Independent sports media company FloSports is rolling out a major revamp of its connected TV app that promises easier navigation and discovery of live sporting events alongside personalization. The overhaul coincides with and is in support of the debut of FloCollege, the company’s brand-new streaming service vertical focused on D-II and D-II college sports that’s slated to launch October 15.
StreamTV Insider got an early peek at a demo of the updated FloSports CTV app, which is rolling out to Roku, Android TV and Fire TV – with expectations to be 100% completed by the end of next week. Apple TV rollouts will follow starting early next week and are expected scale up quickly to users of that platform.
Before getting into the updated CTV app, here’s a rundown of what the company is bringing to market with FloCollege.
Priced at $19.99 per month or $107.88 per year, the service aims to cater to underserved Division-II and Division-III athletics, along with certain Division-I sports, featuring live events, original programming and news. People that use a .edu email from a member institution can sign up for FloCollege at a discounted price of $9.99 per month or $71.88 per year.
In August, the Lone Star Conference – one of the largest NCAA Division-II conferences in the country - was the latest to join the platform under an exclusive five-year media rights agreement beginning this fall. The addition of Lone Star added 17 universities to the FloCollege portfolio and brings its NCAA conference tally to 12, which together span more than 12,000 live games on the platform for the 2024-2025 season. Division-I conferences include the Big East and Costal Athletic Association (CAA).
At launch FloCollege subscribers get access to select games that are already in season for certain conferences, with full men’s and women’s basketball seasons debuting in November. The platform’s partners represent more than 1,200 teams across men’s and women’s athletics from more than 80 schools. College sports featured include football, basketball, soccer, baseball, hockey, rugby, wrestling, lacrosse, softball, volleyball, field hockey, cross country, fencing, golf, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, track, rowing and water polo. For women’s athletics specially, FloCollege will feature more than 4,000 D-II and D-II women’s games.
In addition to CTV, FloCollege will also be available through the FloSports app on iOS and Android mobile devices, as well as the web.
In launching the D-II and D-III college sports-focused subscription service, the company cited a 37% bump in viewers for football since the start of the 2024 college sports seasons, and a 45% bump in soccer viewers.
“We are building a product that will be best-in-class in serving college sports fans of all levels,” said Mark Floreani, FloSports co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “Our vision for FloCollege is to become the essential destination for the thousands of Division-II and Division-III athletes, their families, and fans, while providing much-needed funds to these smaller institutions, who are in critical need of additional revenue resources.”
The company is investing more than $50 million into FloCollege to support rights fees, production, content, product technology and marketing. FloSports said that by investing in conference rights, partner institutions are able to apply funding to broadcast and production capabilities to boost the quality of coverage across sports.
FloCollege marks the first new vertical launch for FloSports since 2020, where the company already counts a range of live and on-demand access for sports like motorsports (FloRacing), hockey (FloHockey), wrestling (FloWrestling), among several others. It also counts strategic partnerships with NASCAR, USA Wrestling, Tour de France and other organizations that underpin more than 24,000 live events FloSports streams annually.
CTV app overhaul
With a new vertical coming to its platform, FloSports has undertaken a CTV revamp to help fans more easily navigate and find sports content they enjoy.
Taylor Cox, senior product manager for CTV at FloSports and formerly with Sling TV, led the app redesign, for which development kicked off in earnest earlier this year. During a roundtable demo with press Tuesday, Cox noted the current iteration of FloSports CTV app had been around since 2018-2019 and the latest updates were made based on customer feedback.
Separately, there had been some reported gripes about FloSports app performance in years past.
The updates, which span UX/UI and performance enhancements, support the launch of FloCollege but also extend across the broader FloSports’ portfolio and app experience. They also come as a significant share of FloSports users are turning to CTV for viewing.
Half, or about 50%, of FloSports viewership happens on CTV devices, according to Cox. And the company heard some critical customer feedback related to pain points around content discovery with the previous design that the new app aims to address.
Shortening time to video, content hubs
One area that Cox said the team saw users had trouble with was so-called “time-to-video” – or how long it takes from when a viewer comes into the app until they start playing the content they want to watch.
With a broad library of niche sports as well as extensive live sports schedules, the former iteration of the FloSports app lacked personalization and was cumbersome for users to navigate to specific conference, sports or teams they wanted, per Cox. The product team was also looking for ways to improve navigation to enable users to get to more granular-level results – like by road-type for motorsports (such as pavement or dirt events).
The redesigned app now features a personalized “spotlight” content ribbon at the top of the homepage that surfaces programs tailored to the user based on sports, teams, leagues, schools or conferences they favorite.
So for example, if a viewer favorited Angelo State Football and the Lone Star Conference, content related to that team, conference and sport would show up first in the recommendations spotlight.
A second ribbon also prominently displays a prompt encouraging users to favorite the sports or teams they want to follow, to help with the navigation.
Using FloCollege as an example, users can see all college sports, navigate by conference, then drill further down by adding specific schools and continue refining by sports within that school. Content hubs for teams and leagues are new to the CTV app and allow fans to find all of the related content, as well as times and dates for current and upcoming live events within one landing page.
Another update is to search, which now surfaces options as users type so they can more quickly find and jump to content hubs. Taken together, FloSports’ updated CTV app aims to give users multiple ways to navigate to and find the sports content they want to watch from within the platform.
Better metadata use, video player enhancements
Some of the improved navigation experience comes back to metadata, according to Cox, where he noted the platform had plenty of existing metadata available, but it wasn’t being fully utilized.
FloSports mobile and website apps had done a better job but metadata “was sorely lacking on our connected TV apps,” Cox acknowledged. For example, before, if a user was looking for Angelo State, the results might not distinguish between different sports at that school, but now more easily narrow in on the specific content a viewer is looking for, helping to categorize and populate content hubs. Cox gave kudos to the FloSports content teams, which he said tapped available in-house metadata and utilized it in the right ways to help on the navigation and discovery front.
The FloSports video player also has some new bells and whistles.
One is helping users in “wayfinding” specific moments in a live event by showing a live preview as they fast forward or rewind to get to a certain point. Another is the new ability to quickly switch between multiple streams within the video player. Cox used the example of a wrestling competition where there may be 12 different mats with activity. Users can navigate down to see and switch between simultaneous feeds of different mats at the same event, without having to exit the video player or go back to the main content hub.
Work on the revamped app, including metadata-related functions, was largely done in-house and FloSports didn’t disclose any vendor partners.
Looking ahead, the company intends to introduce additional features to the CTV app, namely scores and stats that are available within the video player to quickly see and navigate to what’s most important.
“Perhaps the mat at the wrestling tournament that I’m watching is at a break and I want to navigate to another one that’s at a really close match,” Cox posited. “I’ll be able to do so within that video player and not have to dive into the stream to understand which one is going to be a close match up.”
FloSports aims to roll out those additional features at the end of Q4.