Following a sports team in another country has never been easier, thanks to platforms like Fubo.
Founded in New York in 2015 and arriving in Canada in 2021, the streaming service offers Canadian viewers access to a wide range of live sports content, including soccer, cricket, mixed martial arts (MMA) and boxing, as well as out-of-market MLB, NBA and NHL games. That’s on top of non-sporting content offered through partners like Corus and CBC.
Since its Canadian launch, total streaming hours in Toronto have skyrocketed 3,800 per cent, total subscribers are up 722 per cent, while hours-per-viewer have jumped 410 per cent, with soccer emerging as a clear favourite, followed by Major League Baseball (MLB), and MMA in third.
That’s largely thanks to Fubo’s exclusive rights to broadcast some of the world’s biggest soccer matches in Canada, with international favourites like Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal drawing the biggest viewership in Toronto.
“We’re the home of soccer in Canada; we’d put our soccer offering against anyone,” says Ben Grad, senior vice-president of strategic partnerships and head of Fubo Canada. “But we also have baseball, we have hockey, we have basketball, we have a lot of ring-sports content like boxing and MMA, so it’s a pretty diverse offering for sports fans.”
The New York native first got a taste for digital entertainment as a Princeton economics graduate working at a consulting firm, when a colleague pointed him toward an open role at Universal Music.
While pursuing a business degree from Wharton, Grad spent a summer interning for Cablevision, and after graduating in 2005 he worked in digital content for Time Warner and Fuse TV, before landing a role in content strategy at Verizon Communications.
“My boss during my summer internship at Cablevision ended up becoming the CFO of Fubo, so it has always been on my radar,” Grad says. “He started asking me about different challenges and opportunities Fubo was looking at, and after a couple of those (conversations) I said, ‘If my ideas are so good, maybe you should hire me,’ and that’s ultimately what happened.”
In 2021, Fubo (which rebranded from FuboTV in 2023) made its first foray into Canada after Grad oversaw deals to secure exclusive rights to Italian Serie A and later English Premier League (EPL) soccer in the country. Soon after, the company installed Grad to manage the new market.
In the years that followed Fubo inked deals with CBC, Corus, OneSoccer, the MLB Network, MLB.TV, NBA TV, and the Buffalo Sabres in the Canadian Niagara region, to name a few. Today, Canadian subscribers can access 113 channels, most of which are dedicated to sports.
The Star recently caught up with Grad from the Fubo head office in Manhattan to discuss the rise of sports streaming in Canada, how the country’s multiculturalism spurs demand for content outside its local arenas, and how technology is bringing a world of sports to Canadian homes in ways cable never could.
Did you always want to work in sports?
After working in consulting for a couple of years I thought if I’m going to spend 50 or 60 hours a week working on something it might as well be something fun.
This was around the year 2000 in the dot-com internet 1.0 era, so I was very focused on what was then called “digital,” and over time “digital entertainment” became more of a focus as the technology and the industry matured, which was like the cherry on top.
Were you always a sports fan?
Always. I grew up in New York, but my family had Massachusetts roots, so I follow some New York teams, some Boston teams. I was never going to be a Yankees fan, because there’s Red Sox in my blood, so I became a Mets fan by default.
How did you merge those interests?
When I was doing my MBA at Wharton some of the classes included part-time informal internships and projects, and I worked on group projects with the Philadelphia Eagles, ESPN and Fox Sports. I also did a summer internship at Cablevision, which was a major cable company in New York at the time and was eventually acquired as the industry consolidated.
Why did Fubo put you in charge of overseeing the Canadian market?
After I graduated, I worked in strategy and consulting at Time Warner, now Warner Media, and as the director of strategy and planning for Fuse TV, before spending about a decade in content strategy and acquisition for Verizon Communications, so my background was largely in content acquisition.
I came to Fubo as the head of content strategy and acquisition in 2017, and I oversaw our acquisition of exclusive Serie A rights in Canada in 2021, and subsequently the exclusive English Premier League rights in Canada in 2022.
As part of all of that I put together a business case for entering Canada, and eventually the market became big enough that our CEO said we needed someone who is focused on running it, so I took on that position.
What content has been added since?
After we did that Serie A deal, we ended up working with CBC to put CBC, CBC News and SRC (Société Radio-Canada) content on the platform. Then we worked with Corus to get them on the platform, then OneSoccer, which has the Canadian Premier League, and the Canadian national team. We also did a deal to get MLB Network early on, and more recently we got NBA TV Canada onto the platform, which we’re really excited about.
As for hockey, we did a deal with the Buffalo Sabres about a year and a half ago to launch in the Niagara Region in Southern Ontario. We were the first distributor of those rights in Canada in almost a decade.
How many subscribers do you have in Canada?
As a publicly traded company we can’t share all our data, but we can say that we have approximately 1.6 million subscribers in North America. I can also tell you that Ontario makes up about half of our Canadian subscribers.
Where is the service available?
We’re a stand-alone app, and you can get Fubo on just about any device where you can download apps, whether that’s a smart TV or a smartphone, laptops, tablets, etc.
It’s a subscription model and you can pay monthly, but there are discounts if you choose to pay quarterly or annually. Prices depend on which plan you choose but it starts at $17.99 a month.
What are the most popular sports and events on the platform?
Soccer is the number one sport for us, and baseball is number two. Since we have MLB Network and MLB.TV on our platform, if you’re a Red Sox fan or a Dodgers fan living in Toronto you can subscribe to MLB.TV through Fubo and get access to about 2,000 games per season.
MMA is the third most popular sport streaming on Fubo in Toronto specifically.
What about local sports teams?
In the Canadian Premier League, several of the teams are Ontario-based, we have rights to the Canadian national team, and the PWHL — which is carried on CBC. We also re-air Raptors and Blue Jays games on demand, and carry select pre-season games.
Are your subscribers generally cable-cutters?
Our offering can make sense for someone who has a traditional media subscription, and it can make sense for someone who doesn’t.
We have exclusive content that you can’t find anywhere else, we have content that’s hard to find in other places, and we have some that you can find in a more traditional service. So, it makes sense for customers whether they have a traditional cable subscription or not.
Does your popularity in Toronto have anything to do with its large immigrant population?
Certainly, for a family that has heritage in Italy and wants to follow Serie A, we’re a great way to enable that generational connection and reinforce their historical connections.
Cricket is another example. With the Indian Premier League season starting we just launched a new cricket streaming package and we’ve seen really strong uptake with that offering.
So especially for multi-generational households where some folks have strong attachments to teams from a cultural heritage standpoint, and others just want to watch what’s popular locally, we enable all of that.
Is the platform also benefitting from the rise of sports betting in Canada?
We do sense a trend toward an uptake of sports betting services, and that is part of the Canadian sports ecosystem that wasn’t around a decade ago, so maybe that does coincide with what we’ve done.
I don’t personally think it’s a key driver, but we do offer things for fans that may be interested in sports betting, like data-rich feeds during Premier League soccer matches. For select games we offer an alternative feed that is more data intensive, and that can appeal to someone that is interested in sports betting, but I wouldn’t say it’s a main driver of the growth we’ve been seeing.
How else can streaming platforms offer more to sports fans than traditional cable?
We were the first distributor in Canada to offer EPL in Canada in 4K HDR. We also offer Multiview on Apple TV and Roku devices, which enables users to watch up to four different channels of their choice at once, so you can follow several matches at the same time, even across different sports. And just a few months ago we rolled out unlimited DVR, which allows Canadians to record as much content as they want for future playback.
