Finding girls’s sports activities is about to get simpler.

The first-ever community to give attention to feminine athletes, the Women’s Sports Network, launched Wednesday, providing 24/7 streaming of unique programming, competitions, documentaries and a day by day studio present “Game On.”

The Women’s Sports Network is a free, ad-supported community featured on streaming providers together with Amazon.com‘s Freevee, Fox Corp.’s FuboTV and Tubi, together with sensible TVs. The new community comes at a time when funding and viewership numbers for ladies’s sports activities are on the rise, but girls solely obtain a small fraction of media protection.

“It’s a significant step towards narrowing the gap in media coverage for female athletes, for female sports,” mentioned Angela Ruggiero, CEO and co-founder of Sports Innovation Lab and four-time ice hockey Olympian, who’s on the board of advisors for the brand new community.

The community was first introduced again in February by Los Angeles-based Fast Studios.

The Women’s Sports Network has partnerships with the Women’s National Basketball Association, Women’s Football Alliance, Ladies Professional Golf Association, U.S. Ski and Snowboard, Sports Innovation Lab and World Surf League, amongst others. It plans to broadcast video games beginning in January.

Fast Studios was based in 2020 by long-time advert govt Stuart McLean with a give attention to ad-supported streaming tv providers. Fast Studios has additionally launched streaming networks targeted on auto racing and spartan impediment course competitions.

This previous 12 months has seen a gentle rise in viewership numbers for ladies’s sports activities. The WNBA postseason noticed a 22% enhance in viewership 12 months over 12 months. Female athletes on the collegiate degree are additionally proving to be winners within the NIL period, garnering deals with brands including Nike now that faculty athletes will be paid for his or her title, picture and likeness.

Yet girls’s sports activities obtain solely 5% of media protection, based on a latest examine by the University of Southern California and Purdue University.  

“The Women’s Sports Network is exactly what athletes, fans and sponsors have been asking for,” Mollie Marcoux Samaan, commissioner of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, mentioned in a launch asserting the community launch.

According to a study carried out by the National Research Group and Ampere Analysis, 39% of Gen Zers are watching extra girls’s sports activities than they have been a 12 months in the past, together with 29% of millennials. But the examine discovered that the hurdles stay excessive: 79% of U.S. sports activities followers nonetheless declare to not actively observe girls’s sports activities. Meanwhile, 74% of followers can not title a single company sponsor of any main girls’s league.    

“There’s a pent-up demand for women’s sports, but women’s sports typically go under-invested, under-supported, under-viewed, because the ecosystem underneath it hasn’t really been built,” Ruggiero mentioned. “We don’t have enough female writers. We don’t have enough female broadcasters. We don’t have enough female producers. The media ecosystem is still fairly male dominated, and women aren’t getting the ratings,” Ruggiero added.

Traditional networks have put little effort into selling girls’s sports activities, with the National Research Group and Ampere Analysis discovering that U.S. broadcast networks spent 0.2% of media-rights budgets on girls’s-only sporting occasions (excluding occasions with each males’s and girls’s sports activities such because the Olympics). 

“Every men’s league has had decades of a jumpstart on the traditional women’s leagues,” Ruggiero mentioned. “These women’s sports properties are still fairly early in their lifecycle, and anything early in its lifecycle requires more investment to build the brand, to build the awareness, to build the audience, to build the platform. And it’s on the business side, not just the performance side,” she mentioned. 

The community’s studio present, “Game On,” is hosted by former Harlem Globetrotter and social influencer Crissa Jackson, sports activities reporter Taylor Felix, sports activities influencer and former faculty basketball participant Jenna Bandy, and sports activities reporter and producer Jess Lucero.

—CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.