Last year at Wrestlemania 40, as YouTuber turned WWE superstar Logan Paul defended his United States Championship belt from Randy Orton, he enlisted the help of a life-sized mascot of his Prime sports drink. Inside was iShowSpeed, the biggest YouTube streamer in the world.
With Paul on the brink of defeat, the bottle reached its arms out and pulled Paul from the ring, away from Orton. The slick move caught Orton’s attention, and soon, he was staring down the giant felt bottle.
Without caring to unmask the Prime mascot, Orton unleashed a huge kick that sent it flying. The mask came off as it fell to the ground, and iShowSpeed was revealed.
Orton pulled him atop the announcing table at Lincoln Financial Field before unleashing his signature “RKO” finishing move. Speed was rendered useless atop the table for the rest of the match, but his save was enough to help Paul to victory.
The absurd chain of events riled the WWE faithful in Philadelphia and at home. Within days, the clip of the altercation between Orton and Speed was, according to WWE, the third most-watched in Instagram history.
The angle surpassed WWE’s wildest expectations. It also laid the foundation for Speed to make more history. Speed became the first person ever to bring a live camera behind the scenes at a WWE PLE this year at the Royal Rumble. Speed’s second time in a WWE match went even worse than his first, as he was speared by Bron Breakker and thrown out over the top rope in another viral clip.
.@bronbreakkerwwe spearing @ishowspeedsui is INSANE from every angle 🤯 #RoyalRumble pic.twitter.com/ZqlJujK8BA
— WWE (@WWE) February 3, 2025
Speed continues to raise his profile in sports, bringing his fanatical audience along for the ride through his signature in-real-life (IRL) streams from his YouTube channel, where he boasts more than 39 million subscribers.
From the NFL Draft Combine to the Super Bowl to the Royal Rumble and beyond, Speed is often right on the edge of the most significant events on the calendar. If his aspirations pass, the 20-year-old entertainer and diehard sports fan won’t stop there. Before long, Speed could become the most prominent sports broadcaster in America.
iShowSpeed goes IRL
Watching a Speed stream turns you into Marty McFly, arriving in 2015 in Back to the Future Part II. Instead of flying cars and Nike Mags, there is Speed: traipsing through a virtual world or far-off land with a cadre of camera operators and bouncers around him. The chat rips across the corner of the screen, too fast to read. Somehow, Speed juggles it all in his head while keeping the attention of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands worldwide.
Like many young streamers, Speed (whose real name is Darren Watkins Jr.) started out in his bedroom with a computer. Fans flocked to his channel early on to watch him play NBA 2K. As his community got to know him, it became clear his true love was soccer, specifically the legendary Portuguese striker Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ronaldo’s signature, flexing “SIUUU” celebration became nearly as synonymous with the young streamer from Cincinnati as with the athlete who invented it. iShowSpeed added it to a singular repertoire of on-stream tricks that keep audiences returning. Whether he’s barking at tigers, leaping over a speeding sports car, or racing Olympian Noah Lyles, iShowSpeed stands out even among the growing wave of streaming stars as one of its most compelling talents.
The buzz of his IRL streams and insatiable thirst for competition make iShowSpeed a perfect match for the thrill of live sports. A flag football exhibition in New Orleans the night before Super Bowl LIX generated 3 million views on Speed’s channel — out-pulling the official league stream. That’s merely the second-biggest sports stream Speed has put on after drawing 7 million viewers for the Royal Rumble.
“There’s nothing like a live sporting event,” iShowSpeed told Awful Announcing via email. “I really try to immerse myself in the culture of whatever corner of the earth I happen to be in, and one thing that has really stood out is how much sports brings people together. Bringing my community with me to those kinds of big sports moments through streaming is as exciting to me as I think it is to them.”
https://www.youtube.com/live/qOFU-x4Pikc?si=Zxqm-r6xg35e36B7
An iShowSpeed stream is one potential future for sports TV, but the evolution has been a long time coming. With ESPN cable subscriptions petering out, the network partnered with Peyton and Eli Manning to launch the ManningCast in 2021. The alt-cast debuted to high praise and promising ratings.
A similar format was growing more popular online. From sports watch-alongs to election night coverage, audiences learned to go to YouTube and Twitch to consume live content alongside their favorite creators. Naturally, these worlds came together.
Streaming goes mainstream
Streamers are flocking to sports. Brazilian soccer fanatic Casimito is now a full-time broadcaster of the Campeonato Paulista through a partnership with YouTube. Even Speed’s favorite athlete is getting in on the game. Ronaldo used his YouTube channel to stream the Premier Padel 1 final from Saudi Arabia in February.
New leagues are taking note. Digital-first sports brands like Baller League and Grand Slam Track are building creators and streamers into their business models from the start. In addition to television broadcast rights and highlight rights, they are constructing pioneering Creator Rights Windows into their distribution deals. By foregrounding the online fanbase, these leagues are tapping directly into new audiences and seeding the ground for a potentially lucrative future revenue stream.
It likely won’t be long before major leagues like the NFL or Premier League do the same. The key is “getting leagues to understand that this isn’t some sort of throwaway social media clips or highlights thing that just gets included in your rights package,” says Michael Cohen, a sports media advisor and former CEO of Whistle. “This is an actual window. So if you’re a rights-holder, you either need to get paid for those rights … or you need to hold them back.” Until now, the biggest leagues have been content to wring massive rights fees and huge audiences out of traditional television. To keep growing revenue and viewership, they may soon have to look to creators.
Many creator activations in sports are intentionally niche. The NFL’s Creator of the Week program taps into fan interest in tailgating, cuisine, or gaming. Collaborations like Peacock’s Olympic streaming show with Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper or Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football alt-cast with Dude Perfect are designed to Trojan Horse football into a format that is familiar to these online communities. This content brings popular creators behind a paywall in hopes that fans will pay. It is designed to drive subscriptions, not create a new experience for new fans.
iShowSpeed is unique among creators in his ability to draw a substantive audience that is also used to seeing sports and competition on-stream. In a world where Speed broadcasts a live sporting event, it wouldn’t be much different for his audience than the typical mix of content they get when they tune into his YouTube streams. Speed makes it easy as sports executives chase the inscrutable vibe of authenticity with their creator collaborations.
“He’s just got a very authentic way of bringing the juice with his community and finding new ways to kind of one-up himself in all the different things he’s doing,” says Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social and influencer marketing. “For him to use the NFL as a platform to hopefully build new fans and engage different audiences while also providing great content for his core base is fantastic.”
Anywhere iShowSpeed goes, he’s looking for competition. When he streamed from the 2024 NFL Draft Combine, Speed ran through the fan setup of the 40-yard dash. After leaving popular Madden streamer Sketch in the dust, Speed looked up as he crossed the finish line and saw 4.4 seconds on the clock. Because he can actually walk that walk, Speed channels the thrill of sports straight to his audience.
An ESPN TikTok breaking down that 40-yard dash had more than 20 million views, far more than the stream of iShowSpeed racing Lyles. Those numbers make sports executives drool, and they are happy to chase that kind of engagement, even if it leads them to a loose-cannon 20-year-old on YouTube.
“We’re moving down a path where the creator opportunities for livestreams, to more access to more sharing overall is where we’re heading,” says Ian Trombetta.
@espn Was Noah Lyles going at 20% speed? (via @IShowSpeed) #ishowspeed #noahlyles #race ♬ original sound – ESPN
Streamers were popular as far back as the early 2010s, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the trend up a notch. According to Twitch Tracker, the platform grew from around 980 million viewers in February 2020 to 1.7 billion people in March 2025. Meanwhile, YouTube, where Speed streams are available, has become the most viewed streaming app on television.
Viewers worldwide now combine to watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content daily on their televisions alone. These platforms are often the default place for young people to consume content.
The growth of online video forced traditional media to change. In sports, networks now compete directly with YouTube through streaming services like ESPN+, Peacock, and Max. Where cable was once the site of passive viewing as people flipped on SportsCenter and The Tonight Show out of habit, many now look to YouTube and Twitch for that same comfort food. They trust the taste of their favorite creators, not TV hosts.
“This isn’t like, ‘Hey let’s just replicate TV on YouTube and young audiences are just going to show up,” says Cohen, an industry veteran. “It’s, you need a bunch of different creators. Young audiences don’t turn on YouTube, they go to MrBeast, they go to Speed. I don’t turn on my Verizon Fios; I turn on ESPN.”
Building bridges through streams
Right now, media consumption is growing in two different ways.
Everyone today is going online for content, but the types of content and the creators who make it are more different now than ever before. Kids and their parents may have watched different programs or different networks in the cable package 30 years ago, but they were all under the same umbrella.
Younger viewers these days go to different platforms than their elders. They make celebrities out of entertainers their parents and grandparents have never heard of. As a result, a younger fan may love football but have no connection to its traditions. Joe Buck may give Monday Night Football an air of importance to most, but go in one young fan’s ear and out the other. With more options, viewers’ experiences are impossible to compare.
Leagues and distributors must carefully walk the line between these two groups. They can’t be too heavy-handed pushing young people toward traditional media, and they risk looking foolish if they force a creator into the spotlight in an unearned stunt. The NBA was roundly criticized, even by its own players and commissioner, for bringing MrBeast into the All-Star game for a confusing contest during intermission. It may not always be this way, though. Before long, traditional media may have no choice but to embrace creators.
One thing standing in the way is, well, the very culture of the internet. If one thing still distinguishes internet content from television and radio, it is that the latter has editorial standards. Enforced formally by the FCC and informally by shareholders clutching their pearls, there is a line that traditional broadcasters will not cross. Online, oftentimes, the point can be to toe that line.
It is essentially a rite of passage for streamers to get suspended by their platform of choice. For iShowSpeed, that moment came early in his career in 2021, when he made aggressive sexual comments toward a young woman as part of a comedic dating series. Twitch banned him indefinitely. As a result, Sky Sports banned him from appearing on any of their telecasts in the United Kingdom.
When Twitch reinstated him, he had switched to YouTube and never looked back. As online controversies go, Speed’s was fairly forgettable. But it’s also far beyond what a typical network is comfortable with.
That’s not to mention the chat, the largely unregulated space that belongs to the community and is often a race to say the most absurd, out-of-pocket thing possible. These edgy rants and the unfiltered chat are fundamental parts of streaming culture. Network executives will have to navigate—or neuter—them to work alongside top creators.
Jamie Carragher and Speed racing live on air is not something I had on my bingo card. pic.twitter.com/AYHoOm7zXl
— TheGeorge (@BayernPapa) March 5, 2025
“We still want to make sure that it isn’t a free-for-all,” said WWE VP of digital media Steve Braband. “We still want to produce (content) with a partner, which I think is case-by-case in how much we put a fence in the backyard and how much we let (creators) run free.”
At some point, “young” fans won’t be young anymore. Will they age out of chaotic online content and learn to love sports broadcasts as they have been forever? Or will they bring along internet stars into the mainstream and force networks to evolve?
Nobody has much time to answer these questions. Given his authentic passion for competition and intensely loyal worldwide audience, iShowSpeed is most likely to bridge this divide—at least, the people around him are pitching him that way.
“Teams, leagues, and emerging platforms all over the world talk ad nauseam about growing their youth audience and Gen Z demo,” said Rico Ripoly, Speed’s communications manager. “Sport fandom, at its core, is about belonging and community. It’s not hyperbole to say that who Speed is, and the community he has cultivated simply by being who he is on the world’s stage, has the potential to be the most significant development for live sports viewership in the 21st century.”
Few people in Philadelphia for WrestleMania 40 knew Speed from Sheldon Brown. They had every reason to yawn him away. Somehow, he sold a key moment with a WWE legend inside a sports drink bottle costume. Just like that, wrestling fans embraced him. Months later, he became the first broadcaster to live backstage at a Royal Rumble.
The idea of a YouTube streamer being the next Ian Eagle may sound far off. There’s nothing hypothetical about it. “We’re headed down that path already,” says Trombetta. These worlds are bleeding together, and sports suits are making preparations.
YouTube is reportedly the front-runner to broadcast a Week 1 game in Sao Paolo for free. Building on its pioneering NFL Sunday Ticket deal, the platform is developing multiview products and a “Watch With” program to give sports fans more options. Creators on the platform have already felt the bump from NFL fans spending more time on the platform. It’s just the latest trend line pointing toward a future where the two worlds — traditional sports broadcasting and online content creation — overlap completely.
iShowSpeed is ready: “I’ve been a huge sports fan my whole life so being able to do that kind of thing is like second nature. When you’re in it as a real fan for a long time, recognizing the storylines and flows of the game almost comes naturally.
“Streaming games and events live is even better, and the feedback I’ve gotten from my community lets me know they love it too.”