NFL fans owe a thank you to MrBeast and his nation-state-sized following. Really. And NBA followers better show gratitude to devotees of The Summer I Turned Pretty. Here’s why.
Prime Video’s coming-of-age/love triangle melodrama scored 25 million viewers in its third season’s opening week, Amazon said. Anyone who paid for the service to watch the teen saga set to a curious number of Taylor Swift bops contributed to the coffers that are funding $1.8 billion per year for pro basketball rights starting next month. Similar math backed up YouTube’s acquisition of a primetime Week 1 game that the company aired for free to more than 16 million football fans on Friday.
Watching sports feels as expensive as ever, but without those other consumers using the same services, it would be even pricier.
There was a time, about a decade ago, when the sports-indifferent could cut the cable cord and largely exist beyond leagues’ reach. Streaming services launched without live games for reasons both financial and technical. Meanwhile, traditional cable packages’ costs—and function—became increasingly tied to the sports they offered, leaving fans to cover a larger percentage of the rights fee bill.
It seemed for a moment like sports obsessives were going to have to pay full freight if they wanted to keep up with all their favorite teams and tournaments. And it looked expensive. UFC viewers, for instance, have been asked to pay for ESPN+ as well as $80 pay-per-view events. Leagues modeled the possibility of delivering all their games directly to consumers or packaging them together on niche services. Would we need a “Netflix of sports?”
Instead, Netflix itself entered the picture, as did just about every other streamer. With YouTube new this year, the four biggest services will each carry exclusive NFL action.
YouTube’s goal with a free NFL game was to get more people to watch its user-generated content—such as whatever MrBeast is up to next. Other streamers have found their own ways to account for expensive new sports rights, valuing games’ ability to bring in supplemental audiences who have proven likely to stick around.
In some cases, it’s as simple as raising the price for everyone. Peacock just upped its ad-supported tier’s monthly charge 38% to $11 ahead of the NBA’s debut there. Other streamers have turned to advertising for new revenue. Roughly 100 million people have signed up for Netflix’s ad tier. Prime Video—which has pushed farther into live sports than any other general-interest streamer—turned ads on by default early last year. Naturally, any service looking to grow its advertising business is going to become even more interested in sports, where fans are (generally) accustomed to commercial breaks and where sponsors see effective opportunities to reach the masses. For Amazon, sports fits into an even larger Prime bundle that is also tied to shopping benefits.
Thanks to sports’ invasion of streaming services, almost 250 NBA games are going to air nationally this year—up 75 from 2024-25—meaning some League Pass loyalists might now be satiated with a mix of ESPN, Peacock and Prime Video instead, especially if they are already paying for those products. Under a new deal with CBS and Paramount+, UFC fights will be available for all subscribers.
Of course, the downside of every streaming service getting into sports is that, for the sports completist, you now need every streaming service. But it beats the alternative of needing those subscriptions plus games-focused offerings.
HBO Max, for instance, flirted with keeping TNT Sports’ catalog behind a sports add-on fee, before dropping the notion. (Next year, it might become the lone mainstream subscription service without marquee sports altogether when Warner Bros. Discovery splits). The closest such offering that does exist is the worldwide leader in sports. ESPN sits as a tile within the Disney+ app these days, but the content therein requires its own subscription—or Disney’s $30 all-in-one bundle.
For now, ESPN remains deeply tied to the cable bundle model. It’s pitching its new streaming offering to cable distributors just as hard as it is selling it to consumers. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see more games leak into the lower-priced Disney+ subscription over time as Disney seeks to compete with Netflix. Allocating the cost of sports content across Disney+ and Hulu’s 183 million-plus subs might be necessary if ESPN wants to continue adding to its rights arsenal.
There is a clear risk for streamers cramming sports into their portfolios. It’s the same thing that happened to cable. If non-sports fans get the sense they’re paying for games they don’t want to watch, they could flee once again. Free services like Tubi might be banking on exactly that.
But, for the most part, there simply aren’t many live-sports-free havens left. Thankfully.