[IT Cafe] Only Baseball and Champions League Left... Coupang Play Building a "Sports Kingdom"

Launch of NBA Broadcasts: Exclusive Korean Commentary
LA FC Matches Featuring Son Heungmin: Only Korean-Language Broadcast
Securing Major Soccer Leagues Including EPL and La Liga
Sports-Focused Strategy Amid OTT Content Wars

Coupang's online video service (OTT), Coupang Play, is captivating sports fans by continuously expanding its sports broadcasting lineup. Amid increasingly fierce competition among OTT platforms to secure content, Coupang Play is attracting users by offering sports broadcasting as a "killer content."

On October 1, Coupang Play announced that it will exclusively broadcast major games of the 2025-26 National Basketball Association (NBA) season in Korean, starting with the NBA preseason. Beginning this NBA season, Coupang Play plans to livestream at least 20 games per week. In addition to the regular season, it will broadcast all postseason games, including the NBA All-Star Game, the Conference Finals, and the NBA Finals. Coupang Play has also assembled its own team of commentators for the Korean broadcasts, including Cho Hyunil, a well-known NBA expert in Korea.

2025-26 NBA . Provided by Coupang Play

Prior to this, since September 14, Coupang Play has made it possible to watch matches featuring Son Heungmin. This became possible as Coupang Play began broadcasting all games of Los Angeles FC (LA FC) in Major League Soccer (MLS) this season. Previously, Son Heungmin's performances could only be viewed through English-language broadcasts on Apple TV Plus, Apple's OTT service, but now they are also available with Korean commentary on Coupang Play.

As a result, Coupang Play now allows viewers to watch major global sports leagues, including soccer, basketball, and motorsports. Even just considering the major soccer matches broadcast by Coupang Play, the lineup includes the K League, the Korea national football team, the English Premier League, Spain's La Liga, France's Ligue 1, Germany's Bundesliga, the United States' MLS (limited to LA FC), and the Netherlands' Eredivisie.

In addition, Coupang Play now offers broadcasts of the American NBA (basketball), Formula 1 (motorsports), which has recently gained popularity through hit movies, the PGA Championship (a major golf tournament), and the National Football League (NFL, American football). Essentially, aside from baseball leagues and Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)-organized tournaments such as the Champions League and Europa League, most popular sports leagues are now available on Coupang Play. However, to watch sports broadcasts on Coupang Play, a separate subscription to the Sports Pass is required.

Industry experts believe that Coupang Play's sports-focused strategy is well-suited to the intensifying competition among OTT platforms to secure content. OTT platforms either purchase the rights to proven hits or produce their own content to attract users, but both approaches require significant investment and do not guarantee success. In this context, investing in broadcasting rights for popular sports leagues with established fan bases, such as soccer, has helped secure demand. Another strength is that Coupang's paid membership, Wow Membership, is linked to Coupang Play, allowing users to enjoy additional benefits such as dawn delivery from Coupang and free food delivery from Coupang Eats.

The offline event "Coupang Play Series" is also gaining popularity. This event invites major European football clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City, and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) to Korea for exhibition matches, and tickets are so popular that they are difficult to obtain each year. Wow Membership is required to purchase tickets. Coupang Play was also the exclusive broadcast partner for the Major League Baseball (MLB) Seoul Series held in March last year, which was a hit as top players including Shohei Ohtani participated.

Leveraging its sports content, Coupang Play is seeing an increase in its user base. According to Mobile Index by IGAWorks, Coupang Play's app recorded approximately 450,000 new downloads in August, surpassing Netflix (about 410,000) and Tving (about 350,000), making it the most downloaded OTT app. Monthly active users (MAU) also reached about 7.29 million, a figure similar to Tving (about 7.56 million) and second only to Netflix (14.75 million).