He bought the racecourse six years ago. Now he runs the grassroots motorsports Netflix

“Florida implemented a statewide shutdown on the very day of the event,” he said.

Mitchell also struggled to get the right workers and equipment needed for a PPV. On a per Mitchell basis, flights were not available due to the pandemic. The person on ENG camera was much shorter than Mitchell.

Mitchell said his website and the event sponsor’s website crashed as Freedom Factory’s first PPV event had 75,000 simultaneous viewers.

“Our first bandwidth provider laughed at the audience’s predictions. Of course, we surpassed them in the first week of pre-sale,” Mill said. “They apologized before asking for a much larger check.”

Other early obstacles include deciding how to embed the livestream platform on Mitchell’s e-commerce site. The biggest challenge there was “juggling two separate logins, one for product shopping and the other for livestream PPV. They’re all on the same site,” explained Mill.

“Now, our focus is to seamlessly guide our YouTube audience to FRDM+ for premium live events,” he added.

The live event is still at the heart of FRDM+. The service is scheduled for 21 live streamed events throughout 2025, with more live streaming events scheduled.

Look under the hood

Today, bandwidth is not an issue with FRDM+ and I feel that navigating streaming services is not much different from something like Netflix. New releases highlighted below, as well as upcoming content, have different “channels” (grouped by related content or ongoing series). There are horizontal scrolling lines, and many titles have content summary and trailers. The platform also has a support section with instructions for canceling your subscription.

Like other SVOD services, subscribers can watch FRDM+ via a web browser or a smart TV app. FRDM+ currently has an app Apple TV, Four of usand 2019 OS. Mitchell said the team is constantly working on a more connected TV app, adding features, “more interactives” and customers.
To rotate the wheels, FRDM+ leverages a variety of technologies to “at the core of the infrastructure, AWS bandwidth servers handle heavy lifting, Accedo drives connected TV apps, filling the gap between the technology stack and the audience.”

For services like this, redundancy is important when it comes to live events, Mill said.

“In Freedom Factory, we beam air fibers from our homes five miles away to ensure a second reliable internet. There are also hidden pages (the Cleetus McFarland website) to launch a backup stream in the event that the main stream fails,” he said.

Today, the biggest challenge with FRDM+ is not technical. Instead, they work on using a small team to manage different parts of their business. FRDM+ has 35 full-time employees in the shop, racetrack, events and product divisions, and is “fully funded” per mill. The company also relies on production contractors, but its core livestream team has six full-time employees.