Season 7 of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” premiered on Friday, March 7, and Netflix’s racing docuseries has proven to be consistently popular since it first debuted in 2019. Parrot Analytics’ Streaming Economics system calculates that the show has delivered over $290 million in global streaming revenue for the platform from 2020 through 2024.
The series isn’t just a money maker for Netflix, it also helped broaden the fanbase of Formula 1 by providing a new entry point to the sport for fans initially drawn to the show’s personal stories and behind-the-scenes drama. “Drive to Survive” can be a model for other platforms and sports looking to leverage the docuseries format to drive revenue and grow fanbases.
The share of revenue Netflix brings in from sports docuseries has spiked around new releases of popular shows like “The Last Dance” or new seasons of “Drive to Survive.” Although the share of Netflix’s subscriber revenue attributable to sports docuseries has trended down over the past year since the previous season of “Drive to Survive,” Season 7 could power the financial performance of this genre to new highs on Netflix.
It is interesting to note that EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) is the region where sports docuseries make up a larger share of revenue coming in for Netflix. In contrast, the genre has the most minor impact on subscriber revenue in APAC (Asia-Pacific). This is relevant for considering how to grow the genre for the platform. It would make more sense to focus on sports and teams of interest in the EMEA region, where this type of content is overperforming.
The amount that streaming platforms are investing in sports docuseries (as well as the ROI on this investment when it comes to subscriber revenue) varies across platforms. Apple TV+ has made a big push into sports docuseries, which now comprise nearly 5% of its catalog. This investment has not delivered a comparable share of subscriber revenue for the platform, however.
Netflix and Hulu are the only platforms where sports documentaries’ share of subscriber revenue outpaces its share of catalog. This is primarily driven by high-performing outliers like “Drive to Survive ” and “Welcome to Wrexham.”
Across all platforms, 0.72% of titles available to stream are sports docuseries, and these are responsible for 0.74% of streaming revenue (ie, roughly even performance). However, if you exclude Netflix, the global supply share across the other seven platforms is 0.75%, with a revenue share at 0.56%, highlighting that other platforms have not yet figured out how to make the genre deliver in the same way as Netflix.
The success of “Drive to Survive” has clearly made Netflix even more bullish on Formula 1. It was recently reported that the company is thinking of bidding for the sport’s U.S. live broadcast rights. For platforms looking to tap into sports audiences, documentary sports content is a way of doing this without having to pay the big dollars for the rights to live sports. Even if the sports docuseries genre has not performed as well on other platforms as it has on Netflix, the relatively lower cost of producing a documentary series compared with the high cost of live sports rights makes these an appealing investment for streamers looking to attract and retain sports fans on their platform.
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