Q&A: Tennis Channel SVP Direct-to-Consumer Matthew Graham Talks Launching, Programming, and Scaling the Tennis Channel App
In late 2023, Tennis Channel brought in AMC Networks and PBS Digital veteran Matthew Graham to spearhead the development of the network’s DTC app. In this Q&A, Graham delves into the app’s content, monetization, partnership, and growth strategy, as well as how Tennis Channel positions the app in relation to its other platforms and leverages data and audience insights to measure customer lifetime value, personalize content, and inform future strategic decisions.
The discussion also explores how Tennis Channel approaches the app as a vehicle for connecting newer fans with the WTA and ATP tennis tours and the game’s emerging and established stars, targeting new audiences. We also look at how Tennis Channel is leveraging AI to accelerate and automate content generation and greatly reduce app development and time to market.
What brought you to Tennis Channel, and what do you do there?
Tennis Channel brought me on about 3 years ago to help them get serious about their direct-to-consumer business. Tennis Channel had been a linear cable channel network for over 20 years, and they had been really successful with around-the-clock coverage of men’s and women’s ATP, WTA, and tennis around the world, fitting all of that tennis into a linear broadcast presentation. They saw a big opportunity to expand the coverage beyond what you can fit into a linear stream. DTC opens up a bunch of different opportunities for the company. One is to present all of the tennis on demand, whenever the consumer wants [to watch it]; another is to go direct to the consumer outside of the cable ecosystem.
For anyone who has worked as part of a cable network or as part of the cable ecosystem, that means entering a very different universe. Selling apps on app stores, doing performance marketing, and trying to get people to sign up and then trying to keep them paying for a subscription month after month entails entirely different kinds of functions and approaches. I talked them into believing that I was the guy for the job, and I’m really glad that they took it on faith, because it’s been a great adventure, and we’ve made a ton of progress with lots more fun stuff to come.
I imagine a lot of the challenge and a lot of the fun of programming a direct-to-consumer offering is building the content mix. A big part of that of course is live matches, and in today’s sports streaming ecosystem, that means dealing with the skyrocketing cost of sports rights. When you’re budgeting for a content mix that also attracts new subscribers to the app and keeps them watching, how do you strike the ideal balance between tournament coverage and original programming?
The way we think about it is time- and schedule-based. We’re fortunate that there’s tennis happening year-round. We’ve got 12 months of product. But that said, there are different tournaments of different levels and different levels of interest and tournaments that happen in different time zones. We focus squarely on the U.S. market. When the tours come into North America and they’re in Indian Wells, Miami, or Cincinnati, those are really peak times for us. We’ve experimented with doing original content during those times to try to augment the tennis, but what people really want is the live tennis. That’s what they’re coming to us for. Original programs are nice-to-haves during those periods of time, but where they really count is during the sort of lulls between convenient time zones and big tournaments that people are aware of and really tuning into.
During those lulls, we try to do more to keep people engaged to bridge the schedule. One big initiative for this in that regard this year is a podcast that we launched called The Big T. We’ve got some great tennis experts like Brad Gilbert and CoCo Vandeweghe, and we rotate through our Tennis Channel talent as hosts. They do a great job on a weekly basis covering the tennis. We break it up into clips. We’ve got short-form clips that you can watch on the app, and then we post clips onto social media. That creates a throughline over the course of the year that keeps people aware and engaged and ideally sticking around until the next big tournament. And we use it to promote the great tennis that’s happening year-round.
What I’ve seen since I joined Tennis Channel is a broad awareness of the four majors and then diminishing awareness as you get down to the 1000-level tournaments and the 500s. But you never know where the next great matchup is going to happen. One of the things we want to do overall with the app and with the DTC business is to help people answer some very simple questions: “When is my favorite player playing? Who are they playing? Why does the match matter? How can I watch it, or how can I catch up on what happened really easily?” That’s where we see tons of opportunity. It’s a sport that is ripe for reinvention, at least in terms of the way that you access it and watch it.
Fairly or unfairly, tennis as a sport has a reputation of skewing—both in terms of participation and fandom—wealthier, whiter, and older. At Tennis Channel, what are you doing particularly with the app and its content or on the marketing side to reach different demographics?
For me, it was a real eye-opener the first time I went to the US Open. If you walk into the US Open, it will completely change the way you think about tennis. It’s a party. They’ve got their signature drink, they’ve got influencers everywhere. It is expensive, but people are committing to come to this big party in New York every year and watch tennis, and every kind of person—all shapes and sizes, all ages—is there to have a good time. This is a general trend with tennis right now, which is really exciting. The average age of a professional tennis player in the top 100 is 26 years old. So the stars are young people. Coco Gauff [currently No. 4 in WTA] is 22 years old.
So, these are young people. They’re social media-savvy. In many cases, they’ve got teams helping them produce really great content. They’re traveling around the world to all of these exotic places—Rome, Madrid, Paris, London—and so the backdrop is this really enticing global luxury environment. It’s the perfect recipe for social media influence. And these athletes are in great shape. They’re beautiful humans, and they’re dating beautiful humans.
The easiest thing for us is just to get out of the way of that. All of this stuff is happening with or without us. So, we need to reflect that and let it pass through into the product. That means giving voice to this talent. We spend a lot of time and energy making sure that we get time interviewing these players, giving them an opportunity to talk about the match that they just had.
That means real operational investment because the interviews are best right when they walk off the court. We’re either streaming them live or posting them just after they happen so people feel connected to these players. If you follow them on Instagram, you know that they’re in some exotic place in the world, they’ve just had this big match, and we’re giving you access to hear from them directly right after they’ve just had their big quarterfinal win.
Do you find that younger fans respond as much to the personalities as they do to the matches?
Right now, there’s a bigger audience for the personalities than for the matches, to be honest. Part of our business challenge over time is to convert those casual fans of the individual star athletes into tennis fans who want to watch these matches. And I think a lot of that is education. That doesn’t sound very sexy. But it’s about, for example, letting fans know that Coco Gauff—who casual fans might think of as someone who just plays in slams—is out there in the trenches fighting to keep her No. 4 ranking 10 or 11 months of the year. There’s a journey there that they’re missing out on.
It’s sort of like watching the Super Bowl without watching the NFL regular season or even the playoffs. Sure, the Super Bowl’s fun to watch, but it’s way more fun if you’ve been following your team the whole season long. For people who are new to tennis, we need to help them understand that [following the whole tour] is the most fun way to enjoy tennis.
Another thing that’s really prominent in the app besides the interview content is The Match in 15 Minutes, which is a condensed match that, like the interviews, becomes available right after the match. Are you using AI to make that happen? And are there other ways you’re using AI to build and enhance the app?
Yeah, that one’s been great, and we get just tons of great feedback from our customers about that. They love it. And so basically, we take the feed of every match, put it through an AI process, and condense it down into what we call a condensed match.
After a lot of trial and error, we found that 15 minutes is generally the sweet spot where it’s not just match highlights—it’s actually enough time to tell the story of a best-of-three [sets] match. And as I was saying, the [WTA and ATP] tours travel around the world, and so a lot of these matches are happening at very inconvenient time zones for people in the U.S. In 15 minutes, you can catch up and really feel like you watched the match.
We’re doing that for every single match, so our subscribers know they can always catch up very quickly on their favorite player or what’s happening in a tournament. I think it speaks to the fact that there’s so much more you can do because of these AI tools—we can do a 2-minute version, a 5-minute version, a 30-minute version. And you can imagine a future probably not too far away where the user can specify what they want to see or we can learn from the user’s behavior what they want to see and give them custom highlights or custom condensed matches.
When you have the kind of volume of content that we’re working with, the potential for using AI is tremendous. One of the big challenges with tennis is there is so much to follow and so much to watch. The ability to give people recaps and catch them up on tournaments or their favorite player’s journey without having a bunch of editors sitting around trying to cut highlights is great.
The Madrid Open is happening right now, and we’re a week into it. A lot of people will see an ad somewhere or read something and think, “I’d like to catch up on that.” It’s absolutely within the capabilities of an AI engine to say, “In 10 minutes, here’s everything that’s happened over the course of a week to catch you up so that you’re right in the action and you can enjoy the next 4 days knowing exactly how all of the players have fared and how they got here, who had to beat whom, and what the interesting stakes and storylines are.”
I believe you’re also using agentic AI for coding to accelerate app development. Is that right?
Absolutely. We’re a pretty small company, and on the DTC digital side of things, we’re a really small company. We just hired the first batch of software engineers that the company has ever had, which is a game changer for us. The things that we’ve been able to accomplish with just a handful of talented engineers who are flexing these new AI tools—Anthropic Claude Code and lots of other technologies that I’m not as familiar with—they’re doing incredible things with them. On a daily basis, they’re getting things done that would’ve taken months just a few years ago. It is really interesting to think about what you can do as a company in the digital space without the massive amounts of overhead.
We’re fortunate that our new CEO, Jeff Blackburn, came from Amazon. He had a 24-year stint there and built some incredible things like Amazon Prime Video, for example, and had huge success through software engineering, building tools through software. There you have an organization with thousands of engineers across the world, and we’re standing up products in weeks with a handful. I think smaller companies like us can do a lot more, punch way above our weight, in a way that’s brand new. We’re going to see lots of innovation in that regard in the next couple of years.
Tennis Channel works with a number of MVPD partners on the linear and CTV side. When you launched the app or as you’ve grown the app, has there been any friction with those partners over the possibility that the app would cannibalize a linear audience?
Five or 6 years ago, there was a lot of friction, and there was this idea that DTC was going to eat the cable business. I think everyone from the MVPD and the DTC side has realized that, at least in the short term, it’s not a winner-take-all, zero-sum game. The cable ecosystem is going to
continue to do its thing for a while, and DTC is going to continue to grow, and these two approaches to selling content can co-exist. Key to that is the sort of partnerships that cable networks like ourselves have with our MVPD partners.
What that means in particular is that as part of our distribution deals, we grant cable customers access to the DTC applications. So, if you have Tennis Channel in your package through Comcast, with that subscription, you can come to any of our apps, authenticate using an Adobe
technology, enter in your cable credentials, and get access to all of the bells and whistles. You get The Match in 15 Minutes and all of the other interviews and all of the other great stuff, all of the other content on demand, and you can use any of our apps. So, I think the MVPDs see that as a really great value-add for the customer. You’re getting the bundle economics that cable can provide and then the DTC features and bells and whistles as part of your cable subscription.
It’s a win-win. We’re seeing tons of customers take advantage of that. The more people watching tennis, the more people using our apps, the better. If it’s through a cable subscription, that’s great. If it’s directly with us, that’s great too. We want to grow both of those userbases.
One of the advantages of a DTC app over working through partners on linear platforms and so forth is that you own all of the audience data, and I assume you are using that for continuous improvement on the app. Does that benefit what you do with programming on other platforms as well? Are you leveraging that data across the board?
Absolutely. On our app, not only do we have all of these matches on demand, but we have our Tennis Channel flagship linear network that is available through the app as well as a FAST channel called T2. So, these are both linear channels sitting within the app, and outside of the app, measurement is tricky. You’ve got Nielsen on the FAST side, you’re depending on the platforms to report, and that’s a really mixed bag. So, it’s really hard to get granular measurement in the way you do in a direct-to-consumer app. Now we have this statistically significant dataset coming on both of those linear channels as well as on all of the other original shows we do. So, we have a comprehensive view of audience behavior across all of the different content types that we offer.
When we’re talking about original programming, we’ve tried lots of things. Some have worked; most have not worked. Most have been sort of like, “That was all right, let’s keep trying.” That sort of “fail fast and keep evolving” is a really powerful approach, and that kind of measurement is what allows it. Even in this narrow arena, we’re thrilled to have the ability to look at our user behavior and learn from it.
Currently, the Tennis Channel app is 100% subscription. Is there a time when you plan
to add an ad-supported tier where it’s available at a lower cost or free with ads?
Our focus right now and in the near term is providing a really excellent subscription experience. We do have our Tennis Channel linear offering—a 24/7 linear cable offering with ads—and that’s a perfectly fine experience. The ads happen during changeovers, and it’s organic to the sport and makes sense. And, to your earlier point, we can look at that behavior and compare that to other offerings. Could we add more ads? Absolutely. But what we’re hearing from our customers right now is that they’re happy paying for what is primarily an ad-free experience. We think we’ve got a lot of room for growth with that offering, and we’ll continue to re-evaluate as the business evolves.
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