the pandemic, was we were able to stress test this theory, the strategy of "come for the sports and stay for the entertainment." While we weren’t able to get people to come for sports since there were no sports, a lot of the technology that we built, the machine learning capabilities, our ability to induce certain behaviors on the platform, the favoriting of channels, the perpetual DVR that we put in that allowed people to watch their favorite sports moments, that kicked in very nicely and drove viewership hours to about eight hours per day.
