Leading sports-first live-streaming service fuboTV(NYSE:FUBO)is joining the broad-market Russell 3000 Index later this month, the company announced on Tuesday morning. With over $10 trillion of assets benchmarked against Russell's indexes, the inclusion may result in greater demand for the stock.
The move to include thetech companyin the index less than a year after the stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) highlights how quickly fuboTV has managed to establish itself as an important company in streaming TV. Furthermore, Russell's addition of fuboTV comes at a time of incredible momentum for the company.
An important milestone
With shares of fuboTV getting listed on the NYSE for the first time last October, the stock has garnered significant investment interest very quickly. Last fall, shares were initially trading around $12. Today, they're near $32.
"We are pleased with the interest fuboTV has received from the investor community in such a short period following our listing on the New York Stock Exchange last October," CEO David Gandler said in a press release on Tuesday. "The addition of fuboTV to the Russell 3000 Index is an important milestone for the company as we stay laser-focused on defining a new category of interactive television while delivering significant shareholder value."
fuboTV provides consumers with a convenient way to stream many of the sports that lots of people still watch on traditional television. But the streaming service has beenquickly taking shareas it tries to attract people to its service for live sports and then keep them around with a broad base of entertainment, including on-demand TV shows and movies. The company also plans to roll out sports betting on its platform.
It's the underlying business that matters
While fuboTV's inclusion in the Russell 3000 is an important milestone,investorsshouldn't count on that event to lift the stock. As is the case with any stock, it's usually the underlying business that will determine how it performs over the long haul.
Fortunately, fuboTV's ad-supported streaming service is doing extremely well. In the first quarter, the company bucked a trend of normal seasonality that typically leads to a sequential decline in subscribers and instead added 43,000 new subscribers during the quarter. On a year-over-year basis, subscribers soared 105% to more than 590,000.
Consumers are choosing fuboTV because of its "superior value, our year-round content offerings and a customer-centric, innovative consumer product experience relative to legacy pay TV (cable / satellite / telco)," Gandler said in the company's first-quarter earnings release. "We see this trend continuing to accelerate as more consumers discover they can cut the cord without losing access to the sports teams, live channels and content they love."
Subscriber momentum combined with the ongoing shift of marketers' budgets from traditional television to connected TV is leading to extraordinary growth in its advertising revenue, which increased 206% year over year in the first quarter to $12.6 million. Total revenue during the period increased 135% to $119.7 million.