For a while, one vertical in TV entertainment kept cable subscriptions alive as new competitors like Hulu, Apple TV, Roku and Netflix surged to popularity: sports.
But as live streaming continues to gain traction, Martin Floreani said even sports aren't stopping people from canceling cable anymore.
"Across every type of content, there is a large and growing disconnect between what and how people want to watch, and how traditional cable delivers,” said Floreani. “The cable bundle no longer makes financial sense for the vast majority of consumers. The old model is dying.”
For monster companies like Time Warner, AT&T, Dish and DirectTV, this realization hurts. For Floreani’s Austin-based company, FloSports, it’s perfect timing.
Under Floreani’s leadership as CEO and co-founder, the FloSports team has helped transform the sports media industry. Their company provides live events coverage, documentaries, breaking news, and more across 20 types of sports — all of which are viewable online with 24/7 exclusive newsroom coverage. Nearly 80 percent of their content is free, while the remaining 20 percent is accessible via a monthly or annual FloPRO subscription.
“In January, we had our best month in the company’s history,” said Floreani. “We’ve grown net cash from subscriptions by 80 percent year-over-year, and more than 56 million people annually visit our network of sites.”
Part of their success, Floreani said, is due to the partnerships they’ve added.
Since FloSports’ launch in 2006, they’ve entered into an eight-year deal with USA Wrestling on FloWrestling.com, a multi-year deal with WGI on FloMarching.com, and a recent partnership with Krossover that will help develop high school basketball footage. They've also gotten into the live streaming of the new Nitro Athletics Series through a partnership with Athletics Australia, as well as an agreement with The Big 12 that gives FloSports the rights to live coverage of the Big 12 Championships for swimming and diving, indoor track and field, wrestling and gymnastics.
But the other major tenet of their success, Floreani said, is all in the data.
“The reason we’re winning is our obsession with data,” said Floreani. “When we launched FloSports, one thing I learned immediately is that we could have access to more data than any other media company in the world. After realizing this, we invested heavily in analytics.”
Their subscription model has allowed the company to have a direct relationship with their consumers, giving them data and insights into user behavior and content consumption.
“As a result, we are much better informed on how visitors and subscribers activity relate to subscriber churn, retention and lifetime value,” said Floreani.
To understand these data points, FloSports developed an in-house business intelligence platform called Neptune. The platform merges disparate data sources to show FloSports’ top performing sectors in near real-time.
“This unique subscriber insight and the speed and precision of our informative data sources gives us a significant competitive advantage relative to competitors,” Floreani said.
As sports fans continue to turn away from cable providers and toward options like FloSports, Floreani said the company will continue to expand its team and strengthen its grip on the blossoming industry.
With 225 existing employees, Floreani said he expects to see the team exceed 300 by the end of 2017. Throughout the year, they’ll be hiring across the board, including several roles in marketing, sales, finance, product and engineering, content creation and production.
“There is great talent in the city, and we’ve been fortunate enough to put down our roots here. As a sports media company, we love being part of an active community. We’re excited to build our business here,” said Floreani.
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