“Florida implemented a statewide shutdown on the very day of our event,” he said.
Mitchell also struggled to get the right workers and equipment needed for the PPV. Flights weren’t available due to the pandemic, forcing Mill to produce the event from California using a cell phone group chat and “last-minute local crew,” per Mitchell. The ENG camera person was much shorter than Mitchell “and had to climb on whatever she could just to keep me in frame,” he recalled.
Mitchell said Freedom Factory’s first PPV event had 75,000 concurrent viewers, which caused his website and those of the event sponsors to crash.
“Our initial bandwidth provider laughed at our viewership projections, and, of course, we surpassed them in the first week of pre-sales,” Mill said. “They did apologize before asking for a much larger check.”
Other early obstacles included determining how to embed the livestream platform into Mitchell’s e-commerce site. The biggest challenge there was “juggling two separate logins, one for merch shopping and another for livestream PPV, all within the same site,” Mill explained.
“Now, our focus is on seamlessly guiding the YouTube audience over to FRDM+ for premium live events,” he added.
Live events are still the heart of FRDM+. The service had 21 livestreamed events scheduled throughout 2025, and more are expected to come.
Peeking Under the Hood
Today, bandwidth isn’t a problem for FRDM+, and navigating the streaming service doesn’t feel much different from something like Netflix. There are different “channels” (grouped together by related content or ongoing series) on top and new releases and upcoming content highlighted below. There are horizontal scrolling rows, and many titles have content summaries and/or trailers. The platform also has a support section with instructions for canceling subscriptions.
Like with other SVOD services, subscribers can watch FRDM+ via a web browser or through a smart TV app. FRDM+ currently has apps for Apple TV, Fire OS, and Roku OS. Mitchell said the team’s constantly working on more connected TV apps, as well as adding features, “more interactivity,” and customers.
To keep the wheels spinning, FRDM+ leverages a diverse range of technologies, Mill explained: “At the core of our infrastructure, AWS bandwidth servers handle the heavy lifting, while Accedo powers the connected TV apps, bridging the gap between our tech stack and the audience. Brightcove serves as our primary video player partner, with additional backup systems in place to maintain reliability.”
For a service like this, with live events, redundancy is critical, Mill said.
“At the Freedom Factory, we even beam air fiber from a house five miles away to ensure a reliable second Internet. We also have a hidden page on [the Cleetus McFarland website] to launch a backup stream if the primary one fails,” he said.
Today, FRDM+’s biggest challenge isn’t a technical one. Instead, it’s around managing the business’s different parts using a small team. FRDM+ has 35 full-time employees across its Shop, Race Track, Events, and Merch divisions and is “entirely self-funded,” per Mill. The company also relies on contractors for productions, but its core livestream team has six full-time employees.
