How FAST Elevates Lower-Profile Live Sports
Even as more big league sports events become tentpole streaming events like Christmas Day NFL games on Netflix, NBA playoffs on Prime, or the Olympics on Peacock, these big-ticket matches are happening on premium platforms paying ultra-premium prices to license them. But can streaming also provide a launching pad for niche events and middle- and lower-tier leagues with passionate pockets of fans clustered by location or affinity? FAST is proving the perfect platform for heightening access, awareness, and profitability for lower-tier leagues like college athletics and grassroots motor sports. Niche doesn’t always mean small, attests FloSports’ VP of business development Dave Stelnik to Chris Pfaff Tech Media’s Chris Pfaff at Streaming Media Connect 2026.
FloSports and FAST
Pfaff says, “One of the interesting things Flo[Sports] is doing recently that seems to be taking off is FloCollege.” He asks Stelnik to talk about how the company is pulling people in with live events and how it’s capitalizing on them.
Stelnik shares, “FloSports has been around for 20 years, and we’re a digital media company that consolidates fragmented, underserved sports into one platform. That’s what we do. And what we kind of see ourselves as is the operating system for these underserved sports where we can handle everything from technology, production, distribution, data. We’re the largest sports streamer in the United States. We have over 50,000 live sports events a year. Every day we’re working with sports that are traditionally underserved. So FAST coming along is kind of a match made in heaven.”
The Other 99%
Stelnik continues, “I would push back on the idea that we often hear about niche or underserved. We call it the other 99%. [T]hese niche sports have tremendous communities and fan bases behind them, tremendous. It’s just they’ve never had access to watch these sports in certain ways, or the economics have never made sense to bring these sports to wider audiences.”
There’s the example of the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League. “Historically the only people that would’ve had access to watch or even care about these teams are small towns in Quebec, Newfoundland, the Maritimes. These are very small, close-knit communities that care deeply about these teams,” Stelnik explains. In about 2 years, “we’ve gone from a league that’s had almost no exposure outside their local community to being on the front page of Amazon Prime Video, via our FAST channels, next to the NFL.”
Stelnik expands on this point: “So the sea change is in terms of bringing live sports, for all types of sports, all types of leagues; this is not just the major leagues. This has really caught on fire, and I think it’s a really good product-market fit, so to speak, for what the sports fans and the market is demanding.”
Pfaff names other so-called niche sports such as cycling and sailing. “Any of those things that—as you said, the other 99%—we don’t need to necessarily be Balkanized in terms of where the major sports leagues are, but even tertiary or second or third tier, you can carry,” he notes. “Now you can stream it at scale, and I don’t know all the numbers that you want to talk about, but it seems like you keep adding. I mean, NASCAR is doing well for you too, right?”
“Well, what I can say is we’re profitable,” Stelnik allows.
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Pfaff says, joking that haters should listen closely to the full panel to get some good advice.
Serving College Sports Audiences
Stelnik brings the conversation back to FloCollege. “When most sports fans or people think about college sports, they’re thinking SEC, they’re thinking D-I basketball. We’ve really had a huge amount of growth,” he shares. “We’re now up to 20 NCAA conferences, mostly in Division II and Division III. So really in that underserved market, these conferences have really passionate fan bases.”
The economics allows FloSports to produce high-quality events for a variety of sports that reach anyone who has an affinity for these leagues and conferences, he says. “We can actually go out and take top 25 Division II football, which in some instances is produced at a level better than some D-I, and we can really highlight these. They might have been buried in ESPN+ historically or really hard to find or not streamed at all. And now we’re able to really invest in these conferences and drive viewership and engagement with these communities, with these teams.”
Niche Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Small
Close partnership with the conferences and leagues is essential in underserved sports, Stelnik asserts. “But a lot of people think of us in terms of niche. We get [called] niche a lot, but you mentioned NASCAR, [which isn’t]. So we really have grown up the right food chain in the last few years. We’re now in motor sports; we are the essential destination in grassroots motor sports. And that includes everything from NASCAR, grassroots, all the way down to Lucas Oil Late Model. So it’s really kind of a wide portfolio of sports,” he explains. “So when someone says niche or underserved, it doesn’t necessarily mean small.”
Join us August 11–13, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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