LiveLike Powers Fan Engagement Across Eight World Cup Activations on Five Continents

A billion-dollar media rights property does not stay that way by standing still. NASCAR, one of the top five or six media rights properties in the United States, has spent the last several years rethinking how it distributes content, produces original programing, grows its audience, and pays its drivers to become cultural ambassadors. The results so far are striking: a 16% increase in the 18-to-34 demographic in the first year of its new media deal, and a 26% increase in that same demo through early 2026.

For platform operators, digital product teams, and anyone working in sports media, NASCAR's approach offers a detailed case study in how a legacy property can modernize without alienating its core. The NASCAR media rights strategy is not just about who carries the races. It touches production, first-party data, sponsorship packaging, content creation, schedule innovation, and driver brand-building, all coordinated by a private, family-owned organization that can move faster than most leagues.

This post breaks down the key elements of NASCAR's playbook, drawn from a conversation between LiveLike CEO & Co-Founder Miheer Walavalkar and Brian Herbst, NASCAR's EVP and Chief Media and Revenue Officer, on the Future of Fandom podcast.

A media rights deal shaped by consumption patterns, not tradition

When NASCAR went to market with its media rights in 2023, the distribution landscape looked nothing like it did during the previous cycle in 2013. Digital streaming consumption had risen to roughly 35-36% of total viewing, and it continues to climb past 42%. NASCAR's response was to split its rights across Fox, Amazon Prime, TNT (via Warner Bros. Discovery), and NBC/USA, while also bringing in the CW for its Saturday series.

Brian Herbst framed the logic clearly: "Our media rights and our distribution strategies will essentially follow where content consumption patterns are going." The NASCAR Amazon Prime partnership, which launched with the Coca-Cola 600 in 2024, drew 2.7 million viewers and skewed six to seven years younger than a traditional linear broadcast. More importantly, that younger cohort did not disappear when the schedule moved to other networks. It stayed for the full season.

This is the critical nuance in any live sports streaming strategy. Fragmentation is not just a distribution challenge; it is also an audience development tool. By placing races on streaming platforms, NASCAR reached fans it would not have found on cable alone.

Managing sports media rights fragmentation without losing fans

The obvious risk of splitting rights across four or more partners is confusion. If you are an NBA fan right now, you have to check daily which network carries that night's game. NASCAR has a structural advantage here: it is a weekend-based sport. Each week, fans need to know one thing, which channel has Sunday's race.

NASCAR builds cross-promotional obligations directly into its media deals and carves out institutional advertising inventory to promote the next broadcast partner. Brian described the approach: "We have to promote like crazy from Fox to Amazon. We have to promote like crazy from Amazon to TNT. We have to promote like crazy from TNT to NBC." That inventory can also flex outside NASCAR broadcasts entirely, reaching new audiences during events like the World Baseball Classic on Fox.

For any sports property managing fragmentation, the lesson is operational discipline. Education is not something you layer on after the deal is signed. It needs to be contractually embedded.

The $60 million production studio that made the deal possible

One of the most forward-looking moves in NASCAR's strategy was the decision to build a $60 million production facility in Concord, North Carolina, before the media rights deal was even negotiated. The logic was anticipatory: legacy partners like Fox and NBC have decades of live event production experience, but newcomers like Amazon, Apple, and the CW do not.

When the CW agreed to carry the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, the network asked NASCAR to handle production. Because the Concord studio was already under construction, NASCAR could say yes. The production agreement and the media rights agreement were signed simultaneously.

This in-house sports production capability gives NASCAR control over how its story is told, from camera placement (120 cameras per race, plus in-car cameras in every vehicle) to the voices on the broadcast. Brian put it simply: "We care the most. We've been around for 78 years. We expect to be around for another 78 years."

The facility also supports NASCAR's original content strategy, powering social videos, YouTube programing, fast channel content, and archive-driven documentaries. When NASCAR provided 800 hours of tagged footage for Amazon's Dale Earnhardt Sr. documentary, that content library became the backbone of what turned into the highest-performing sports documentary Amazon has ever released.

The Driver Ambassador Program: paying athletes to build the brand

Perhaps the most innovative element of NASCAR's current approach is the NASCAR Driver Ambassador Program. NASCAR allocated $15-20 million from the top of its media rights revenue and redirected it into incentive payments for drivers across the Cup Series, the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, and the Truck Series.

The program works on a points system. Drivers earn points for growing their social following, appearing on shows like Good Morning America or the Pat McAfee Show, participating in Netflix or Amazon productions, and increasing their Fox broadcast appearances. The driver with the most points at year's end receives the largest payout. Joey Logano topped the leaderboard in the program's first year with a $1 million check.

NASCAR, its agency partner CAA, and the drivers' own teams all source opportunities. Nine times out of ten, Brian said, NASCAR approves driver-initiated ideas because "that'll grow the sport." With only 36 Cup Series drivers, the per-person incentive is significant enough to change behavior.

This is a model that any sports property could adapt. Rather than relying solely on a corporate marketing machine, NASCAR is turning its athletes into a distributed content and relevance network, then measuring the output and compensating accordingly.

First-party data and the vertical sales model

NASCAR's ownership structure gives it an unusual degree of vertical integration. It controls 20 of its own tracks, the media rights, the archive footage, the production facility, and a fan database containing tens of millions of records. Anyone who has bought a ticket or played a fantasy game on NASCAR.com has generated sports first-party data fan profiles that NASCAR can activate.

On the sponsorship side, this integration has enabled a vertical sales approach. A single sponsor package now includes NASCAR track spend, NASCAR IP spend, a driver and team component, and a media network component. The client buys one package and dials up or down specific assets as needed. The internal allocation debates happen behind the scenes, not in front of the client.

This sports sponsorship vertical sales model drove a record new business year for NASCAR in 2026. For platform operators thinking about monetization, the principle is clear: the more touchpoints you control, the more value you can bundle for commercial partners.

Schedule innovation and younger audience growth

NASCAR's transformation extends beyond media and content to the competition calendar itself. For 16 of Brian’s 21 years at the company, the schedule never changed. Since the merger of NASCAR and ISC (its track-holding company) and the move to private ownership, the organization has used that operational freedom to experiment aggressively.

Recent NASCAR schedule changes include street races in Chicago, a race inside the LA Coliseum, an event at the El Camino Real, the first international race since 1958 at Mexico City, and the upcoming 2025 race on the actual naval base in Coronado, San Diego. A social video promoting the Coronado race made it the hottest-selling ticket on the NASCAR circuit within 48 hours.

These moves address a geographic accessibility problem. NASCAR tracks are enormous, often located far from metro centers. Street races and stadium events bring the product to urban audiences who might never drive to Talladega. The NASCAR younger audience growth numbers validate the approach: 26% growth in the 18-to-34 demo in 2026, building on 16% growth the year before.

Correcting NASCAR technology misconceptions

One theme Brian returned to throughout the conversation was the gap between perception and reality regarding NASCAR's technological sophistication. International audiences, in particular, often assume Formula 1 is far ahead on the technology front.

The reality: NASCAR operates 120 cameras per race, in-car cameras in every vehicle, automated pit road tracking, 200 competition data points firing off cars traveling 190 miles per hour, a remote race control center in Concord, and a full in-house digital and production engineering team. For a company of 1,300 people, the technical output is significant.

Brian acknowledged this is a storytelling gap, not a capability gap: "That story, I think we have not told as well as some of our counterparts." For any sports organization, the lesson is that technology investment only builds brand equity if you communicate it effectively to your audience.

Key Takeaways

- NASCAR's media rights strategy deliberately fragments distribution to match shifting consumption patterns, using streaming platforms as audience development tools rather than just revenue sources.

- The $60 million Concord production studio was built before the media deal closed, positioning NASCAR to say yes when new partners needed production support.

- The Driver Ambassador Program redirects $15-20 million from media rights revenue into direct incentive payments for drivers who grow their public profiles, turning athletes into a distributed brand-building network.

- NASCAR's vertical integration across tracks, media, data, and production powers a bundled sponsorship model that delivered a record new business year in 2026.

- Schedule innovation, including street races and international events, is driving significant younger audience growth while maintaining core fan engagement.

The common thread across all of NASCAR's moves is control. Control over production, control over data, control over schedule, control over how drivers build their brands. That control is not an end in itself; it is what allows NASCAR to move quickly, package value for partners, and make long-term bets on fan growth without answering to quarterly earnings pressure.

For any sports property or media platform thinking about the future of sports fandom, NASCAR's playbook is a reminder that distribution is just one piece. The organizations that will win the next decade are the ones building the infrastructure, both technical and commercial, to own the full fan relationship.

Still not sure if a vertical fan engagement strategy can be applied to your platform? Get in touch today to learn more.

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For the better part of a decade, the sports streaming industry operated under a single mandate: don't go dark. Reliable playback was the KPI. The viewing experience itself, the part that might actually give a fan a reason to choose one platform over another, was an afterthought. Streaming was TV over IP, nothing more.

That era is ending. Streaming has overtaken cable in importance, and the organizations that distribute live sports are finally asking a different question: now that we're digital-first, what can we do that's actually special? The answer requires a fundamentally different skill set, one rooted in product thinking, fan data, and first-party audience strategy, and a willingness to treat every viewer as an individual rather than a number in a concurrent-viewer count.

On a recent episode of the Future of Fandom podcast, LiveLike CEO & Co-Founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Ari Evans, CEO & Founder of Maestro, to unpack what it takes to build a true sports fan engagement platform, why the industry has been so slow to personalize the broadcast experience, and where AI-powered sports broadcast personalization is headed next. This post distills the most actionable insights from that conversation.

‍The Zynga lesson: freemium thinking applied to sports

Ari Evans spent his formative product years at Zynga, where the entire organization ran on experimentation and forecasting. Product managers wrote SQL queries daily. Every feature shipped with a revenue and adoption forecast, and the team could predict outcomes within 5–10% accuracy. The monetization model was stark: roughly 1% of players generated most of the revenue, and everyone else paid nothing. That freemium structure subsidized the casual majority.

When Ari later brought that rigor to esports and sports broadcasting, he found almost none of it in place. Gaming publishers measured success by a single metric: concurrent Twitch viewers. There was no conversion funnel connecting viewership to in-game purchases or any other bottom-line outcome. Broadcast-trained teams, hired to run esports divisions, came from a world of one-to-many delivery where data feedback loops simply didn't exist.

The parallel to sports streaming is direct. Organizations moving from cable distribution to direct-to-consumer sports strategy need the same muscles Zynga built: segmentation, funnel thinking, rapid experimentation, and attribution. Most don't have those muscles yet. The ones building them now are the ones pulling ahead.

Cross-platform sports streaming is harder than it looks

One of the most revealing parts of the conversation centered on what it actually takes to deliver interactive live streaming for sports leagues across every screen. Maestro's pivot from a full-stack web product to a cross-platform SDK approach, supporting connected TV alongside mobile and web, changed the company's trajectory entirely.

The reason is partly technical: building for TV means building the same thing four times, in four different languages, with four different sets of constraints. A significant share of any audience is still watching on older hardware, first-generation Roku devices or smart TVs from 2016, that can barely run animations. Every platform team faces the same question: what's the lowest common denominator that covers the largest surface area?

But the harder problem is conceptual. On TV, the input device is a remote that most viewers aren't actively holding. The phone, not the television, is arguably the primary screen for younger audiences. That reframing changes everything about how you design interactive overlays, how you route calls to action, and whether a personalized notification should appear on the TV, the phone, or both. Sports streaming TV app development demands a design system flexible enough to adapt to each context without requiring a full redesign for every platform.

Personalized interactive video: the last unaddressed medium

Ari made a point that deserves repeating: video is the only medium left where just-in-time, personalized messaging doesn't exist at scale. Email marketing has had it for years. Push notifications are personalized by default. Display ads are targeted down to the individual. But a live sports broadcast? Everyone sees the same rectangle.

Maestro's approach uses a rule builder, a no-code tool similar to Zapier, where operators define trigger events and map them to personalized overlays. A fantasy football player sees a graphic when they score points in their league. A bettor sees a prompt tied to real-time match action. The metadata drives the creative on the fly, targeted to individual users through tagging.

Early results show higher click-through rates on personalized overlays compared to generic ones, which is consistent with every other form of personalized marketing. The opportunity for sports broadcast personalization is enormous precisely because the bar is so low. LiveLike's own interactive widget suite operates on the same principle: the right prompt, to the right fan, at the right moment, drives meaningfully more engagement than a one-size-fits-all broadcast experience.

The casual fan onboarding gap

The conversation surfaced a problem that almost no sports organization is actively solving: what happens when someone watches a sport for the first time?

Ari shared a personal story about attending a Formula 1 race in the Paddock Club. People around him cheered at moments he didn't understand. He wasn't going to ask why. He left the event unsure whether he'd return, not because the experience was bad, but because nobody helped him understand what he was watching.

This casual fan onboarding experience is a massive, unaddressed opportunity. Platforms know when a user is watching a league for the first time. They could serve a 30-second explainer video on how scoring works. They could simplify commentary overlays based on a viewer's familiarity level. They could use AI tools for sports media organizations to adapt the depth of information dynamically.

The stakes are real. If a first-time viewer doesn't understand what they're watching, they won't come back. The industry spends enormous energy on retaining superfans through features like multiview, but converting a casual viewer into a returning one, that's where the larger growth opportunity sits. A well-designed sports fan engagement platform should address both ends of the funnel.

AI, speed, and the small-organization advantage

The final thread worth pulling is Ari' observation about AI and organizational speed. Small teams adopting AI tools can compress decision-making cycles dramatically. Fewer people means fewer approvals, faster iteration, and more experiments per unit of time. Ari built an entire new product, Maestro's influencer co-streaming tool, largely solo using AI-assisted development.

For larger sports media organizations, the bottleneck is rarely technology. It's inter-departmental coordination: content teams waiting on product teams waiting on broadcast teams waiting on engineering. AI can reduce that friction, whether through automated A/B testing strategy, faster prototyping, or tools like LiveLike's Genie that streamline internal content workflows.

Ari' prediction is worth taking seriously: the AI transformation in small organizations will happen much faster than in large ones, and the resulting disparity will create significant disruption. Sports tech AI startup efficiency is already visible in how quickly new products are reaching market. The organizations that figure out how to apply that same speed internally, regardless of their size, will define the next generation of fan experiences.

Key Takeaways

- Video remains the only major medium without personalized, just-in-time messaging at scale, representing the single largest untapped opportunity in sports streaming.

- Cross-platform delivery, especially to connected TV devices, is a genuine technical moat that most organizations underestimate until they attempt it in-house.

- The casual fan onboarding experience is almost universally neglected, yet it represents the largest addressable audience for growth.

- Freemium monetization principles from gaming, where a small percentage of power users subsidize the majority, apply directly to direct-to-consumer sports strategy.

- AI's most immediate impact on sports media organizations won't be viewer-facing; it will be eliminating the internal coordination friction that slows experimentation.

The sports streaming industry spent a decade getting reliable playback right. The next decade belongs to the organizations that treat every viewer as an individual, from the first-time casual who doesn't know how tennis scoring works to the superfan watching four games on a split screen. The technology exists. The frameworks exist. What separates the leaders from the rest is whether they build the product muscles to actually use them.

Still not sure if personalized interactive sports streaming can be applied to your platform?

Get In touch

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LiveLike, a global leader in fan engagement and loyalty solutions, has partnered with the Professional Fighters League (PFL) and Futureverse to launch PFL Rewards — a next-generation global fan loyalty experience now available worldwide inside the new PFL app for iOS and Android.

Designed to reimagine how fans engage with PFL, PFL Rewards blends physical and digital incentives, transforming passive viewing into active participation. Fans can earn points for everyday interactions — downloading the official PFL app, streaming live fights, submitting predictions, or watching highlights — and redeem them for exclusive rewards including merchandise, event tickets, and VIP access.

“PFL is pioneering a new era of fan engagement – one where interactivity, loyalty, and real-world value are seamlessly integrated,” said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-founder of LiveLike. “We’re proud to bring our technology and expertise to the table to help power a more connected, rewarding, and immersive MMA fan experience from day one.”

Building a Connected, Year-Round MMA Fan Community

With its AI-first platform trusted by major sports brands such as LIV Golf, Chelsea Football Club, YES Network, and the New York Mets, LiveLike brings the tools to turn everyday fan behavior into meaningful rewards through personalized and gamified experiences.

PFL’s new loyalty hub unites the league’s audience across 160+ countries into a centralized digital ecosystem, offering fans a place to connect every day of the year — not just on fight night.

“PFL is redefining what it means to be a modern sports league,” said Mike Chioditti, SVP, New Business of the Professional Fighters League. “In just a few years we have become the No. 2 MMA company worldwide with our quality of fighters and global distribution. We’ve gained 650 million fans around the globe, many of them of a demographic that’s young and tech savvy. We want to connect all of our fans and give them a place to engage and be rewarded for their fandom. With Futureverse’s technology, this platform gives our audiences a destination every day of the year, not just fight night.”

Futureverse & The Root Network

At the foundation of PFL Rewards is The Root Network, Futureverse’s Layer 1 blockchain designed for interoperable fan journeys. This makes PFL the first major MMA organization to launch a large-scale, fully web3-integrated fan engagement platform.

“Sports fandom is no longer limited to a stadium seat or a TV screen,” said Aaron McDonald, Co-Founder and CEO of Futureverse. “Today’s fans want to participate, personalize, and be recognized for their engagement, wherever they are in the world. With PFL, we’re creating a real-world example of how sports organizations can bring fragmented audiences into a unified, gamified experience. It’s a blueprint for how today’s most influential sports leagues will connect with the next generation of fans.”

What’s Next for PFL Rewards

Following launch, the platform will expand to include digital collectibles, token-gated commerce, ticketing, and custom experiences, providing fans with multiple ways to earn, play, and access exclusive opportunities both online and in-person at invite-only events.

To download the new PFL app, visit pflmma.com/app-info.