How Crave, the Canadian Streamer Behind ‘Heated Rivalry,’ Is Making a Name for Itself in America and Beyond

At its upfronts presentation last June, Canadian streaming service Crave touted a number of upcoming partnerships and series with Canadian royalty. It was partnering with Fremantle on its revival of “Match Game” hosted by Martin Short. It announced “Slo Pitch,” the first project in a co-development deal with Elliott Page’s Pageboy Productions. And it also launched interview series “Tom Green’s Funny Farm” featuring comic Tom Green.

Crave was also excited about another new series for which it had just confirmed a six-episode order: a steamy romance about hockey stars from EP Jacob Tierney called “Heated Rivalry.”

At the time, Justin Stockman, VP of Content Development and Programming at Crave’s parent company Bell Media, thought the show had promise. The words “gay” and “hockey” don’t normally go together, so he knew it could be “a little bit spicy” and would get people talking. Others were unsure when they heard the elevator pitch: hockey won’t sell outside of Canada, they said, and a queer love story would make it niche. Stockman and the Crave team were undeterred.

“When a show is authentically itself and the characters feel really true and it delivers exactly what it’s supposed to deliver, all those things that feel like barriers don’t become important,” Stockman told IndieWire. “So we’ve really tried to lean into the authenticity. If it feels niche, make it more niche, make it so true to that niche that everyone will actually relate to it.”

A little over six months later, “Heated Rivalry” is by far the biggest Crave Original to date, and is potentially on the podium for one of the biggest Canadian dramas ever. The show was big in its native Canada, but it really took off with viewers in the U.S. watching on HBO Max, even if the majority of those viewers had never heard of a “Crave Original.”

Since its premiere on both Crave and HBO Max late in 2025, the series is now nearing 11.5 million U.S. viewers. The show became a water cooler sensation week after week, with the audience for the finale four times larger than the premiere, and it is on pace to be the #1 acquired series in HBO Max history.

“I would be disingenuous to say that I could have predicted the impact that this show had,” said Jason Butler, SVP of Global Content Strategy & Planning at HBO Max. “What’s so special about what Jacob has created is it’s rare to see this degree and level of on-screen representation that’s showcasing the many different facets of the human condition: love, sex, passion, intimacy, heartbreak, failure, success, all told through this unique lens of two male athletes falling in love. It’s these sort of thematic underpinnings of the show that are really resonating with audiences around the world.”

HBO Max landing “Heated Rivalry” was fortuitous. It’s rare for HBO Max to be acquiring shows of its own rather than producing them in-house, and Butler said what’s been remarkable about the growth of “Heated Rivalry” is that the show has more than doubled in viewership since after its premiere aired.

Butler specifically was responsible for finding the show and bringing it to HBO chief Casey Bloys, and the feeling was not just that it made sense creatively, but also strategically as a premium show that fit the HBO brand. HBO Max has pushed the series out not just in the U.S. but also Australia and parts of EMEA and LATAM.

“People were having viewing parties, and buzz was growing and compounding each week on social,” Butler said. “It created this very fan-driven, viewer-driven momentum that we rarely see these days, with the show starting on a certain level and growing so organically across the run of it show and then beyond the run of the show.”

That’s an incredible platform for “Heated Rivalry” considering Crave itself is only available in Canada. In terms of SVOD streamers for Canada, it’s in fourth place behind Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, and it perhaps coincidentally relies heavily on a longstanding licensing arrangement to distribute HBO and HBO Max content to the Canadian market, where HBO Max itself is unavailable.

‘Letterkenny’Hulu

But it also has thousands of hours of original programming not from HBO, a few of which have broken out elsewhere. The sitcom “Letterkenny,” which was also co-created by Tierney and Jared Keeso, ran for 12 seasons via Crave and is available for streaming in the U.S. on Hulu. Other Canadian series Bell Media and CTV have licensed abroad include Keeso’s hockey comedy “Shoresy” and the medical drama “Sullivan’s Crossing.”

“Heated Rivalry” was the first one licensed by HBO Max, despite the prior pipeline that really only flowed up north. Crave last year acquired a majority stake in international distributor Sphere Abacus, which has been ramping up sales of its originals around the globe.

And as a result of the success of “Heated Rivalry,” Crave has seen a 26 percent increase in subscribers since last year, adding over a million subs to reach 4.6 million in what is a small Canadian market. Knowing that its market now has a more global reach, Crave’s goal is to create something bigger, while still catering to an underserved Canadian audience.

“We’re now looking at what are going to be those great ideas that, yes, serve that need for Canadian eyes to see them but that can sell all around the world and show that Canadian creatives are some of the best in the world, and we can make really good shows too,” Stockman said.

Though Toronto and Vancouver and elsewhere are growing as production hubs, Crave’s challenge has been cultivating Canadian talent and getting them to stay there. The budgets for most Canadian projects traditionally haven’t been at the necessary level, and it can be slow when Crave is trying to co-finance a project with a Hollywood studio. So in the case of “Heated Rivalry” and others, the streamer is taking on more risk and shouldering that financing burden itself to move a little quicker.

Now that Crave’s pockets are deepening, so too is the talent pool. It recently signed a deal with Seth Rogen’s Point Grey on a to-be-announced project, and after turning him into a star, Crave is reuniting with “Heated Rivalry” actor Hudson Williams for a spooky mystery series called “Yaga” that also stars Carrie-Anne Moss.

In the short term at least, Crave will still only be available in Canada, but the success of “Heated Rivalry” has put more eyes on what the streamer is putting out and opening a window for Crave to be more aggressive in getting its shows out to the world.

And it won’t let its Canadian-ness get in the way of finding another global smash.

“We really saw that there was a business opportunity here where Canada has a growing image on the world stage,” Stockman said. “We’ve got great creatives, and Canadians want to see themselves on TV, and that’s becoming harder. So that is a business opportunity. Let’s not look at it as an obligation; let’s look at it as a growth plan.”