Streaming live TV at home should be plain.
But depending on the sport, you can sign up (and pay handsomely) for many different services to keep up.
There are scarce leagues like Major League Soccer that can be watched on one channel. (In the US, you can watch every game live on Apple TV with an MLS Season Pass.) However, keeping up with most sports is a lot like, say, tennis, where the rights to the four major tournaments are spread across several different platforms.
Overall, while major streaming platforms go hand-in-hand with legacy broadcast companies going digital, the highly sought-after rights have positioned leagues to make huge money. The negative impact on viewers is that many professional sports are now available “exclusively” in many different places.
Basically, watching sports has never been easier. And it has never been more hard.
International gymnastics’ governing body has pushed for AI-powered referee assistance. But what justifies the huge cost of such a system? The World Gymnastics Championships provided the answer and may have had nothing to do with gymnastics at all.
In the United States, most NFL games can be streamed live via Sunday Ticket, which costs $349 for a full season and also requires a YouTube TV subscription for $72.99 per month. For six months of football ($437.94), from Week 1 through Super Bowl Sunday, that’s a total of $786.94.
However, this is not every match. All Friday Night Football games, the Black Friday game, and one wild-card playoff game will be available exclusively on Amazon Prime Video ($8.99 per month, which will last for five months, $44.95 total); one exclusive Brazilian regular season game available on Peacock ($7.99/month); ESPN Plus offers one exclusive Monday Night Football game ($10.99 per month); and this year, Netflix is joining the fray with two holiday games ($6.99/month).
If you want to be able to stream every game in the US, your total will be $857.86.
The NBA signed an extraordinary 11-year, $76 billion deal to broadcast games with Disney, Comcast and Amazon starting in the 2025-2026 season. That brings the NBA to just under $7 billion per season, a 2.5-fold boost over the league’s previous annual media rights earnings.
How will things be divided? Well, next season promises to be played every night of the week: there will be double-headers on Peacock on Mondays; Two games are broadcast on Tuesdays on NBC regional affiliates; There are doubleheaders on Wednesday on ESPN; Primetime games will be available on Amazon on Thursday, starting in January after Thursday Night Football ends; On Friday, some games are available on Amazon and sometimes others on ESPN; Saturdays will feature mostly primetime games on ABC, with a few afternoon games on Amazon; and there will be games on NBC on Sunday after the NFL season ends. Have you been following all this?
Currently available is NBA League Pass, a popular streaming service for out-of-market games that allows you to select multiple teams. It is unclear what it will look like next year.
Tennis is betting on its future – driven by data, sports betting and foreign investment. but how huge a swing is he willing to take?
The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 purportedly banned sports betting in the United States, except in a few states. However, in 2018, the law was invalidated and the Supreme Court ruled that it violated the 10th Amendment. Currently, the legality of sports gambling is decided at the state level, which means we are inundated with ads for games like DraftKings and FanDuel. It’s also a fresh way for leagues to sell media rights, though these deals are much more unclear than TV and streaming deals.
Although sports betting has been extremely popular in Europe for years, it is booming here. U.S. sports betting revenues grew to $11 billion in 2023, a more than 11-fold boost in just four years. Gambling revenues already dwarf the size of entire sports leagues and will exceed the largest – the NFL – within a decade of PASPA’s overturn.
If forecasts are correct, in five years total online sports betting revenues will exceed those of major sports leagues.
Credits
Editors: Sarah Jeong, Jake Kastrenakes and Kevin Nguyen
Illustrator: Samara Haddad
Innovative Director: Kristen Radtke
Engineer: Graham MacAree
Copying editors: Mariya Abate and Liz Hickson
Fact checking: Becca Laurie