FAST sports channel startup C15 Studio scores Ehrenberg investment

After emerging from stealth mode this summer, FAST sports channel operator startup C15 Studio has scored its latest investment – this time securing backing from sports investor Roger Ehrenberg, who was also an early investor in ad tech company The Trade Desk.

London-based with offices in Dublin and New York, C15 was founded in 2023 by Joe Nilsson and Amory Schwartz, with early-stage funding from U.S. investors. Nilsson previously led the international streaming business for Jukin Media (owned by Trusted Media Brands) while Schwartz founded NASN, the European sports network that Disney acquired in 2006 for a reported $125 million.

C15 hasn’t publicly disclosed the amount raised but Nilsson, chief executive officer at the company, told StreamTV Insider that the investment from Ehrenberg’s Eberg Capital, alongside original series seed investors, puts its total seed series round at 125% oversubscribed – meaning more investor interest above what the company sought. The first seed investment closed in October 2023, led by KB Partners, and was quickly followed by investments from Sharp Alpha Advisors and Jim Pallota’s Raptor Group.

While the FAST market is becoming more mature in the U.S. and seemingly no shortage of channels to choose from, C15 Studio looking to stand out with a pedigree in sports broadcasting and through its laser focus on creating, distributing and monetizing FAST channels for Tier 1 and Tier 2 sports properties. Roughly a year in and its roster counts four channels already, including Formula 1, One Championship, Triton Poker Series and the Professional Squash Association.

C15 channels currently have distribution on free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services in the U.S. including Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV and Amazon’s Freevee. Additional distribution partners are expected to be announced in the coming months. Nilsson, in an interview with StreamTV Insider, said distribution partnerships with device-native FASTs and virtual MVPDs in the pipeline, without disclosing names.

As for the latest investment, it brings on board Ehrenberg’s Eberg Capital, an investment firm focused on sports with a portfolio that includes the Miami Marlins, Real Salt Lake, Alpine Formula Racing and sports betting operator Betr.  Ehrenberg, through IA Ventures, made the first early-stage investment in advertising disruptor The Trade Desk. A May Sportico article described Ehrenberg as “one of the most prolific sports venture capital investors of the past few years,” writing that through Eberg Capital he’s seen as a risk-taker that likes to make seed stage investments “and write checks between $250,000 and $2 million to get in on the ground floor of the sports business’ next big thing.”

In a statement regarding the investment, Ehrenberg praised C15’s rapid and early work.

“We recognized how quickly C15 has established themselves as the ‘go-to’ in this space, and have great confidence in their strategy and approach,” stated Ehrenberg. “They’ve put together a talented team of sports broadcasting operators and built an impressive network of channels in less than twelve months”.

It comes as C15 Studio is getting ready to announce a new yet-to-be named partner and fifth channel.

So in a FAST market that’s becoming more mature with plenty of players vying for attention and distribution, how is C15 working to stand out?

StreamTV Insider sat down virtually with Nilsson to find out more about the company’s approach to sports in the free ad-supported streaming space.

Laser focused on sports

Major sports are making their way to streaming, as seen by mega deals like the NBA and Thursday Night Football on Prime Video and NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV, among others.

But sports are also making their way to FAST services. Initially some of that has been through shoulder or sports-related content, like Roku launching a dedicated NBA FAST channel. Since then, live sports have also started to migrate, such as Roku’s exclusive rights to MLB Sunday Lead-off games on The Roku Channel and Vizio’s exclusive coverage of The Women’s World Cup Summer Tournament on WatchFree+. WNBA games are also available on FAST via Scripps’ ION channel.

And while those are a few examples of major sports on FAST, some see the free ad-supported environment as a place where smaller and niche or participant sports could potentially find engaged audiences. Samsung TV Plus, for example, added a channel this year dedicated just to pickleball, including live tournament matches. And Roku last year picked up rights for live Formula E racing.

As mentioned C15 differentiates from other FAST channel owners through its specialty focus on sports (rather than say single-series IP from a content library or lifestyle or general entertainment content). But is finding a sweet spot, where it may not be delivering channels for the NFL or NBA but is capitalizing on top global sports like Formula 1 (which with international fandom and a more recent surge in U.S. popularity, in part boosted by the so-called Netflix effect from series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is far from niche) and what Nilsson described as Tier 2, which have passionate fans.

According to Nilsson, its strategic focus is teaming up with sports rights holders that sit in the category of global leader or global federation, per se, of a specific sport to create 24-7 FAST channels using their brand and assets.

To be clear, C15 doesn’t hold live rights to Formula 1 in the U.S., which belong to ESPN, and Formula 1 has a direct-to-consumer paid offering (F1 TV Pro) with live rights. C15’s Formula 1 FAST channel does offer races, but on a five-day delay from those paid services. It also offers extensive programming around the sport and from prior race weekends, including free practice, qualifiers, pre- and post-shows, races in full-form and other formats.

“There’s a tremendous amount of content, programming that comes out of a race weekend in Formula 1,” Nilsson said, noting they can start on a Thursday or Friday and fans then have a chance to catch up on what they missed or binge event content.

C15’s three other FAST channels do have live sports rights and got off to a swift start. In the company’s first 30 days of broadcasting, it delivered over 200 hours worth of live broadcasts across two FAST channels, per Nilsson, who categorized the feat as “no small undertaking,” as live TV requires a bit more handholding than other types of content.

C15 isn’t a tech vendor but has a stack with about five vendor partners that it considers best-in-class.  Its expertise comes in the form of offering a one-stop, end-to-end offering for sports rights holders, where C15 Studios handles needs for channel creation and quality, distribution, rights management and monetization. It also markets the channels, both in communicating to platforms and audiences as to what programming is on the channel, why it’s unique, by-appointment to view opportunities, and also ensures the varied specifications required by different platforms are met.

“The joy of our channels is they come with recognizable brands,” he said, such as Formula 1.

Another aspect where C15 differentiates stems from leaders’ respective background in sports, where the chief executive said packaging programs for sports audiences is fundamentally different compared to most other content IP categories.

Nilsson described the dilemma of considering whether to package content that addresses a super core sports fan, a peripheral fan or a general audience.

“How do you make something best suited for all of those versus isolating one and not the other?” he posited. “Sports comes with some huge opportunities but also comes with some stuff that you have to be really delicate in operating around” be it sponsors, windowing rates or rights that require skill and efficacy.

For leagues and teams, particularly for sports that may have more of a challenge finding distribution through traditional providers or on major networks, FAST represents a way to bring their competition to a wider audience and gain new viewers or deepen engagement with existing fans.

Working with a partner like C15 takes out the FAST channel-related work of creation, distribution, operation, legal and other functions that some sports rights holders either don’t want to expend resources on or have the means to undertake themselves. It’s not the only one in the FAST space looking to help others create, distribute and monetize channels. VideoElephant, for example, is a Dublin-based vendor with a similar aim, but focused on the opportunity to create FAST channel utilizing a large short-form content library and its work with legacy web video publisher clients.

However, the sports are where C15 sees opportunity, particularly in a FAST space that’s become more saturated in other content categories.

Quality, passionate audiences

C15 is launching and operating FAST channels in a U.S. market where FAST services and platforms are looking for engaged audiences and some have expressed a shift towards quality as they evaluate an abundance of available content and channels to include in lineups.

Nilsson cited C15’s core focus for FAST as the U.S. or North American market, which represents both the most saturated and largest opportunity from an audience and advertising perspective (it’s also looking at international markets, with potential in parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand). Sports, however, is still one of the last categories to make a major conversion to FAST, he noted.

To that end, C15’s emphasis is on creating fewer but higher quality channels.

Much of its team comes from sports broadcasting backgrounds, such as a Sky, with experience in creating TV channels for network television. And that expertise reinforces the company’s approach to building quality sports channels from scratch for the free streaming environment.

“They should be indistinguishable in the strategy of the programming, to what you see on screen, to their value proposition to an audience, when compared to say a cable network channel,” Nilsson said.

That extends not just to programming, but also the stuff in between, like promos, interstitials, graphics, now-next-laters, lower-thirds, and so, on.

“The gamut of bells and whistles that you get on a traditional TV channel, we treat our channels the same,” he said. “We just see FAST as a new delivery means.”

In terms of deciding to work with a sports rights partner on a FAST channel, there are two main aspects C15 evaluates. One is whether there’s enough programming to super serve an existing audience and the other is if there’s an audience that’s otherwise uncatered to, untapped or ready to be converted.

Take squash for example, where C15 has the Squash TV channel.

According to Nilsson, it’s a huge participation sport where the U.S. represents one of the largest regions.

“They’re a different type of fan to say an NFL fan in that they don’t walk around necessarily wearing jerseys,” he said, but described “more of a visceral reaction” when saying squash to people than some better-known spectator sports.

“A squash fan is a super core enthusiast and they will passionately watch to a high degree. And right now we have the opportunity to over index on delivering that audience with the rights that we have,” he said.

It represents a much smaller fan base than say the potentially large viewership for F1, but he noted strong yield or engagement from that audience is important and part of the mix.

In terms of getting distribution on platform, C15’s dedicated focus on sports could be attractive to FAST platform providers to help drive service uptake, where live games and related content have potential to convert or attract new monthly active users in a way that single-series episode reruns might not.

It can also be beneficial to sports organizations that want to “seed” an audience, Nilsson noted, providing a top-of-funnel environment where they can engage a casual fan that might not be ready to pony up for live content behind a paywall and help convert them to a core enthusiast.

“Giving them a free opportunity at the broadest reach possible through FAST is a really great way to incubate fandom down that funnel,” he said.

Pursuing the A in FAST

On the monetization front C15 is building up capabilities, including generating revenue through programmatic advertising.

It has established commercial relationships with major SSPs for CTV advertising, including Pubmatic, Microsoft, Nexxen, Magnite and FreeWheel.

Adding to its ranks, the company recently hired Chris Flatley, a former Dish Sling TV and Fubo TV exec, as VP of Advertising Sales for North America. With that move, Nilsson said the company is creating direct sales channels with DSPs and agencies – with a particular focus on those representing advertisers that actively sponsor the sports C15 delivers, “giving those advertisers another means by which to reach streaming TV audiences.”

Working in C15’s favor, sports tend to attract advertisers and CTV overall is expected to see increased ad spending this year.

According to IAB’s second half Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy outlook, CTV is expected to capture $22.7 billion in annual ad spend, representing 12% year over year growth. The report noted investment within FAST services has increased 7 points year over year and is now in line with ads bought on vMPVDs and streaming platforms.

“The benefit of sports is it comes with a huge amount of [advertiser] demand,” Nilsson said, adding it’s by far the most sought-after category regardless of the viewing environment. It also provides a bevy of opportunity and mix for sponsorships, with proven clients that want to be associated with that type of IP, he noted.

With a growing channel roster and fresh funds in the mix, C15 is winding up as it aims to score big with sports on FAST. 

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