When it comes to sports, Philo doesn’t have it — at least in the conventional sense.
The wallet-friendly streamer has long positioned itself as a lower-cost streaming cable replacement that caters to fans of entertainment, lifestyle and knowledge-based programming — which means setting aside deals for expensive sports channels in order to keep plan costs down.
As it happens, Philo’s collection of more than 80 premium cable networks also carries quite a bit of highly-sought reality shows.
Following its landmark deal to include NBC Universal’s Bravo in its paid plans, Philo is leaning into its role as a starting point for reality shows fans by launching a new brand campaign called “Film Study,” a series of female-strong spots that shows viewers dissecting all the on-screen drama as if they were plays in a major athletic competition.
“The idea is that reality fans and sports fans have a lot in common,” a spokesperson for Philo told The Desk by e-mail. “Reality fans watch live, rally around their franchises, debate every episode, find community in a thriving fandom ecosystem, and even run fantasy leagues. The spot leans into that with whip pans, broadcast chyrons and player-style intros, plus a wink at how much attention TV services usually give sports.”
In an era where more entertainment is flowing toward network-owned streaming services, sports is one of two types of appointment-viewing content that still puts people in front of traditional linear TV. (The other genre is live news.) The collective experience of watching a game unfold in real time — the elation of a 50-yard pass run in for a touchdown, the thrill of a last-minute goal that ties a game, a slam dunk over the head of another player, a fight when a player body checks another away from the puck — invokes all sorts of emotions among fans, usually stronger if everyone is watching together, all at once.
Reality shows may not have tie-up with fantasy gaming platforms and prediction marketplaces (yet), but that doesn’t mean that type of programming doesn’t invoke similar emotions — celebrities and contestants engage in just as much drama as any household name athlete, and Philo knows it.
According to Nielsen, some of the most-watched, non-sports programming on broadcast and cable TV today involves reality-based programming and competition series. On streaming, “Love Island USA” and “The Traitors” has attracted a large following of mostly-young viewers who are glued to their phones and their TV sets. On traditional TV, “The Real Housewives,” “Vanderpump Rules” and “Below Deck” pulls in an audience to Bravo, which is now offered through Philo.
It would have been one thing for Philo to launch a new brand campaign that paints reality TV series as another type of sports, but the company went an extra step, making a deliberate decision to spotlight women across its connected TV spot and digital advertising assets.
“We thought it was important to spotlight women in the campaign, particularly with the callbacks to sports,” the spokesperson said. “Female audiences are often underrepresented in advertising — particularly sports-adjacent advertising — while driving by some estimates up to 85 percent of consumer purchases. We wanted to show that reality TV fandom, particularly a fandom so closely tied to female audiences, deserves the same kind of attention and credence as sports fandom.”
Philo said its Film Study initiative is its “biggest brand campaign to date.” The campaign was developed in house by Philo’s creative marketing team, and director Daniel Russell was tapped to arrange the TV spot.
The campaign comes about two years after Philo rolled out a brand identity refresh that promotes its service as a “better way to watch TV” — something for everyone in the family, whether its movies and dramas on AMC’s portfolio of channels or reality-based series on Bravo, VH1, Lifetime and We TV.
The service offers premium cable networks from AMC Global Media, Hearst’s A+E Global Media and non-sports channels from Skydance’s Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount. The channels are offered through Philo’s paid subscription tiers, which starts at $25 per month. A premium plan, called Bundle Plus (stylized as Bundle+), also includes access to the ad-supported tiers of AMC Plus, HBO Max and Discovery Plus for $33 per month.
Philo also distributes more than 100 free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels from a number of partners, which are available to stream and record with or without a subscription.
As a private company, Philo doesn’t regularly update its subscriber counts, and data about the streaming service generally isn’t offered by its investor-owners. Last year, the company said its streaming platform reaches more than 3 million viewers on a monthly basis.
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