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Getting women’s sports a larger share of overall sports coverage is a team effort, and Religion of Sports, Ensemble, Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, and Roku have combined forces to attack that goal.
This week, the group announced its launch of the Next is Now women’s sports anthology docuseries on The Roku Channel later this year. The series will be both funded and executive produced by brand partners, with Deep Blue founder and CEO Laura Correnti noting that it has already drawn “expressed interest from a handful of both endemic and nonendemic brands to the women’s sports space up through the CMO ranks.”
The project tips off with The Fastest Six Weeks in Sports, a series looking at how women’s basketball draft prospects and veteran athletes spend the weeks between the end of NCAA Women’s March Madness and the start of the WNBA season. For perspective, the 18.9 million fans who watched last year’s NCAA women’s final was not only a bigger audience than the men’s final (14.8) but the largest non-football sports audience of 2025. Last year’s WNBA draft, meanwhile, drew 2.45 million viewers—the most for a WNBA broadcast since 2000.
Religion of Sports—founded by Tom Brady, Michael Strahan, and Gotham Chopra—will lead production on Next is Now content. Issa Rae’s branded entertainment company, Ensemble, will focus on social media content creation and distribution, while Deep Blue consults on media and creative ideas while driving brand partnerships and activations.
All Next is Now programming will appear on the Roku Sports FAST channel and in Roku’s Women’s Sports Zone. The game plan isn’t just to give women’s sports fans what they increasingly want but to remove the excuses that women’s sports content is too hard for fans to locate or for brands to purchase.
“Why we decided to go this route was to also guarantee what is [now] a continued barrier for scale and for discovery, which is promotion,” Correnti said. “By bringing brands in to finance the production and contribute media funds to ensure that there is discovery of the content, we felt that that was the quickest and most efficient way to ensure we’re not just telling and scaling these stories, but that consumers and viewers can find them.”