How to Build a Niche Sports League and Streaming Fan Base
Driving viewership and attention for new and niche sports streaming requires deploying alternative strategies for building buzz, visibility, and must-see excitement. Bulldog DM founder & CEO John Petrocelli explains how the recently launched Beach Football League achieved liftoff for the sport and its live-streamed experiences, leveraging social and celebrity involvement and choosing the right platforms for delivery and distribution, as he describes in conversation with Chris Pfaff of Chris Pfaff Tech Media in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026.
Celebrity Coaches and Beautiful Scenery
Pfaff asks Petrocelli to speak about niche sports, which are exemplified by something Bulldog DM is involved with: Beach Football League. He believes that what the company does as a live producer lends itself well to the curation of some unexpected sports tentpoles.
Petrocelli explains, “It’s a very fascinating league founded by Tully Banta-Cain, who’s a two-time New England Patriot Super Bowl champion as well as a 49er.” He realized that to “go finance football at the youth level, you need a lot of equipment and gear and fields, etc. And his perspective is, you can bring a football to the beach and young people can play right on the beach. His league is different because it’s former players or former Division I of all walks of life playing tackle football, and the game moves incredibly fast.” The beach setting lends itself to incredible scenery, he notes. “We’re able to stream the games but also give you this really gorgeous cinematic drone coverage. You get this contrast of this intense battle happening on the sand set against the crashing waves of Santa Monica Beach.”
Petrocelli shares details of an upcoming game that has celebrity coaches: “DeShaun Foster for the Santa Monica team and Beast Mode, Marshawn Lynch, for the local Santa Cruz team. So [it’s a] pretty fascinating league that’s getting a lot of interesting [attention,] and there’ll be a music artist performing at halftime as well.” This new way to experience football “has high growth possibilities both domestically and internationally. If you’re a Caribbean nation that wants to empower kids to play the game, they need a ball to do that. And to see that game happen at that speed in the sand, for us [it] has been pretty interesting to both capture and live stream.”
Expanding the Network and Leveraging Keywords
“We’re looking at a lot of direct-to-fan platforms. What do you think is the optimal balance between keeping audiences on owned platforms versus leveraging the massive reach of third-party streaming giants?” Pfaff wonders.
With nearly 20 years of live video experience under his belt, and 14 years of operating Bulldog DM, Petrocelli says he consistently sees clients worrying about safeguards against the possibility of lower viewer turnout for any live experience. “And so we’ve responded to that by creating a real-time audience development capability, where we’ll take that live broadcast, really create it into an ad unit and then drive it and syndicate it and place it across a big network of premium publishers,” he shares. “It could be CNN, ESPN, Billboard, Variety, you name it. And what happens there is these large groups of largely passive-based text scrollers now are presented with this video and there’s an invitation to click and drive to that experience.”
He turns back to his main example: “In the case of the Beach Football League, we were able to bring a pretty sizable broadcast—near broadcast-sized—audience and drive it to their YouTube channel. And the viewer ratio to subscribers was 3,649%.” It was the right audience at the right time, Petrocelli says.
The use of keywords helps. “If there were the keyword NFL or a football player or beach appeared—could be a group of 10 keywords—we would also try to bring that ad unit to where that keyword appeared, and we could also target by behavior,” age group, affinity for sports, etc., he notes. “And the other takeaway there is, we can also build a proprietary audience. We can identify people down to their unique device ID in the future and serve them that ad for the subsequent broadcasts. That’s helping people who are emerging sports leagues develop an interesting audience.”
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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