New Suite of Features Reduces Seasonal Subscriber Churn and Addresses Complicated Geofencing Requirements

Evergent, the customer management and monetization leader for streaming and D2C sports businesses, today announced the launch of its new Sports Accelerator package, a suite of features designed to optimize monetization of live event programming for sports OTT providers. Evergent’s Sports Accelerator addresses the most challenging aspects of subscription management and monetization for sports programming, including reducing churn between professional sports seasons, navigating couch rights and blackout restrictions, and supporting channel sales and global payment processing. The new package builds on Evergent’s existing relationships and experience with sports media leaders including the National Basketball Association (NBA), YES Network, Bally Sports, MSG Network, and Marquee Sports.

Live sports programming is consistently one of the most popular television genres in the United States and throughout the world and it has only become more popular of late, as viewers are left with fewer original content choices due to the ongoing actors and writers strikes. Over the past year, streaming providers have also invested heavily in live sports programming, with major U.S. sports leagues including the NHL, MLB, and MLS broadcasting some games exclusively on platforms including Apple TV+, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime.

The new Sports Accelerator package from Evergent is purpose-built to address the seasonal, location-specific nature of live sports programming. Evergent’s seasonal subscription feature allows customers to retain subscribers across season boundaries while aligning those subscriptions to season validity dates. Additional benefits of the feature include price grandfathering across seasons to help reduce churn that would otherwise take place after a major event like the Super Bowl or NBA Finals.

In addition to seasonal subscription management, Evergent’s Sports Accelerator package also includes the following features designed to improve monetization and subscriber retention:

• Couch Rights: Evergent’s couch rights feature allows RSNs to seamlessly remain compliant with complicated geofencing rules and blackout restrictions. Evergent allows RSNs to establish and enforce couch rights for subscribers traveling beyond the RSN’s broadcasting boundaries, allowing subscribers to enjoy their subscription content while away from home.
• Subscription Pause and Resume: Evergent’s flexible subscription management tools allow end users to pause their subscription for any reason, minimizing the number of subscribers who churn without returning to the platform. This customer-friendly feature allows streaming companies to avoid the high costs of customer reacquisition.
• Channel Sales Manager: With Evergent, media providers can sell tickets and subscriptions through a variety of channels, including the teams themselves. Media companies can create and issue coupons or vouchers through the Evergent platform, allowing them to enable, manage and track coupon use across channels in a single platform.
• Favorite Teams/Players: This feature allows media companies to capture information on the subscriber’s favorite teams or players during the sign-up process, providing valuable data for personalized experiences and upselling opportunities.

Sports media customers use these tools for customer relationship management and monetization to overcome the challenges specific to their industry. Customers such as the NBA to deploy the seasonal subscription feature to increase customer retention. Regional sports networks (RSNs) including Bally Sports use Evergent’s couch rights feature to maintain compliance with geofencing and blackout restrictions.

“The live sports media landscape is changing, and it’s clear that media companies can no longer rely on the same playbook,” said Vijay Sajja, founder and CEO of Evergent. “Our new Sports Accelerator package was built with the fan in mind, simultaneously improving the user experience and reducing customer churn. We will continue to hone these features as we learn from our partnerships with some of the leading entities in sports media.”