It should be simple to stream live TV at home.
But depending on the sport, you might sign up (and pay handsomely) for many different services just to keep up.
There are rare championships, like Major League Soccer, that can be watched on a single channel. (In the United States, every match can be watched live on Apple TV with the MLS Season Pass.) But following most sports is like, say, tennis, where the rights to its four major tournaments are spread across multiple platforms different.
And generally speaking, as big streaming platforms battle traditional broadcast companies transitioning to digital, the highly sought-after rights have allowed leagues to make a lot of money. The negative effect for viewers is that many professional sports are now available “exclusively” in many different locations.
Basically, watching sports has never been easier. And it has never been so difficult.
International gymnastics’ governing body has been pushing for AI-assisted help for judges. But what justifies the enormous cost of such a system? The World Gymnastics Championships held an answer, and it may have had nothing to do with gymnastics.
In the US, you can stream the majority of NFL games live via Sunday Ticket, a full season of which costs $349, and you’ll also need to be a subscriber to YouTube TV at $72.99 per month. For six months of football ($437.94), from Week 1 through Super Bowl Sunday, that brings the total to $786.94.
But this is not the case for all games. All Thursday Night Football games, plus the Black Friday game and a wild card playoff game will be exclusively on Amazon Prime Video ($8.99 per month, which you’ll need for five months, for a total of $44.95 $); an exclusive regular season match in Brazil is on Peacock ($7.99 per month); ESPN Plus offers an exclusive Monday Night Football game ($10.99 per month); and this year, Netflix is joining the fray with two games for Christmas Day ($6.99 per month).
If you wanted to be able to stream every game in the United States, your total would be $857.86.
The NBA has signed an extraordinary $76 billion, 11-year deal to stream games with Disney, Comcast and Amazon starting with the 2025-26 season. That nets the NBA just under $7 billion per season, or 2.5 times the league’s previous annual amount for media rights.
How are things going to be divided? Well, next season promises games every night of the week: Mondays will have doubleheaders on Peacock; On Tuesdays, two games are broadcast on regional NBC affiliates; Wednesday, there are doubleheaders on ESPN; Thursday will have primetime games on Amazon, starting in January after Thursday Night Football ends; On Friday, some games are available on Amazon and sometimes others on ESPN; Saturdays will be primarily primetime games on ABC, with some afternoon games on Amazon; and on Sunday there will be games on NBC once the NFL season ends. Did you keep track of all this?
There is currently NBA League Pass, a popular streaming service for out-of-market games that lets you select a few teams. It’s still unclear how this will work next year.
Tennis is betting on its future, based on data, sports betting and foreign investment. but how big is it ready to take?
The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 ostensibly banned sports betting in the United States, except in a few states. But in 2018, the law was struck down after the Supreme Court ruled that it was a violation of the 10th Amendment. Now the legality of sports gambling is decided at the state level, which means we’re inundated with ads for things like DraftKings and FanDuel. It’s also a new avenue of media rights that leagues can sell, although those deals are far more opaque than television and streaming contracts.
While sports betting has been huge in Europe for years, it is now booming here. Sports betting revenue in the United States reached $11 billion in 2023, a growth of more than 11 times in just four years. Already, gambling revenues dwarf the size of entire sports leagues and will surpass the largest – the NFL – within a decade after PASPA is repealed.
If projections hold true, in five years, total online sports betting revenues will eclipse those of major sports leagues.
Credits
Editors: Sarah Jeong, Jake Kastrenakes and Kevin Nguyen
Illustrator: Samar Haddad
Creative Director: Kristen Radtke
Engineer: Graham MacAree
Editors: Mariya Abate and Liz Hickson
Fact checker: Becca Laurie