Professional Bull Riders has signed a one-year deal with Carbon Media Group to offer coverage of more than 100 live events and archived video content digitally, beginning next year.
The deal was scheduled to be announced this week.
With the agreement, CarbonTV.com, which focuses on outdoor and rural-lifestyle content, will be the official home to PBR Live, the circuit’s streaming service. Included in the offerings will be coverage of all Built Ford Tough Series and BlueDEF Velocity Tour stops.
The featured content will be produced by PBR. The live-event content will be the first such coverage for CMG.
CMG also will manage PBR’s YouTube channel.
Last year, PBR signed a one-year deal with CBS Interactive for that group to manage PBR’s digital video product, offering $9.95 monthly and $99.95 yearly subscriptions. The new deal with CMG makes the featured content available for free, something PBR officials said was an important component of the agreement.
“I think the subscription model has a lot of merit and opportunity in the future,” said PBR Chief Operating Officer Sean Gleason, “but we need to get a lot of engagement from our fans around the digital property before we put such an emphasis on subscriptions.”
Traffic numbers for the online content for 2014 were not available.
The deal was negotiated in-house and is valued in the mid-six-figure range. The agreement allows for the two sides to extend the deal up to two additional years.
“It makes sense for both of us,” said CMG Chief Executive Officer Hyaat Chaudhary. “They have a loyal fan base, and we reach a large base in outdoor and rural lifestyle.”
CMG, which was founded in 2007, draws 24 million unique viewers monthly, according to comScore.
The PBR programming will carry a combination of traditional, 30-second ads within the live broadcasts and the archived material, as well as broader sponsorships around packages of events or other PBR content. Ad sales will be done jointly.
“When we looked at our demographic and lined it up with Carbon, it was almost a perfect fit,” Gleason said.
Earlier this year, PBR extended with CBS their deal for TV coverage of the sport, signing an agreement that increases the number of Built Ford Tough Series events carried on the broadcast network to 14 a year, up from 10 annually.
Josh Carpenter is a staff writer for sister publication SportsBusiness Daily.
