Roku Works Around the Edges of Live Sports With ‘NFL Draft: The Pick Is In' (Bloom)

In a sleek screening room at the NFL’s massive West Coast headquarters next to $5 billion SoFi Stadium, where the league’s Los Angeles Rams and Chargers play, a feature-length documentary unspooled this week that represents the latest push by Roku to get into both sports and original programming.

That 97-minute documentary, NFL Draft: The Pick Is In, debuted Friday night on the Roku Channel, Roku’s in-house, ad-supported channel that includes an increasing number of its own original shows.

At the screening, Rich Eisen, the NFL Network’s public face, called the doc “a major milestone for the Roku Channel.” Eisen is also the host of another new Roku original, a five-days-a-week talk show focused on the league.

Eisen has anchored the NFL Network’s own coverage of the draft for most of the channel’s 20-year existence. A documentary about the 2023 draft, held in April and released less than two weeks before the regular season debuts, was a natural for everyone involved, he said.

“It’s the only event on the calendar where the main decision makers are not there,” said Eisen, who appears in several amusing behind-the-scenes moments in the doc. “It’s an off-season Super Bowl.”

Not surprising, then, that the NFL’s annual parity-inducing prospect-distribution system has spawned numerous previous films, both scripted and documentaries, from Draft Day with Kevin Costner and Chadwick Bozeman, on down.

The Pick Is In was well backed – the league’s NFL Films and the sports division of David Ellison’s Skydance Entertainment produced it -- and takes an equally well-funded approach to the events it’s covering. Camera teams were embedded with four franchises, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, a CAA agent representing two top defensive prospects, other players, and executives.

The Pick Is In doesn’t break much new ground compared to its predecessors, other than the particular dramas of this year’s process.

But after answering which top quarterback won’t be among the first 20 picks, and what happens when one of the agent’s clients slides a bit in the draft order, the doc mines real emotional gold from the late-round fate of one diminutive Kansas State running back.

Deuce Staley had an extraordinary college career, despite being only 5’5” tall, with more than 5,000 yards combined rushing and receiving. The drama comes not just from Staley’s outsized college career, but the fact that his father, Will, is a Dallas Cowboys college-scouting executive. The outcome of a sixth-round pick in the draft’s third day has seldom carried as much emotional freight for disinterested onlookers.

That’s quite an achievement, especially considering the draft is, as one participant put it, “a broadcast that’s essentially just a reading of names off pieces of paper.”

Bigger Than a Sheet of Names For Roku

Roku Media Head of Content David Eilenberg said The Pick Is In is one of “about 30” original series and features created for the Roku Channel this year, and the channel’s first feature-length documentary original.

Roku has been slowly building its originals offerings across a range of genres since 2021, when it spent $75 million on the programming library left when billion-dollar startup Quibi spectacularly crashed. Other Roku originals right now include the reality spinoff The Great American Baking Show and a Jessica Alba-hosted and -produced show on home renovations.

“We’re trying a bunch of genres in general entertainment,” Eilenberg said, though he, like other Roku executives, declined to specify the company’s originals budget. “In this case, (The Pick Is In) gives people a new vantage on something that’s become a sports obsession.”

The NFL draft absolutely isn’t NFL live game broadcasts, which are overwhelmingly the most watched programming on broadcast and cable television. But the draft too has become something that resonates with many viewers, Eilenberg speculated, because of the huge interest in fantasy football leagues, which are all conducting this season’s team drafts right about now.

Roku, meanwhile, is “looking at sports in a few different ways,” Eilenberg said. “We’re approaching it as a platform, not (just) with content, but as a tool.”

That tool is the Sports Zone, which functions as an interface within the general Roku interface, with programming from across the Roku universe. Eilenberg called it a “genre-specific sub-home menu,” created when Roku executives realized how many sports events and related programming were being watched on its platform.

A recent Roku-commissioned survey found that 56% of streaming-video users watched live sports on their TV, and more than a quarter of those had missed games because their cable package didn’t include the match.

The Sports Zone is one way to fight that fragmentation. Other streaming services – Apple TV Plus, Peacock, Paramount Plus – have added a Sports tab in their menu of offerings as they carry more and more live events.

Roku, like Apple TV, has the benefit of being a “marketplace,” providing a more comprehensive set of viewing options than just their own shows, in Roku’s case including sports from CBS and Paramount Plus, Eilenberg said.

In June, Roku made a splashy headline when it acquired a piece of the North American TV rights to Europe's Formula E racing league. But Roku isn’t directly competing with Fox Sports 1, ESPN, NBC Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT and TBS and other possessors of pricey live-game rights.

“Our position, as with all our content, is the same as with all our channels, which is that it’s free and ad supported,” Eilenberg said. “That makes us distinct from the others.”

He also suggested Roku’s method of reaching a wide audience echoes decades of free, ad-supported sports viewing experiences on broadcast TV.

“People are going to be going through us to get to sports,” Eilenberg said.

Sports not only attracts viewers, “it also draws interest from advertisers,” Eilenberg said. “No genre of content is more enticing. It’s not just the Big Four (pro sports leagues) with advertisers either. Women’s sports is huge now.”

Accordingly there’s not only a sports “genre-specific sub-menu,” but what can only called a sub-sub menu for women’s sports, fueled by interest in World Cup soccer, the WNBA, and other female-focused leagues and sports.

Eilenberg was hesitant to predict where Roku’s sports forays will head next. Understandable, given the many, many questions hanging over the industry, as legacy cable and broadcast wither, streaming economic models aren’t scaling, and TV rights have skyrocketed.

Among the headlines of just the past couple of weeks are speculation that ESPN will partner with Apple or Amazon (the latter reportedly more likely). Separately, Amazon said in its upcoming second season of Thursday Night Football that it will deploy artificial intelligence tools to enhance its NFL coverage this year. Amazon also said Nielsen will incorporate its first-party game viewership data in its ratings, which were 18% higher than Nielsen’s own.

Apple has seen its modest Major League Soccer investment, $250 million a year for nearly all broadcast rights for a decade, blossom with the mid-season arrival in Miami of all-time great Lionel Messi. The 36-year-old global soccer star will not only be paid a boatload of money by David Beckham-owned Inter Miami, he’ll get a share of Apple TV Plus league subscription revenues.

But whither Roku remains a question for many outside observers, with or without sports documentaries.

Analyst Michael Nathanson said in a report after the most recent earnings that his firm remains” cautious about Roku’s ability to see sustained growth amid the rising competition in CTV advertising and devices ... We reiterate our Underperform rating.”

As Nathanson pointed out, though Roku ad revenues were down for the first half of the year, its stock price is “humming along, up over +120% year-to-date (vs. +17.6% YTD for S&P500)!” Continuing that blistering pace of share-price growth will be challenging.

More sports programming may help with ad revenues, by attracting or retaining more viewers. The programming also could differentiate the Roku Channel from not-very-different aggregator channels carried by competitors such as Tubi, Pluto, and TV OEMs such as Samsung and Vizio.

“Longer term, we remain concerned about Roku’s ability to sustain outsized revenue growth and generate meaningful levels of profitability,” Nathanson wrote.

That’s a reasonable concern about a company largely confined to the relatively static U.S. market, with mammoth competitors such as Alphabet, Amazon and Apple. Longer term, then, Roku must hope that it, like the undersized Deuce Staley in The Pick Is In, can still be a top pick when viewers draft their next viewing experiences.