The Beachbody Company

The company was founded in 1998 by Carl Daikeler and Jon Congdon in Santa Monica, California. Daikeler was previously in informercials for Lifeline Gym and :08 Min Abs in the 1990s. The founders received $500,000 in angel investing, developed a series of workout videos and bought the website Beachbody.com.In 2005, P90X, or Power 90 Extreme, was created by Tony Horton as a commercial home exercise regimen and developed as a successor to the program called "Power 90". It consists of a training program that uses cross-training and periodization, combined with a nutrition and dietary supplement plan. It was heavily marketed through infomercials and celebrity endorsements.In 2007, customers began selling workout DVDs. The company announced that it was developing an OTT streaming platform in 2015 that would function similar to Netflix containing all of its exercise workouts previously available on DVD. The platform gained popularity early in the COVID-19 pandemic with more than half a million new subscribers at that time.Between June and November 2017, advertising watchdog organization Truth in Advertising found that Beachbody distributors were making false and unsubstantiated income claims to promote the company's business opportunity. The FTC has stated that 99.6% of all MLM participants will lose money, after factoring in the costs to join.In 2017, Beachbody agreed to pay $3.6 million to settle a lawsuit from the city of Santa Monica over automatic credit card renewals. It was alleged that Beachbody was charging its customers’ credit cards on an automatic, recurring basis without the required written consent of those customers.A three-way merger between Forest Road Acquisition Corp, Myx Fitness Holdings and Beachbody was entered into in February 2021, which valued the new business combination at $2.9 billion.