FuboTV doesn’t look like the same company it was a year ago. And that’s precisely the point.
Wedbush Securities reiterated its Outperform rating on Fubo stock this week, setting a $6.50 price target that implies meaningful upside from recent trading levels. The call came after the company reported first-quarter 2025 results that showed continued subscriber growth, improving unit economics, and a clearer path toward profitability — metrics that have eluded the company for most of its public life. According to Yahoo Finance, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter maintained his bullish stance, pointing to Fubo’s operational momentum and its strategic positioning in the live sports streaming market.
The story of FuboTV has always been one of ambition colliding with brutal economics. The company launched as a soccer-focused streaming service in 2015, pivoted to a broader live TV platform, went public in 2020 during the streaming gold rush, and then spent years burning cash while trying to compete against deep-pocketed rivals like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, and Sling TV. Its stock, which briefly topped $35 per share in early 2021, cratered below $1 at various points. Many on Wall Street left it for dead.
They were premature.
Fubo’s first quarter of 2025 showed the company is finally bending its cost curve in the right direction. Revenue grew year over year, subscriber counts in North America continued climbing, and — perhaps most critically — average revenue per user (ARPU) ticked higher, reflecting better monetization of its advertising inventory and a willingness to push through price increases without triggering mass churn. The company has been trimming its international operations, pulling back from markets where profitability remained a distant prospect, and concentrating resources on the North American market where it has genuine traction.
Pachter’s thesis at Wedbush centers on a straightforward observation: Fubo occupies a niche that larger players have underestimated. The platform’s sports-first identity gives it a stickier subscriber base than general entertainment streamers. Sports fans don’t cancel during the off-season the way a viewer might drop a service after finishing a prestige drama series. They stay because they need access to NFL Sunday games, Premier League matches, NBA playoffs, and MLB doubleheaders. That behavioral pattern translates into lower churn rates and more predictable revenue — exactly the metrics that make Wall Street comfortable assigning a higher valuation multiple.
But Fubo’s story can’t be told in isolation from the broader upheaval in the pay-TV industry. Traditional cable and satellite providers are hemorrhaging subscribers at an accelerating pace. According to recent industry data, the U.S. pay-TV market lost roughly 6 million subscribers in 2024 alone, continuing a trend that has cut the total subscriber base nearly in half from its 2012 peak. Those cord-cutters don’t stop watching live television. Many of them migrate to virtual MVPDs — the category that includes Fubo, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, and Sling TV.
YouTube TV, owned by Alphabet, has emerged as the dominant player in this space, reportedly surpassing 8 million subscribers. Hulu + Live TV, backed by Disney, sits comfortably in the number-two position. Fubo is smaller. Significantly smaller. But it has carved out a defensible position by leaning into sports in a way its larger competitors haven’t fully matched. Its channel lineup is sports-heavy by design, its user interface prioritizes live game discovery, and its marketing speaks directly to the fan who wants every regional sports network and every national broadcast available in one place.
There’s a financial reality check embedded in that positioning, though. Carrying sports content is expensive. Regional sports networks (RSNs) charge hefty carriage fees, and national rights deals for leagues like the NFL and NBA have skyrocketed. Fubo’s content costs as a percentage of revenue remain elevated compared to where they’d need to be for the company to generate consistent free cash flow. Management has acknowledged this openly, and the company’s strategy involves a combination of subscriber scale, advertising growth, and selective content negotiations to close the gap.
Advertising is where Fubo sees its biggest near-term opportunity. Live sports programming commands premium CPMs because advertisers know the audience is watching in real time — no fast-forwarding, no binge-watching at 2 a.m. three weeks after air date. Fubo has been investing in its ad-tech capabilities, building out programmatic selling tools and expanding its advertiser base beyond the handful of major brands that dominated its early inventory. The results are showing up in the numbers. Ad revenue per subscriber has been growing faster than subscription revenue per subscriber, which suggests the company is successfully layering a high-margin revenue stream on top of its core business.
So what’s the bear case? It isn’t hard to construct one. Fubo still isn’t profitable on a GAAP basis. Its balance sheet carries debt that, while manageable in the near term, creates refinancing risk if capital markets tighten. And the competitive threat from YouTube TV is existential in nature — Google can afford to operate its live TV service at break-even or even at a loss for years, subsidizing it with the broader Alphabet profit engine, in a way that Fubo simply cannot match. If YouTube TV decides to aggressively pursue sports-centric subscribers with targeted pricing or exclusive content deals, Fubo’s niche could erode quickly.
There’s also the Venu Sports factor — or rather, its absence. In 2024, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced plans to launch Venu Sports, a joint venture that would bundle their collective sports content into a single streaming product. The venture was blocked by a federal judge on antitrust grounds after FuboTV itself filed suit, arguing that the combined entity would create an anticompetitive stranglehold on sports streaming rights. Fubo won that legal battle, and the collapse of Venu removed what would have been a formidable competitor. That victory shouldn’t be underestimated. It preserved Fubo’s competitive positioning at a moment when it could have been fatally undermined.
And then there’s the merger that changed everything. In January 2025, FuboTV completed its combination with Hulu + Live TV, a deal that had been announced in late 2024. Under the terms, Disney acquired a significant stake in the combined entity while Fubo’s management retained operational control. The transaction gave Fubo access to Hulu’s live TV subscriber base, its content relationships, and its technology infrastructure — all in exchange for equity dilution that, while substantial, was arguably worth the strategic gain. The combined company now operates under the Fubo brand and boasts a subscriber count that puts it in credible competition with YouTube TV for the first time.
This merger is the real reason Wedbush remains bullish. The math is different now. Pre-merger, Fubo was a scrappy independent with roughly 1.5 million subscribers trying to compete against platforms backed by trillion-dollar parent companies. Post-merger, the combined entity has a subscriber base large enough to negotiate better content deals, attract more advertising dollars, and spread its fixed technology costs across a wider revenue base. Scale economics in the virtual MVPD business are unforgiving — you either have enough subscribers to absorb rising content costs, or you don’t. Fubo, post-merger, appears to have crossed that threshold.
Pachter’s $6.50 price target implies the market hasn’t fully priced in the merger’s benefits. That’s a reasonable read. Investor sentiment around Fubo has been scarred by years of losses and stock price declines, and many institutional investors remain on the sidelines, waiting for proof that the combined company can deliver sustained profitability. The first quarter’s results were a step in that direction, but one quarter doesn’t make a trend. The next two to three earnings cycles will be decisive.
The broader streaming industry provides useful context. Netflix, which recently surpassed 300 million global subscribers, has demonstrated that streaming can be enormously profitable at scale. Disney+ has turned the corner toward profitability after years of heavy investment. Amazon continues to pour billions into Prime Video and its Thursday Night Football package. The common thread is that the companies winning in streaming are the ones willing to invest in premium content — especially live sports — while simultaneously building sophisticated advertising businesses. Fubo is playing the same playbook, just at a smaller scale and with tighter financial constraints.
One underappreciated aspect of Fubo’s model is its sports betting integration. The company has been experimenting with in-app wagering features that allow viewers to place bets while watching live games. This is still early-stage and regulatory constraints vary by state, but the concept has significant revenue potential. If Fubo can become the platform where fans watch and wager simultaneously, it adds a transaction-based revenue layer that no other virtual MVPD currently offers. Sportsbook operators like DraftKings and FanDuel have shown that the sports betting market in the U.S. is growing rapidly — Fubo’s bet is that it can capture a piece of that growth by meeting bettors where they already are: watching the game.
Wall Street’s reaction to Fubo’s recent results has been cautiously positive. The stock has recovered from its lows, though it remains well below its pandemic-era highs. Short interest is still elevated, reflecting ongoing skepticism from a segment of the market that views the company’s profitability timeline as too uncertain. But the fundamental picture is improving. Revenue is growing. Margins are expanding. The subscriber base, bolstered by the Hulu + Live TV merger, is at a scale that gives management real negotiating power with content providers and advertisers.
The question isn’t whether Fubo can survive anymore. It can. The question is whether it can thrive — whether it can convert its sports-first positioning, its growing ad business, and its newly acquired scale into the kind of consistent profitability that justifies a meaningfully higher stock price. Wedbush thinks the answer is yes. Not everyone on the Street agrees. But the trajectory is pointing in a direction that would have seemed implausible just eighteen months ago.
For an industry that loves narratives of disruption and reinvention, Fubo’s arc is a reminder that sometimes the most compelling stories aren’t about explosive growth or overnight success. They’re about survival. About a company that nearly ran out of runway, fought a legal battle against three of the biggest media conglomerates on earth, merged with a competitor to gain scale, and emerged on the other side with a business that finally makes structural sense.
Not a bad plot for a streaming company that started with soccer.
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