Give women’s sport a greater share of overall sport sporty coverage is a team effort, and Religion of Sports, Ensemble, Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment and Roku have joined forces to achieve this goal.
This week, the group announced that the women’s sports anthology documentary series Next is Now will launch on The Roku Channel later this year. The series will be both financed and produced by partner brands, with Deep Blue founder and CEO Laura Correnti noting that it has already garnered “expressed interest from a handful of endemic and non-endemic brands in the women’s sports space up to the ranks of CMOs. »
The project kicks off with The Fastest Six Weeks in Sports, a series examining how women’s basketball draft prospects and veteran athletes spend the weeks between the end of NCAA Women’s March Madness and the start of the WNBA season . For comparison, the 18.9 million fans who watched last year’s NCAA women’s final weren’t just a audience larger than the men’s final (14.8) but the largest non-football sports audience of 2025. Meanwhile, last year’s WNBA draft attracted 2.45 million viewers—the most for a WNBA broadcast since 2000.
Religion of Sports, founded by Tom Brady, Michael Strahan and Gotham Chopra, will lead production of Next is Now content. Issa Rae’s branded entertainment company, Ensemble, will focus on social media content creation and distribution, while Deep Blue consults on media and creative ideas while fostering brand partnerships and activations .
All Next is Now programming will appear on the Roku Sports FAST channel and in the Roku Women’s Sports Zone. The game plan is not just to give women’s sports fans what they increasingly want, but to eliminate the excuses that women’s sports content is too difficult for fans to locate or for brands to buy .
“The reason we decided to go this route was also to ensure what is 1736480420 a continued barrier to scale and discovery, which is promotion,” Correnti said. “By leveraging brands to fund production and contributing media funds to ensure content discovery, we felt this was the quickest and most effective way to ensure we weren’t just telling and to broadcast these stories, but that consumers and viewers can find them.
Marks off the bench
According to Wasserman’s women-focused practice, The Collective, women’s sports represented 15% of all sports views in 2023. Even with last year’s gains and the emergence of new leagues, including the Professional Women’s Hockey League and League One Volleyball, Wasserman predicted that women’s sports would still account for only 20% of sports audiences in 2025.
But even as the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and WNBA consider expanding their media rights agreements, brands have been slow to buy into them. a 2024 report from Gatherjust 6% of Fortune 500 companies invest in women’s sports – a figure Correnti calls “appalling” – compared to 20% for men’s athletics.
“There is clearly a need and an opportunity to engage the other 94 percent,” Correnti said. “Who are they, what drives their business and how can we ensure the women’s sports ecosystem can meet their business needs to create productive and collaborative outcomes?” »
When these Fortune 500 companies participated, it was a game changer.
For example, Morgan Stanley, ranked No. 41 on the Fortune 500, has been heavily involved in the popular ESPN+ docuseries. In the arena: Serena Williamsthanks to its collaboration with Religion of Sports.
Additionally, State Farm, which is No. 39 in the Fortune 500, used the time between NIL partner Caitlin Clark’s final collegiate appearance in the NCAA finals and her No. 1 pick by the Indiana Fever in the draft the NBA to partner with ESPN, Disney. Advertising, and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions for their docuseries “Full Court Press” for ABC featuring Clark and other future WNBA rookies.
The brands and demand are there, but the challenge is providing women’s sports inventory at a scale they can use and tailored to the audiences they want to reach. That’s where Roku and its 90 million “built-in scale” homes come into the equation.
“It’s free and accessible to consumers. There is the opportunity to promote the development, capture and collection of data,” Correnti said. “[It’s] all the bells and whistles that we know advertisers are looking for to justify not just investment, but increased investment in 2025.”
Recruit new players
Next is Now partners also want to involve brands that have not typically ventured into women’s sports.
Correnti said that although brands like State farm, GoogleAnd Ally have been reliable supporters, she predicts that much of the increase in brand spending in women’s sports this year will come from brands considered “non-endemic” to the sport. Whether they are more drawn to stories of athletes parenting while playing, transitioning to retirement, or navigating NIL, these non-endemic brands might be more likely to find their female sports consumers well beyond the field or of the court.
“Women’s sports have taken pop culture by storm, providing unforgettable moments on and off the playing field,” said Ian Schafer, president of Ensemble. “While the stories are timeless, these moments live right into the social media timeline, where pop culture thrives.”
Although Next is Now partners see great potential in Roku’s ability to help measure, target and reach audiences (which Roku will also use in its first live women’s sports partnership with the Professional Volleyball Federation this year), they view its platform as only one part. of the storytelling process. By giving brands a role in production, Correnti envisions a partnership in which Next is Now content is broadcast on branded channels, transformed into ad campaigns, used in activations on college campuses and debuted during early screenings .
“Unlike the traditional model where you make something, you sell something, and it’s at the mercy of a sales team that wasn’t involved in the original story, getting brands involved from the start allows to create more contextual messages. that everyone benefits from,” Correnti said.
