Samsung TV Plus reached a milestone at the start of this year, hitting 100 million monthly active users around the world
One element in the streaming platform’s growth has been a push into sports and other live streaming events, in large part because it is able to deliver them for free at a time of subscription stream-flation
On Sunday, July 12, Samsung TV Plus will premiere Hooligans: The ARCH Racing Project with Keanu Reeves & Gard Hollinger. The company hopes the show will function for it a bit like Drive to Survive does for Netflix. The six-episode series tracks Reeves and Hollinger and their motorcycle racing team as it enters the action in pro racing circuit MotoAmerica
Along with picking up the show, Samsung TV Plus also acquired rights to live MotoAmerica races in 2026 and 2027, and will show them on a dedicated FAST channel (one of 750 it operates in the U.S.) About a dozen multi-day races are held each year
Watch on Deadline
Samsung is not alone in bringing live sports to free streaming. Roku has landed rights to Major League Baseball and the X-Games. Fox Corp.’s Tubi simulcast World Cup games last month and the Super Bowl in 2025. Takashi Nakano, VP of content and programming for Samsung TV Plus says it has ramped things up since sticking a “baby toe” in the water with a slate of minor league baseball games in 2024. “It was a runaway hit. We weren’t sure how it was going to be consumed,” he recalled. “But we saw growth week after week. Engagement was very strong.”
Nakano recently spoke with Deadline about the company’s live strategy and how it can provide the same audience draw as radio when families once gathered in the living room to listen to it. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length
DEADLINE: After getting your start with live baseball and volleyball, you then branched into music with the Jonas Brothers. How did that fit together with sports?
TAKASHI NAKANO:We use the full scale and scope of Samsung to showcase our content. We saw this capability come to life when we did five Jonas Brothers concerts. We weren’t sure of how it was going to go. And the Jonas Brothers were great partners. They jumped in and said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ They saw engagement on their social media handles grow as we were livestreaming. We saw them add more events at the end of their tour, and we created a custom New Year’s Eve show that was not on the books, just for fun. And we sold all that out really quickly. There’s a question about how viewers discover content, but being on TV is an amplification for our partners beyond what we traditionally call digital. It’s really television, and that’s what I think is exciting.
DEADLINE: And how did the opportunity then come along to get into motorcycle racing and team up with Keanu Reeves?
NAKANO: Obviously, Keanu is a mega-superstar beloved by many, but he is also a motorcycle fan. He and his partner, Gar Hollinger, created a race team based on an engine that they built here in Southern California. And they said, ‘Let’s race this thing.’ And really that’s where it started. They race in this league called Super Hooligans, and they were like, ‘If we’re gonna race it, we should document what’s gonna happen in our inaugural season.’ So they did that. And we got wind of what they were doing. They said, ‘Hey, do you guys want to tell the story of Gar and Keanu and ARCH racing on Samsung TV Plus?’ And we said, ‘We’d love to.’ Besides the two of them, there are a lot of other people involved in a racing team. And so viewers start becoming intimately involved in the life of racing and what they have to do to get on a bike and go 180 miles an hour through this circuit, and wondering if they’re gonna crash, and wondering if their engine is gonna hold up. You really see that drama.
DEADLINE: Some of these kinds of shows can be vanity deals where a star’s name is attached but you don’t end up seeing a lot of them. So, how much Keanu is there inHooligans?
NAKANO: He is deeply involved, insanely involved in his team. Keanu is part of every episode for sure, actively making decisions. You see the emotion, you see the ‘Oh my God, are we going to crash? What happened? Is [ARCH Racing driver Corey Alexander] fine? Is he OK? Is he walking?’ You will see all of that drama from Keanu from start to finish
DEADLINE: In a world of algorithms, how do you approach curation when you have someone like Keanu Reeves on an exclusive show? Are you trying to make sure John Wick movies are recommended when these episodes finish?
NAKANO: The power of linear television that I think many technology companies have missed is that the power of the lead-in is so important. What do you show before a live event? What do you show before any event or any show? And how do you move users from one experience to the next experience, the next experience, through that television journey? How you program is critical. And your lead-in and lead-out is is also very important. Linear is linear, right? It’s where everyone sees the same thing before a show. Everyone sees the show and everyone sees the same thing after the show. But how do you get users kind of transitioning from one show to the next show to the next show is an art, and I’ve got the best team on the planet to do that, to paint that picture.
DEADLINE: This is anecdotal, I haven’t conducted a survey on it, but some people in the industry have expressed frustration to me with how eager you seem to be to get viewers into the Samsung TV Plus environment. For pay-TV subscribers, that can sometimes cause confusion because of how prominent the app is on the home screen and how many programming brands exist in both traditional linear TV and in FAST. (That part is their fault, not yours.) How does the company balance the goals of Samsung TV Plus with the overall viewer experience?
NAKANO:At Samsung, we have partnerships with every single app partner out there. They have the ability to promote. They have position on our home screen. They spend a lot of money to get their programming front and center to the users and to the viewers. So, that’s an important part of our business. At Samsung TV Plus, we are still a resident on our own devices. We have to manage across all the other app platforms and MVPD subscriptions as well. We have to manage across a number of stakeholders. So it’s it’s a complicated experience. It is not simple. There’s lots of harmonization, a lot of working together. We’re fortunate because our groups are tight. I’ve been fortunate to be working with that team for nearly my entire career here at Samsung. We have a shorthand that we use across our team. So, it works well.
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