Fireside Chat with Chatri Sityodtong

Updated: Broke and desperate, Chatri once lived on $4 a day. Watch his full story here.

One Championship is not often seen as a tech company, but the sports media unicorn’s founder, chairman, and CEO Chatri Sityodtong begs to differ with this perception. He explained why during a fireside chat with Tech in Asia on June 4.

According to him, broadcasting content, whether to one country or 150 countries, has an incremental margin of 100% for a media company. He compared this to a software company growing its product by selling it to customers at no additional cost to the business.

With everyone deriving “massive economic value” from sports, Sityodtong sees sports media properties as the ultimate platform business. Furthermore, he believes that One Championship is onto something indestructible, especially after the company has reached scale and with its current ranking as one of the top sports media properties in the world.

One out of three Asians tuning in

The founder’s long-term goal is for the company to eventually overtake the US’s National Football League and take the top spot globally. More specifically, this is how he envisions success: Having one in every three Asians tuning in live to One Championship’s events. He took this metric from the Super Bowl viewership in October, where one out of three Americans tuned in to watch the annual football championship.

And Sityodtong is very optimistic about achieving this as he sees limitless opportunities for digital products, especially with how big livestreaming has become.

The Apprentice

People also do not usually associate One Championship with reality television. That is going to change, however, with the upcoming launch of The Apprentice: One Championship Edition, a television show conceptualized by Sityodtong’s team in an effort to find content that would cater to the general audience.

The basis of The Apprentice franchise remains largely intact – business people competing for the US$250,000 job offer to work under a CEO for a year – but Sityodtong is also adding some twists.

Contestants will be pitted against 12 world champions in a series of adventure challenges such as rock climbing and eating spiders, and they will be judged by some of Asia’s top CEOs, which include Patrick Grove from Iflix and Ankiti Bose from Zilingo.

This is the first project for One Studios, the company’s television and film production division launched in April 2019, and Sityodtong is kicking it off with a bang: He wants the series to be the most watched The Apprentice franchise in history.

Thriving amid the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves across the sports media industry and One Championship has not been spared. All of its global live martial arts events have been postponed.

However, that has not dampened Sityodtong’s mood. With most people stuck at home, the company is seeing record-breaking growth in its organic social and digital video views, and sales of online merchandise have skyrocketed.

Currently, Sityodtong is focused on expanding digital partnerships to help grow One Championship’s content even more.

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