It’s been a huge year for Caffeine. The emerging streaming platform backed by Fox, Disney, Cox and more announced Monday that they’ve now passed 60 million monthly active users, a huge jump over the five million they had last December. And they’ve also posted 140 times revenue growth in the last six months.
Around that announcement, Caffeine CEO Ben Keighran spoke to AA via email about how they got there. He said their partnerships with emerging sports leagues were crucial to that. Keighran said Caffeine’s big expansion focus this year was in the live sports space, including partnerships with the X Games, World Surf League, Natural Selection Tour, World Skate, World Poker Tour, BYB Extreme Fighting Series, and more.
“We pivoted from a model that was previously focused more on individual creators, to go all-in on live sports content. Over that time, we’ve brought on 150-plus niche and emerging sports leagues, partners and competitive events, with more to come in the new year.”
Keighran said this year was the perfect time for that shift given changes elsewhere in the streaming landscape, which he feels have left smaller leagues and sports in the cold.
“This year we’ve seen the live sports space reach a bit of a tipping point where this current era of live streaming has seen an influx of technology platforms, streaming services, and in some cases, individual teams and leagues vying for the right to package and distribute content,” he said. “While this era of fragmentation and specialization has led to some lucrative deals for the top 50-100 sports out there, it’s left a vast majority of the niche and more emerging sports out there to forge their own path for distribution and monetization.”
“There’s such a wide range of sports that people care about. And we saw that as an opportunity to help those leagues market and distribute their content, while giving fans a centralized destination where they can watch their favorite sports wherever and whenever they want.”
Keighran attributes much of Caffeine’s success in convincing these leagues and more to work with them to their technology.
“We’ve also developed live streaming tech that is well suited to partners who want to broadcast live sports (replays, scale, real-time) and launched a free embeddable player that we can live stream to, making our content more discoverable. Content owners are seeing an average of 10 times the viewership they get from other distributors.”
He also said their platform’s easy availability (it’s available live and for free on iOS, Android, Roku and Amazon Fire, as well as on caffeine.tv) is a useful selling point for leagues.
“We provide the opportunity to expand monetization and distribution opportunities at scale, while providing a social-first, cord-cutting, and highly engaged young audience a platform to watch their favorite competitions in an interactive and community-based way.”
And they provide the opportunity for leagues to present always-on shoulder programming as well, including replays, highlights, documentaries, and more. Keighran said that’s proven to be a good extra boost for leagues.
“Bringing an always-on approach further enhances the user experience, and increases the value proposition for the leagues that broadcast on the platform.”
In terms of what they’re looking for from leagues, Keighran said they want “diverse and engaging content” and “unique and innovative sports properties.”
“It’s about giving leagues and distribution partners the infrastructure and tools to help them succeed. A lot of what we have built is geared towards making it easy for fan communities to access, discover, and engage with the sports they care about most. Caffeine seeks partnerships with sports leagues that align with our commitment to diverse and engaging content. Leagues that offer unique and innovative sports properties, coupled with a willingness to embrace new distribution models, are particularly attractive to us.”
It’s interesting to see Caffeine with funding support from the likes of Fox and Disney (in addition to many venture capital firms), as those companies also want live sports rights for channels like FS1 and ESPN. Keighran said they don’t see themselves as going head-to-head with those traditional media companies, though.
“We see our approach as collaborative rather than competitive. At this moment, we’re focused on providing distribution and new opportunities for the niche sports leagues that are out there, rather than competing for the exclusive rights to top sports leagues.”
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“We’ve continued to expand our portfolio of content through new sports leagues and partners that have come onto the platform in recent months, while broadening our reach through new distribution partners. We’ve also had an influx of traditional media publishers like Barstool Sports, Blue Wire, Bleav Network, Clutch Points, The Action Network, and more come onto the platform to distribute their video podcasts and serialized content, which has helped grow our user base.”
He said they’re finding lots of value from those partnerships as well.
“We want to be a destination for sports fans of all types, so bringing these additional media partners onto the platform not only contributes to the overall content offerings we have but also broadens our appeal to different audiences.”
And Keighran said he thinks there’s plenty of room for Caffeine to keep growing in 2024 and beyond.
“We are focused on continuing to expand our library of live and on-demand sports content within the core categories we know users are gravitating to the most (action sports, basketball, combat sports, football, battle rap, and combat sports), as well as continuing to welcome in new leagues and partners from other corners of the sports world. We’ll also continue to ramp up and expand our advertising and distribution partnerships.”
