- FloSports expanded CTV app distribution to Vizio and Samsung smart TVs, with LG to follow later this year
- Relationships with CTV device partners are increasingly multi-faceted, where Flo is leaning into discoverability
- Different device partners all have OS nuances that require considerations
- FloSports counts over 1 million subscribers and has seen CTV viewership grow yoy
- The sports streamer plans to launch a new FloHockey FAST channel this year as part of a broader strategy to get content in front of fans
FloSports, a paid streamer focused on live sports at the Tier 2, Tier 3 and collegiate level, has seen connected TV viewership growth and intends to get its content in front of more fans in 2026 – starting Tuesday with new CTV app distribution on major smart TV-makers Samsung and Vizio.
But with content and viewers dispersed across various services and device platforms, simply getting CTV app distribution isn’t the only recipe for success. FloSports’ latest deals illustrate how content and app providers are deepening relationships with platform partners as they too seek to attract and engage audiences and introduce new TVOS features for content discovery.
FloSport’s Dave Stelnik, who oversees all of the streamer’s distribution strategy as VP of Business Development, spoke with StreamTV Insider about the latest deals, evolving relationships with platform partners and plans in the pipe as it seeks to propel momentum for its sports streaming service, which he said has over 1 million “hyper passionate subscribers.”
With standard plans priced at $30 per month or $150 per year (and discounts available for students and member institutions) FloSports delivers live and on-demand programming, including more than 50,000 live events a year and access to more than 25 sports - with particular prowess in its hockey (FloHockey) and motorsports racing (FloRacing) verticals.
On the momentum front, Flo introduced a revamped CTV app last fall and launched its first new subscription vertical, FloCollege – which costs $20 per month for access to sports in 18 NCAA conferences. Coinciding with fresh Series D funding in April, the company said it had doubled revenue over the past two years and achieved sustained profitability.
Now it plans to continue that traction and ramp up reach with expanded device distribution and the launch of a new hockey-focused free ad-supported streaming TV channel later this year.
Leaning more heavily into FAST and securing more device partners are part of FloSport’s broader off-platform strategy to be where consumers are.
“We’re trying to be really aggressive in bringing our content to sports fans,” Stelnik told StreamTV Insider. “How sports fans watch live sports and how they engage with their sports is changing by the day and we want to be wherever they are on their preferred devices and platforms.”
Expanded CTV device distribution
Announced Tuesday, FloSports is now available on Samsung smart TVs model year 2018 and later and all Vizio smart TVs in North America (as well as some international distribution on Samsung).
A launch on LG TVs will follow later this year.
Those add to Flo’s existing connected TV distribution partner roster of Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV, Google TV and Apple TV - meaning by year-end it will be available the vast majority of smart TVs sold in North America.
In addition to the U.S. and Canada, the app will be available on Samsung smart TV’s 2018 and later in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Sweden and all Eurozone (EZ) countries.
As for Vizio – the smart TV-maker was acquired by retail giant Walmart, which reportedly plans to use the Vizio TVOS to power its in-house brand smart TVs. FloSports confirmed that distribution of its CTV app will include all Vizio TVOS-powered devices, including those from Walmart.
A note on availability – since some of the streamer’s content is geo-restricted based on rights agreements, not every country can see its full offering. In Canada, for example, subscribers will get Tour de France coverage from FloSports that’s not available in the U.S.
CTV viewership gains, launching a new FAST channel
Last year FloSports shared a stat that 50% of its viewership was happening on CTV – a trend that appears to be growing.
It’s where Stelnik thinks the company is “seeing the fruits of our labor,” saying that the streamer’s TV viewership has grown rapidly over the past two years, with two-thirds of live viewership for FloSports now on CTV. That proportion is “even higher’ for its most popular sports verticals of racing and hocky, he added.
“What we’re seeing is a definite shift in preference with new and existing customers to watch their sports on the big screen.”
Getting a CTV app on smart TVs alleviates prior friction for fans in that they no longer need to deal with casting from a mobile device but can watch with an easy and direct, one-button click on the TV screen.
As for response to the revamped CTV app, Stelnik said the numbers speak for themselves.
“Our overall viewership is up significantly year over year and…that disproportionately comes from TV viewership,” he commented.
In terms of scale, with those 50K live events, Flo saw over 60 million live plays or views of its events this past season (meaning from last season to-date).
Since the live sports it covers are more “niche” if you will and its offering very specific to certain verticals, Stelnik acknowledged FloSports may not reach as many viewers as those offering major league or big-name sports but said its subscribers are “a very focused and engaged audience.”
In April, FloSports had said some new funds, which brought its then-total raised to-date to more than $100 million, would go towards expanding device and distribution partners.
Per Stelnik, the latest device launches and last year’s revamped app are a continuation of the strategy and applying funds but suggested a lot of other initiatives in the works – one being the launch of a FloHockey 24-7 FAST channel on major platforms later this fall.
That represents a brand-new FAST channel for Flo, which already counts one for FloRacing in market that will also get expanded distribution this fall.
Stelnik declined to share more specifics as to where and when FAST expansions and launches will happen but did say the FloHockey FAST channel will have “distribution both in the U.S. and Canada.”
“This is really an effort for us to bring some of our best live content to FAST and we think we can lead in that space for racing and hockey, which are two of our bigger fan-driven sports.”
CTV device partnerships increasingly multi-faceted
As FloSports looks to expand distribution and show up where consumers are, it’s leveraging platform relationships that are evolving to go beyond support for a native app to include aspects like content discovery.
While deal specifics depend on the platform, Stelnik noted it’s interesting in that “every OS is a little bit different” and affirmed that “these partnerships are increasingly multi-faceted.”
As he mentioned, many device partners – including Vizio and Samsung - are no longer just CTV OEMs themselves, but companies with their own media plays (via built-in FAST or free streaming services like WatchFree+ and Samsung TV Plus) and ads platforms.
“So all of our partnerships have a little bit of all three,” he said, in terms of content, technology and advertising elements.
Since smart TV-makers are creating and distributing content themselves, FloSports wants “to be part of that with our FAST channels and our tentpole live events.”
(For more on Flo’s FAST strategy scroll down to section ‘Eyes on FAST’)
Leaning into discoverability with Samsung and Vizio
FloSports has plenty going for it with a roster of live sports, many of which don’t get carriage elsewhere – but it’s leveraging features being rolled out by device partners to surface programming on CTV platforms and make it easier for new and existing fans to find.
On Samsung and Vizio in particular, “we’re really leaning into discoverability,” Stelnik said.
With a sea of content and apps, discoverability is understood to be a challenge on streaming – and particularly for sports fans.
As recent survey data from Hub Entertainment Research showed, the majority of U.S. sports fans (87%) said they’re likely to sign up for a new streaming subscription to watch the sport they follow – but CTV app and sports rights fragmentation means finding events they want is a challenge. Most fans (53%) agreed that finding the sports they want to watch has become more confusing since last year, while roughly a quarter said they had no opinion and another 22% disagreed.
To help with discoverability, CTV platforms have tried out various features, like creating hubs or zones for specific content, including sports – such as on Roku and Vizio.
Some platforms are also introducing AI-powered voice and two-way conversational content discovery mechanisms.
On Samsung TVs, FloSports is integrated into Universal Search and content will be accessible in areas of the smart TV UI, such as “Live Now” and “Continue Watching”. This is meant to make it generally easier to surface Flo’s content to Samsung users.
Samsung is also slotting Flo as an Editor’s Choice, which puts the CTV app with preferable placement front on the home screen.
For Samsung Canada in particular, the platform will lean in and was particularly attracted to the streamer’s hockey portfolio – which spans nearly every major junior league under the NHL (including the Ontario Hockey League, American Hockey League ) – given the sport’s popularity in the country, which Stelnik said is a factor driving TV purchasing decisions in the market.
“We think that there’s a huge number of untapped hockey fans both North and South of the border that we can reach via these new partnerships and get them to subscribe,” he said.
On Vizio, meanwhile, some of FloSports’ larger events will launch in the Vizio Sports Zone, including NCAA basketball starting this season.
On the technology-front it’s integrating with payment systems to enable on-platform purchases via Samsung Pay and Vizio Account.
The aim there is to make becoming a FloSports subscriber “as easy and frictionless as possible,” while marking another element of the streamer’s expanded distribution relationships.
Live sports a priority for platform partners
In addition to fueling its own aims and making consumer and content partners happy, FloSports aims to be a good partner to platforms – which also appear keen to bolster sports programming.
In terms of CTV device players, “all of them would tell you that live sports is a priority,” Stelnik said. “It drives engagement, drives viewership, drive higher CPMs, generally speaking.”
Indeed major streamers have been picking up big sports rights and FAST platforms themselves have been adding live content as well as sports-focused channels and trying to make it more accessible for fans.
And Stelnik believes FloSports is well positioned to bring value to device makers, including through its engaged audience that he said is compelling to platforms.
“It just becomes a mutually beneficial partnership when we can bring our events to their platform and just bring broader reach for us, more content, more ad inventory for them. So it’s a win-win.”
Preparing apps and delivering live sports for nuanced TVOS differences
Securing distribution and placement is one thing, but as app providers and content owners seek to expand reach that also means making sure they can deliver content to a variety of device partners that each have their own TVOS requirements and interfaces. Add to that the fact that FloSports is delivering time-sensitive live sports content – and largely for sports that haven’t previously been televised.
While not unique to Flo, Stelnik acknowledged that in general, distributing live sports to different partners on time is a challenging endeavor, but believes “it’s a challenge worth tackling.”
Still, “every platform has a little bit of nuance to their discoverability,” such as Vizio’s Sports Zone, which has its own integrations for how Flo gets its live events surfaced in the hub – and would vary from efforts with other partners and their own respective processes.
Meaning streamers need to go platform-by-platform to make it work.
“But at the end of the day, it's worth it, because to the customer, they get a seamless, great experience when they turn on their TV and it's as personalized and discoverable as possible,” he said.
Metadata challenge
Content metadata is one aspect Stelnik thinks stakeholders on both sides of the equation can agree is always a challenge in some regard – be it in terms of delivery, lack of standardization or ensuring that it’s robust enough.
“A lot of what the platforms are doing with live sports and discoverability is dynamic, it’s changing all the time,” he noted. “That creates growing pains around metadata and how content owners such as ourselves need to send data to the providers.”
Content metadata is key as an underpinning element of features for content discovery, recommendations, programming guides, and not to mention applications for advertising – the latter where Gracenote data shows key information for sporting events is often missing.
And each platform has distinctions in how they ingest metadata, so for FloSports the goal is to be as tightly integrated as possible with all of the major players.
Building the pipes for live events streaming
Two factors are a little bit unique to FloSports as it prepares CTV apps to ensure compatibility and discoverability across different TVOS platforms.
One is that the streamer doesn’t fit neatly into the live linear or on-demand streaming bucket and it tends to have discrete live linear events that hadn’t been widely distributed before.
Related to that, a lot of the leagues it delivers content for weren’t previously on legacy linear TV – meaning a lack of existing infrastructure to facilitate live sports with other distributors.
“We in effect have to build all the piping and build all the processes with our partners to make metadata and discoverability work correctly,” he said, adding that it’s definitely a crawl before walk or run situation but “it’s going well.”
But the work to do so with platforms is part of the value that FloSports believes it adds for its own content and league partners, as it “can deliver wider distribution than they’ve ever had before.”
Consumers are likely to see more and more FloSports content in featured areas of TVOS platforms next year, per the VP, such as home pages and sports zones, where fans are finding their content.
“In 2026 I think sports fans will bump into Flo content more and more on their devices,” he said.
Looking ahead
Growing muscle in North America can help international
With the latest CTV app expansion, “I think we’re in a really good place” in terms of FloSports distribution in North America, Stelnik said. Right now distribution efforts are focused on North America, but down the line international markets could come more in focus.
As mentioned the Samsung deal involves some international distribution and he noted certain sports that do well in specific markets like Jiu-Jitsu’s popularity in Brazil, for example.
FloSports also provided the following information about the best-performing sports on its app in some of the countries where it will be available via Samsung:
Canada - FloHockey, FloRacing, and FloBikes
UK - FloCheer/VarsityTV and FloRacing
Australia - FloRacing
Brazil - FloGrappling
Stelnik thinks “growing some muscle” through efforts in North America will help Flo bring its offering to international markets in the future.
Eyes on FAST
Where he sees room to grow more near-term is on the content side, “especially with our FAST channels.”
The VP cited “a lot of demand” for an always-on quality hockey channel.
For hockey and motorsports, FloSports is looking to lead and “we think we will have more live sports on our FAST channels than anybody else in the category,” he said, noting the streamer has thousands of events in each of those verticals.
Per Stelnik, FAST is a way to maximize reach, “but mostly it’s a way to grow our brand and to give new audiences a free sampling of our best content.”
It’s also part of a concerted effort to grow Flo’s ads business.
Ideally, FAST is “a barker” for the company’s DTC s business that can provide an upsell path into paid subscriptions, but the primary goal is just to get consumers to come across Flo’s content.
“We want we want people who've never heard of Flo to turn on their TV or their preferred platform and see some of the best live motorsports or best live hockey available for free on our FAST channel,” he said.
Also helping its position in FAST is the fact that Flo can pull games of the week from various partners, multiple days a week and put those live on a free streaming channel – providing a consistent way for new audiences to get introduced to the Flo offering and helping platforms maintain a fuller sports programming calendar.
Doubling down on discoverability
Beyond that, asked about priorities, Stelnik said “we’re always looking to make our content more discoverable,” whether that’s through content partnerships or better technical integrations with device partners.
With platforms themselves iterating and evolving TVOS’ with tools like AI for content discovery and personalization, FloSports aims to be agile and responsive to what those players are introducing.
“We know that live sports are a big priority for all of these platforms,” Stelnik said. “So we want to be there as a good partner with some of the best live sports in the market.”