• by Wayne Friedman , July 8, 2020

The small but growing virtual pay TV service fuboTV posted a 78% increase in overall revenues to $51 million for its first-quarter reporting period.

Much of its growth comes from subscription revenue, which climbed 74% to $46.4 million, while advertising revenue rose 120% year-over-year to $4.1 million.

The service’s average revenue per user (ARPU) was 25% higher versus a year ago to $54.16 per month.

Paid subscribers were up 37% to 287,316, with its monthly active users now watching 120 hours per month on average in the quarter -- 52% higher year-over-year.

While fuboTV says cord-cutters of traditional pay TV services have boosted its business, in a letter to shareholders, chief executive officer of FaceBank Group David Gandler (which merged with fuboTV in early April) adds that shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19 also helped boost business.  

All this occurred despite the lack of sports programming. 

In 2019, the fubo Sports Network was launched as a live, ad-supported, free-to-consumer TV network. 

Going forward, shareholders approved a change of the company’s name to fuboTV Inc. The publicly held company will trade under the same “FUBO” on the OTC marketplace.

Overall, fuboTV says it is part of a growing trend to move to virtual multichannel video programming distributors, which was 70% higher for the three-month period ending in April, according to Comscore data. 

Viewing for fuboTV rose during the period amounted to 8.5 hours/day or 145 hours a month, according to Gandler.