Breaking: Roku Signs First Live Sports Rights Deal with Formula E Racing; CBS, Paramount+ Renew Deal

Drivers, start your engines, as another player is reportedly set to enter the world of live sports streaming. Roku has announced that it is set to be the new lead broadcast home of ABB FIA Formula E World Championship racing. The circuit is the leading global electric street racing organization and will air a majority of its events on Roku beginning in January.

Roku will be the home of 11 races starting with the new season and that five races will air on CBS and Paramount+, continuing the series’ partnership with CBS Sports. Both CBS and The Roku Channel will also carry additional Formula E content as the Eye Network will air a highlights package and Roku will house archive content as well, including race previews and highlights, as well as documentaries on the series and its drivers.

Paramount and Roku already work closely, and customers who subscribe to Paramount+ through Roku will be able to watch all 16 races from inside the Roku platform. Also, users will be able to access the races through the Sports Experience on Roku’s home screen.

“This is a powerful new partnership with CBS and Roku that will dramatically increase Formula E’s audience reach and maximise discoverability of our programming in the USA,” Formula E’s chief media officer Aarti Dabas said. “We value the strength of our ongoing relationship with CBS and are delighted to join forces with Roku and supercharge Formula E content on their market-leading platform.”

Financial terms for the new rights deal were not disclosed, but the addition of live sports rights, even for a niche corner of auto racing is significant for Roku. The platform is already the most popular streaming hub in the United States and Canada thanks to its integration as the operating system for many brands of smart TVs, but the company’s ad-supported streaming platform is also increasingly popular in the U.S.

According to Nielsen, The Roku Channel hit a ratings' milestone in May, eclipsing 1% of total TV viewership for the first time ever. The streamer has invested heavily in original programming over the past year, including recently announcing originals from Jessica Alba, Sofia Vergara, Reese Witherspoon, and other A-list stars; as well as renewing the rebooted “Great American Baking Show” for another season.

“It’s an honor to partner with Formula E on Roku’s first-ever live sports partnership, making it easier for millions of TV streamers to discover the thrill of Formula E races through the unique integrated viewing experiences only available on Roku,” the streamer’s head of content David Eilenberg said. “We look forward to working together with Formula E, as well as our longstanding partners at CBS and Paramount+, to drive viewership to this programming and to connect new audiences with the exhilarating world of Formula E.”

When Roku last reported earnings in late April, it announced that during the first quarter of 2023, it had 71.6 million active users who had wracked up over 25.1 billion hours of streaming, both records for the service.

With the introduction of exclusive, live-streaming sports rights, Roku appears to be signaling that it is going to continue its expansion into original programming moving forward. Despite Roku’s Nielsen milestone last month, it was not the most-viewed free streamer during the month, that honor went to the Tubi. However, the Fox-owned service does not seem to have the same appetite for originals as Roku does. Though the service did serve as the on-demand home for Men's World Cup matches in 2022, no such similar announcement has yet been made for the Women’s World Cup, which starts next month.

Despite Fox’s wide-ranging sports rights deals, the company has declined to include Tubi in any of those plans, as executives had said that the service’s business model is not right for those types of deals. While that could certainly change in the future, it now appears that Roku is going to try and fill that vacuum in the ad-supported, free-streaming market by following the strategy that Netflix has articulated in the past.

While the world’s largest streamer has yet to get involved in live sports broadcasting thus far, in discussing the possibility, reports indicate that Netflix would prefer to focus on niche sports that it can either own or have an oversized influence on rather than competing for the billion dollar rights for established leagues like the NFL, NBA, or Major League Baseball.

Given how quickly The Roku Channel has grown into a formidable force in the streaming world, it would not be surprising if this was just the first of many announcements to come about the platform securing live sports rights.