In early October, a few weeks before the 2025 season tipped off, NBA commissioner Adam Silver found himself in a hallway inside NBC Sports’ facility in Stamford, Connecticut, staring at a makeshift wall of screens.
A team of executives and developers from NBCUniversal were manning the station, showing off the experience they built inside Peacock to highlight the slate of more than 100 games that the company will stream each season. Silver listened intently, asking questions as he took in the demo.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter a few minutes earlier inside the custom built set that NBC constructed for its NBA studio shows, Silver marveled at how sports has completely transformed the streaming landscape, with his league’s partners NBCU, Amazon and Disney now all-in on streaming.
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“Here we are at NBCUniversal today, but I’ve been to similar meetings at Disney and Amazon, and it’s quite incredible the amount of resources that they are putting behind their sports properties, I think with a recognition that that live sports are increasingly differentiating themselves from virtually all other forms of programming on their networks or on their platforms, and so it makes complete sense for them to be making these sort of investments,” Silver said.
Indeed. A quick glance at the current state of streaming underscores Silver’s assessment, with the recent Major League Baseball deals with NBCU, ESPN and Netflix only further underscoring that fact.
Media companies, sports leagues and even A-list talent have quietly shifted their priorities to streaming platforms, preparing to leave the linear world behind should that business collapse entirely.
NBCU’s Peacock has basically become a sports platform, with the NFL, NBA, MLB, college football and the Olympics forming a year-round cadence; Paramount+ has long leaned on the NFL but its massive $7.7 billion UFC deal is a sign of larger ambitions in the space; and while the future of sports on HBO Max is uncertain given the possible split or sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO CEO Casey Bloys told reporters Nov. 20 that “sports in general, has been very good for Max,” holding out hope for some future rights.
HBO Max, of course, may have a new owner, given Netflix’s stunning $82.7 billion deal for Warner Bros., though the completion of that deal is a long ways away, if it isn’t blocked by regulators.
In fact, digital giants that had long tinkered in the sports space appear to be moving much more aggressively: Netflix not only has Thanksgiving NFL games, a regular cadence of major boxing matches (and sports-adjacent WWE Raw events), but will add an MLB opening night game, the “Field of Dreams” game, and the Home Run Derby to its live event lineup.
Will the Warner Bros. deal change that, given that its sports rights won’t be included in the sale (those will go to the Discovery spin-out)? “I don’t think you should look at this as any change in our sports strategy at all,” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told Wall Street analysts Dec. 5.
Apple, meanwhile, just dropped around $750 million for rights to Formula 1, which will join MLB Friday night games and a more accessible lineup of Major League Soccer games on Apple TV.
Apple’s Eddy Cue, Stefano Domenicali, CEO of the Formula One Group and Derek Chang, President and CEO of Liberty Media Corporation attend the Apple TV press conference prior to practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of United States at Circuit of The Americas on October 17, 2025 in Austin, Texas. Bryn Lennon – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
“I’m a huge F1 fan, but I’m also a huge sports fan, and one of the things that we wanted to do if we were going to offer some level of sports is to be able to do it in a way that is what I think sports fans want, which is easy access, available, same location, same place, they know exactly where to get it, where it’s coming from, all of the complexities that you deal with in sports and watching going away,” Cue said, when asked by THR about how the new deal fits into the company’s sports strategy.
And the last holdouts of pay-TV (most notably Fox and ESPN) have made the jump too, meaning that, for the first time, 2025 is the year when NFL and NBA fans will be able to watch every single game via streaming, no pay-TV subscription required.
“It’s intentional,” says Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, who spoke to THR inside Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where he was celebrating the league’s partnership with another streaming power player, YouTube. “It’s intentional with our partners to use technology, to use different platforms, to be able to reach a broader audience, whether you want to watch through streaming or you want to watch it on pay television or broadcast. We want our fans to be able to reach the NFL any way they can.
“The benefit we have is that we’re appointment viewing,” Goodell added, noting that his league’s games have become a driving force for streaming subscriptions. “People know when our games are. There’s a purpose for that, and that is part of how we continue to build an audience on a global basis, which I think is awesome and important.”
Nowhere is that more relevant than at Fox and ESPN, which have built their streaming businesses around live sports.
ESPN’s streaming service is only a few months in, but is that Disney division’s top priority, with Antenna estimating that it has garnered about 1.7 million signups since it launched in late August; Ditto for Fox One, which Antenna estimates attracted about 2.3 million sign-ups.
For media companies that are in the streaming space, sports have become the biggest drivers of new subscriptions, and a key piece of their retention strategies. That’s even true for the tech giants like Amazon and Netflix.
“What we’ve seen with live [events] is it has its outsized positive impacts around conversation around acquisition, and we suspect around retention,” Sarandos told investors July 17.
And with every streaming platform now in the advertising business (even Apple sells as on its live sports programming), sports are safe, reliable drivers of viewership at an otherwise challenging time for media buyers.
An Amazon Prime Video ‘Thursday Night Football’ cameraperson during a game between the Denver Broncos and the New Orleans Saints. Gus Stark/Getty Images
“Sports are really working for us,” Amazon Prime Video chief Jay Marine said on CNBC Nov. 28, teasing Prime’s Black Friday game. “We like what we’re seeing, and advertisers like what they are seeing.”
For traditional players, sports are not only key subscription and ad drivers, they may be the critical pieces to likely consolidation, as Paramount, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery are all finding out. Combining those platforms (and their rights) could be the key to challenging the biggest players.
“A combined streaming service would offer a subscriber acquisition and churn-reduction mechanism through the combination of HBO’s prestige dramas and Paramount’s growing sports rights, which drive acquisition, and a deep four quadrant library to drive retention,” wrote Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich in a Nov. 26 report about media consolidation. “WBD has historically suffered high churn when hit series (e.g. House of the Dragon) end. Paramount+ has lower churn during the NFL season but struggles during the off season. Combining WBD hit dramas, more limited but still important sports programming and vast catalog of films with Paramount’s NFL carriage and kids content would help to engender a 12-month engagement cycle for the combined platform, in our view.”
Talent, too, is embracing the change. Elle Duncan, the ESPN SportsCenter anchor and WNBA studio host, is set to join Netflix as its first in-house sports host, a source says, underscoring that platform’s commitment to the space. And Fox led a substantial investment in Shadow Lion, the media company founded by its lead NFL analyst Tom Brady, with ambitions to create original content for its social and streaming platforms.
“It’s a digital world we’re living in,” Brady tells THR, adding that the deal is about “extending this Fox Sports experience beyond just, let’s say, NFL games on Sunday.”
As for the leagues, the shift to streaming may be existential. Rights fees have skyrocketed for decades, but with linear TV in decline, the leagues want to ensure that their existing partners can survive the shift, or that they can find deep-pocketed new bidders to replace them.
With MLB set to unify its rights after 2028 season, and the NFL widely expected to force its partners into new rights negotiations as early as next year (getting well ahead of the league’s 2029 opt-out), those fees are set to continue going higher.
“Major US renegotiations will shape the next rights cycle — including the MLB and potentially the NFL — and these could push global spend even higher,” says Dan Harraghy, senior Research manager Ampere Analysis, adding that the U.S. rights and increased global competition “will lift worldwide spend to more than $78 billion by 2030.”
But the leagues are also enamored by more than just dollar signs. There is a growing recognition that younger consumers are consuming entertainment differently than prior generations, and they are leaning on their partners to find the right ways to reach them.
“It’s where our fans are,” Silver says. “I also like the fact that with multiple partners, there’s a competitive aspect to it, too. I think multiple heads are better than one.
“I wouldn’t want to rely just on the work that we’re doing at the league office, or one partner,” he adds. “I think everybody pays attention to what each other what each other do. In some cases, they’re sharing practices. In some cases, they have proprietary things they’re doing. But I think ultimately the greatest beneficiary will be the fan.”