Earlier today, fuboTV announced they are officially in the process of acquiring sports betting and interactive gaming company Vigtory with intentions to close out the deal in the first quarter of the year. fuboTV also announced they plan to launch a sportsbook by the end of the year with the goal of leveraging Vigtory’s sportsbook platform and digital gaming assets, and its consumer-driven betting technology, to develop a frictionless betting experience for fubo’s customers.
During the 23rd Annual Needham Virtual Growth Conference, CEO David Gandler revealed a bit about the company’s decision to venture into sports betting. “It makes our core business valuable, for sure. The core business is doing quite well. The numbers keep improving throughout the quarter, which we thought was extremely compelling,” he explained.
“The sports betting side allows us to increase the funnel. We’re going to be targeting customers with our free to play app. That adds more people to the funnel that care about sports and allows us to convert people to the sportsbook, allows us to convert users/players to the video product, allows us to have promotional capabilities that we may not have had in the past. We think it’s going to increase engagement and retention. We think it’s very complimentary and very synergistic and there could be a non-linear impact on our core business and advertising.”
The free to play experience which is expected to launch this summer, is made possible by their acquisition of Balto Sports in December. Balto Sports is a Y-Combinator company, that develops tools for users to organize and play fantasy sports games.
fuboTV will first launch the free to play experience as a standalone app, which will be later integrated directly into the fuboTV user experience, though non-fuboTV subscribers will have access as well.
fubo’s new adventure comes as the vMVPD is in high demand more than ever. Just last week, fuboTV announced that they expect to exceed 545,000 subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter (72 percent year-over-year increase). The company had projected ~510,000 subscribers going into the quarter.