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Just a few years in the past, Collin Castellaw was an artwork trainer incomes simply $25,000 a yr when he determined to begin making YouTube movies. At this time, alongside his enterprise companion Deron Guidrey, he leads PlayersTV — the primary athlete and fan-owned sports activities and life-style TV community with a pre-money valuation of $75 million.
“We’re not from conventional TV or legacy media backgrounds, and I feel that is what units us aside,” Castellaw says. “It permits us to suppose in another way, transfer shortly like a startup, and deal with the place the trade is heading, not the place it has been.”
Guidrey first found Castellaw via Shot Mechanics, his YouTube coaching channel with over 1,000,000 subscribers. On the time, Guidery was working in advertising and marketing with skilled athletes and noticed a possibility to collaborate.
“He linked me with just a few execs and requested who was dealing with my enterprise monetization,” Castellaw recollects. “I advised him nobody—I used to be simply counting on occasional sponsorships.”
Recognizing the potential, Guidrey supplied to take over, placing Castellaw on a modest $2,000 month-to-month retainer. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than Castellaw voiced issues, however Guidrey remained assured that larger offers have been on the horizon.
Issues shifted when Guidrey seen the rise of first-person athlete content material on platforms like The Gamers’ Tribune and Uninterrupted.
“I acknowledged an issue,” Guidrey says. “Athletes have been creating manufacturing corporations, however they’d no distribution.”
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He envisioned a devoted channel that showcased the athlete life-style past the sport, that includes cooking reveals, actuality collection, and content material that humanized gamers past their uniforms. He reached out to Castellaw, proposing a partnership that mixed his advertising and marketing and expertise technique experience with Castellaw’s expertise in digital promotions and content material manufacturing.
“I took a web page from Jay-Z’s blueprint when he launched Tidal, bringing artists collectively to create their very own music streaming platform,” Guidrey says. “I utilized the identical idea to athletes—a platform owned by them, for them.” And thus, PlayersTV was born.
Picture credit score: PlayersTV
Constructed by athletes. Powered by followers
PlayersTV is the one athlete- and fan-owned media community, boasting 3,000 hours of licensed and authentic content material. It has distribution offers with main platforms like DIRECTV, FuboTV, YouTube TV, and Hearth TV, and it’s quickly launching its personal direct-to-consumer streaming service. Looks like buyers appreciated the Jay-Z line.
“We’re not only a manufacturing firm creating IP,” Castellaw says. “We deal with guaranteeing 10 to twenty million eyeballs on content material. That is the largest unlock nobody on this area has achieved at our degree.”
A lot of PlayersTV’s success may be attributed to the groundwork the duo laid earlier than the launch.
“We seemed on the downside first,” Guidrey says. “As an instance you’ve got 40 athletes that wish to create content material—properly, there aren’t sufficient consumers to host it!”
The purpose is for PlayersTV to grow to be the go-to platform for artistic athletes in search of distribution, assuaging the stress on businesses to safe offers with extra selective networks.
“Cartoons have Cartoon Community, anime has Crunchyroll, and now, this content material has a house too,” Castellaw says.
He factors to the restricted availability of sports activities content material on main platforms. “When you have a look at locations like Netflix, there’s solely a handful of sports activities content material yearly,” he explains. “We all the time say, the place there’s fragmentation, there’s a possibility for aggregation.”
From spectators to shareholders
One in every of PlayersTV’s most unusual options is the Fan Possession Initiative, permitting sports activities followers to purchase small shares within the firm in trade for perks like unique occasions, and, after all, the bragging rights of proudly owning an athlete media firm.
This initiative raised over $3 million from 2,200+ “fan homeowners,” making PlayersTV the first-ever athlete- and fan-owned media firm.
For Castellaw, the philosophy behind the initiative boils all the way down to a easy adage: If you wish to go quick, go alone. If you wish to go far, go collectively.
“When an investor questions our valuation or market traction, we level to our fan shareholders as proof of idea,” he says. “It is a direct endorsement from the very viewers we’re concentrating on for content material distribution.”
“By placing athletes and followers first, we place ourselves to draw buyers on our personal phrases,” Guidrey provides. “The fairness mannequin with followers resonated deeply with the athletes, and it even empowered us to make our first acquisition—an organization purchased with the help of our athlete and fan shareholders. How cool is that?”
Guidrey and Castellaw introduced their imaginative and prescient to life by combining their distinctive expertise, figuring out key issues, and staying true to their core values. Whereas they nonetheless have a protracted option to go, Guidrey needs the corporate to grow to be the primary publicly traded athlete-owned IPO.
“Every part we do is pushed by the need to create lasting affect, not simply chase cash,” Guidrey says. “We is probably not large Hollywood names, however we wish our story to encourage different founders like us.”