Play Sports offers top-tier streaming of major leagues like the EPL, La Liga, K League, F1, NFL, and more. Beyond streaming, we've brought world-class teams—such as the Yankees, Padres, PSG, and Manchester City—from the screen to stadiums in Korea.

These events drew nationwide attention, with tickets selling out in minutes and live stream viewership hitting record highs. Our success highlights the passion of Korean sports fans and the powerful impact of combining live events with digital experiences.

Even with exciting sports content, our app failed to engage sports fans because of a poor user experience. The app was built like a typical SVOD platform, without considering that sports fans have different needs. As a result, the sports section didn’t work well for its audience and didn’t meet their expectations.

In order to define the problem more clearly and set up the metrics, we needed to gain more context. We started with taking a look into some data points.

22% of entire play users have watched at least one sports content

10% of our users have installed our app and watched sports content as their first content

Out of the top 10 contents that made the most contribution to new sign ups,
#1 and #4 were soccer matches.

Seems like the numbers don’t look that bad here. Then what’s the problem?

We had a good number of MAU but the problem is that we had low DAU.
That was because of the spike from sports matches.
Spike users were coming in just for the sports content.

Let’s take a look at what is happening during the spike

Non Sports Fan

  • Only visit when there is a super popular match

  • Becomes interested in the match by word of mouth

  • Only interested in national star players

  • Visits to watch Coupang Play Series

Strategy

  • Introduce the users to our movie and TV series contents

  • Provide highlight videos of popular

  • matches and famous players

Casual Sports Fan

  • Users that watch matches 1,2 times a week

  • Has a specific team, player, or sports they like

  • Likely to switch the service to anywhere that provides the league or player they follow

Strategy

  • Send users notification

  • Match schedule for awareness

  • Provide highlight videos of league or player

  • Personalize sports feed

Super Sports Fan

  • Users that watch sports on a daily basis

  • Enjoys sports in general

  • Has multiple sports and leagues they like and follow

  • Switches leagues depending on season off

Strategy

  • Keep the feed fresh

  • Provide easy way to discover matches

  • Provide competitive sports experience

We decided to focus on Casual Sports Fan which had the strongest potential to become DAU

Feature Strategy

Schedule

Event Detail Page

League Page