Ep. 83: Philipp Männer - How Rally Built a Direct-to-Fan Business

For episode 83 of Retention Zone I sat down with Philipp Männer, Senior Director Media Rights and OTT at WRC Promoter, the company behind the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) and the FIA European Rally Championship (ERC). We spent half an hour on how a sport with one of the most demanding live products in motorsport turned itself into a global streaming business.

The first thing worth highlighting is structural. Philipp owns all of distribution. Traditional licensing to broadcasters and owned-and-operated platforms sit under one role. That setup is still rare. Plenty of rights holders keep media rights in one box and digital, marketing, or fan engagement in another, and the two end up pulling against each other. Putting everything under one person reflects how distribution actually works today. As Philipp put it, when he started in the business the only option was a TV channel you licensed rights to, and that was your distribution. Now it is far more complex and fragmented, and he treats that as an opportunity.

Rally is a different animal to produce and to sell

Rally is the oldest motorsport in the world, and its format shapes everything downstream. There is no head-to-head racing. Events are time trials run from Thursday to Sunday, with 15 to 25 competitive stages per rally and around 20 on average. A driver has to be fastest across all of them and has to finish. Anything can happen on any stage, and a favorite can crash out at any point.

That format produces a live product most broadcasters cannot easily carry. WRC All Live, introduced in 2018, covers every stage of every rally live, and each event runs to roughly 20 to 25 hours of live content. Philipp drew a comparison to golf, a sport he follows closely. Once a fan is in, they do not want to miss anything. Rally fans behave the same way, watching across all three or four days of competition.

Rally.TV as a service and as a brand

The streaming home is Rally.TV, the rebuild of the old WRC+. When WRC Promoter also took over the ERC, it folded both championships into one dedicated video streaming service so a fan always knows what they are getting. Rally.TV also works as a distribution brand beyond the app. There is a Rally.TV FAST channel live across most European markets on the major FAST platforms, a Rally.TV pay channel licensed to partners, and a distribution deal with DAZN across many markets. The point of the relaunch was to widen access and pull in people new to the sport.

The US surprise

Here is the fact that reframes the whole conversation. The US is WRC’s number one digital market. It leads on social across every platform and ranks among the strongest for streaming subscribers. That growth is organic, built through digital platforms, and it happened with no US event on the calendar and no American local hero to drive interest. Philipp pointed to the More Than Machine documentary series, distributed globally primarily through YouTube, as a major driver of the US audience. An event is planned for the US in 2027, which should push growth further.

Retention comes before growth moves

Retention Zone exists for exactly this topic, so I pushed Philipp on it. His line was clear. Retention is very important, and you never make growth changes that damage it. Two initiatives stood out. First, a new interactive data overlay that fans had specifically asked for, which he framed as proof they listen to subscribers. Second, a push toward more data and AI storytelling on the platform.

Pricing, installments, and the localization plan

Rally.TV runs on pure subscription today, a monthly pass at 13 euros and an annual pass at 120 euros, with the same platform look worldwide. Philipp is honest that for a curious newcomer, that price is a big hurdle and a lot of money. The fixes are coming market by market. Installments landed last August, letting fans spread the annual pass, and Philipp called the result a tremendous success. There is a Black Friday offer every year, and the installment launch itself carried a 50 percent discount on the first three months.

The bigger move is localization. Expect tailored pricing, freemium tiers that put some live content in front of newcomers for free in selected markets, ad-supported tiers and more flexible payment options over the next months and years. Philipp knows this has to be done step by step, reading the data, because launching something too complex breaks reporting from day one. But not everything in the distribution strategy is about Rally.TV. Everything needs to be considered holistically and in alignment with WRC’s broadcast partners, which are still playing a key role for WRC.

One more useful detail

Seasonality matters less for WRC than for many sports. The season runs from January in Monte Carlo to late November in Saudi Arabia, with 14 events this year, and the annual pass covers 12 months from purchase rather than a single season. What moves the needle is events and drivers. Local heroes doing well pull in their home audiences, and that pattern beats calendar seasonality for a global, geographically spread championship.

My honest takeaway. This is a property in the most interesting phase a streaming business can be in. Big enough to have a real, engaged base, early enough that product changes still teach you something. That is a better place to sit than the top of a mature curve with nowhere left to grow.