When Volleyball World's streaming platform VBTV launched the local payment method Pix Automático in Brazil, its initial payment success rate jumped from 71% to 96% in a single month. That result is one chapter in a longer story about how a global sports streaming service acquires, converts, and retains subscribers – and why VBTV built it on Cleeng's subscriber retention and payments infrastructure. VBTV COO Stephanie Giardina and Cleeng COO Joachim Bergman shared the details on the Streaming Made Easy podcast.
Key takeaways
- Local payment methods are a conversion lever, not a nice-to-have: Pix Automático took VBTV's Brazil payment success from 71% to 96% in one month.
- VBTV moved from a single OTT one-stop shop to specialist providers, keeping payments and subscription management with a dedicated expert (Cleeng).
- Cohort-based pricing helped shift VBTV's mix from 90% monthly subscribers to roughly 50/50 monthly-to-annual, reducing churn.
- Volleyball's near year-round calendar means fewer seasonal churn gaps than most sports streaming services.
- Cleeng customer service runs digital-first at scale: leaders achieve an 82.7% first-time resolution rate and a 0.24% contact rate that can flex up to 10x during major events.
Who is VBTV?
VBTV is the owned-and-operated streaming platform of Volleyball World and the FIVB (Fédération Internationale de Volleyball). It streams more than 3,000 live matches a year, positioning itself as the "home of digital volleyball" – carrying FIVB competitions alongside additional leagues and volleyball rights it has acquired.
The product is a subscription service with a hybrid model: some content sits in front of the paywall, some behind it. This approach gives fans a taste of VBTV's content before they commit.
Why VBTV moved from a one-stop shop to specialist providers
In 2024, VBTV made a deliberate architectural decision: it moved away from the single one-stop-shop OTT provider, and split its stack across three specialists – backend, frontend, and payment and subscriber infrastructure – for greater flexibility.
Payments and subscription management was the one piece VBTV knew it needed to bring in-house. As Joachim Bergman put it, Cleeng handles registrations, entitlements, payments, tax remittance, and customer service – essentially acting as "an app store for the web, without the 30% fee." But unlike app stores, Cleeng also gives VBTV the subscriber data they need to manage retention and win back lapsed customers.
“There are a lot of things in the background, but we really think of you guys [Cleeng] when it comes to acquisition, retention, the entire subscription ecosystem. So you [VBTV] really went for an expert”, said Marion Ranchet, the host of the Streaming Made Easy podcast.
Local payment methods drive conversion: the Brazil result with Pix Automático
Local payment methods directly affect subscription conversion – and the effect can be dramatic. VBTV had strong demand in Brazil, a market it opened recently, but saw an unusually high drop-off at the final step of the funnel: fans reaching the transaction page and failing to complete a purchase.
The fix was local. VBTV and Cleeng launched Pix Automático, the recurring version of Brazil's dominant payment method – now bigger than card in Brazil by both value and users. The impact was immediate:
The initial payment success rate in Brazil increased from 71% to 96% in one month (VBTV / Cleeng, 2026).
Brazil is not an isolated case. VBTV also runs GCash in the Philippines, and the broader principle holds worldwide: from iDEAL in the Netherlands to PayPal in Germany, Twint in Switzerland, UPI in India, and MobilePay/Swish in the Nordics, fans convert best with the methods they know and trust.
As Stephanie Giardina noted, that trust signal – seeing a familiar, local option at checkout – is as important to conversion as the payment mechanics themselves.
Cohort pricing and the shift from monthly to annual
Retention starts with pricing. VBTV uses cohort analysis – grouping subscribers by when they were acquired – to understand how different cohorts behave and churn. That visibility, which VBTV says it couldn't achieve before Cleeng, informs and drives VBTV’s pricing strategy.
"Pricing is one of the most important pieces. Understanding your different cohorts – when they subscribe, when they purchase, when they churn – is something we weren't able to do before." - Stephania Giardina
Because monthly subscribers churn faster than annual ones, VBTV uses pricing to nudge fans toward annual plans around the length of its competitions. They also actively encourage subscribers to explore other volleyball competitions beyond the ones that originally drew them in, helping to deepen content engagement and maximize the value of each subscription.
The result is a structural shift in the subscriber base.
VBTV’s monthly-to-annual mix moved from ~90% monthly to roughly 50/50 (VBTV, 2026).
Retention beyond payments: how VBTV leverages Cleeng’s retention capabilities
Once a subscriber is in, VBTV leans on Cleeng's retention tooling to keep them: “There's the retention mechanism that we have available on Cleeng. We can now offer our clients different incentives to stay with VBTV, and we can also understand why they're churning, which we weren't necessarily understanding that deeply before”. With Cleeng, VBTV can launch win-back campaigns and cancellation flows that provide targeted offers and discounts at the moment a subscriber tries to leave.
What's next for VBTV and Cleeng: data, personalization, and agentic AI
VBTV spent the past year building its entire data infrastructure, and is investing in personalization – it added fantasy, fan voting, schedules, results, and overlays this year – alongside a full website rebuild. The goal is to connect every touchpoint into a single fan journey. VBTV runs a broad ecosystem beyond the core app: it manages YouTube streaming (which it treats as complementary rather than competing), its social channels, and a website it is now rebuilding from scratch and internalizing.
On the Cleeng side, the direction is agentic AI. Cleeng is exposing its data – a data lake of tens of billions of raw parameters – through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, so operators can connect an AI assistant (Claude, OpenAI, and others) directly to their subscription data. Instead of relying on a dashboard and a human analyst to interpret churn, an operator can ask their data where churn risk sits and have the system recommend – and action – a response.
Cleeng x VBTV results at a glance
| Metric | Result | Driver |
| Brazil initial payment success | 71% -> 96% in one month | Pix Automático (local payments) |
| Subscriber mix | ~90% monthly → ~50/50 monthly-to-annual | Cohort-based pricing |
| Live matches streamed | Over 3000 a year | VBTV content aggregator |
The takeaway for streaming operators
VBTV's story is a blueprint for niche and sports streaming services: convert with the payment methods fans actually trust, price around your calendar to move subscribers from monthly to annual, and treat retention as an always-on discipline rather than a save-at-cancellation afterthought. The common thread is control and data – owning the subscriber relationship end to end, understanding cohorts deeply, and building on a foundation solid enough to layer AI and personalization on top.
For VBTV, partnering with Cleeng – a subscription and retention specialist – made that foundation possible, turning a leaky Brazilian checkout into a 96% success rate and a 90%-monthly base into a balanced, more durable one.
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