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You are at:Home»Sports»As Netflix shares rise, an ‘anti-ESPN’ sports strategy emerges
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As Netflix shares rise, an ‘anti-ESPN’ sports strategy emerges

January 22, 2025006 Mins Read
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Jake Paul fighting Mike Tyson, the NFL on Christmas Day and a Super Bowl-level Beyoncé performance proved great for Netflix’s business.

The streaming giant reported record new subscriber signups in the final quarter of 2024 – almost 19 million – bringing the total number of subscribers to more than 300 million. (As of Wednesday morning, Netflix stock is up.)

The company was quick to point out the success of its year-end sports programming, including the Paul-Tyson boxing match and its NFL Christmas doubleheader, which included a Beyoncé-led halftime show that Netflix also packed herself, in the end. attracting more viewers than football matches.

Market research firm Antenna estimated that Netflix attracted more than 650,000 new subscribers around the time of the NFL games. According to Antennathe Paul-Tyson fight generated more than 1.4 million registrations.

The company outlined its sports programming strategy in its letter to shareholders released Tuesday:

“We are not focused on acquiring rights to large regular season sports packages. Rather, our live strategy is to provide unmissable programming of special events,” the company said.

This positions Netflix as a sort of “anti-ESPN.”

By design and necessity, ESPN devotes its rights budget to accumulating a huge volume of sports packages for the regular season. The network’s currency being live games, it spends prolifically on this programming. (This tonnage of live games will become even more important for ESPN as it launches its own direct-to-consumer sports platform – currently named “Flagship” – later this year.) In addition to this, ESPN/ABC could have the most notable events in the history of sports media with the upcoming Super Bowls, the NBA Finals, the College Football Championship and the Stanley Cup Finals, among others.

The luxurious position Netflix finds itself in is evident in its acquisition strategy. It doesn’t need all the live sports – it just needs enough “important and memorable” (in its own words) live sports to keep its audience engaged.

With a market capitalization north of $370 billion – and growing, if Wednesday’s stock price rise from Tuesday’s quarterly report is anything to go by – and its massive global audience, Netflix can both choose this which he decides is “not to be missed”. and probably spend more than anyone else on the market.

This is one of the main reasons why the Christmas Day football experience was so important – both for Netflix and the NFL.

Netflix was set to test whether fans would switch from traditional NFL streaming platforms to stream games on Netflix, surely knowing that Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football had proven the concept.

Netflix pulled out all the stops, hiring dozens of on-air personalities from other networks and, of course, paying Beyoncé to deliver a halftime show that wouldn’t have looked out of place during a Super Bowl. The reward included being the most-watched NFL game ever on a streaming platform.

Netflix has the right to remake games on Christmas Day in 2025 – since December 25 is a Thursday, they will be released on the same day as one of Amazon Prime Video’s games.

The NFL, of course, must be delighted: it welcomes a new entrant with deep pockets, able to pay top dollar for the copyright, present the product to a global audience of a few hundred million people and putting out a show that looks and sounds like the one fans are used to.

Netflix is ​​a natural (best) bidder for a new NFL game package, whether it’s a new “18th Game,” an international package, or something entirely new (like the NFL does). Christmas Day, which was formerly the province of NBA).

Now lay down in WWE. Netflix hijacked WWE’s Monday night live show and launched weekly shows earlier this month. While that seems to fit the description of a “great regular season sports program,” Monday night’s WWE road show feels more like a “special event” than “multiple matches per week.”

What constitutes a sports-related “special event”? And it also happens to be one of the few premium live sports packages available right now?

UFC fights. Keep in mind that WWE and UFC share a parent company (TKO Holdings), so Netflix’s $10 billion investment in WWE could be a show of commitment related to future deals involving the UFC . ESPN exclusively owns all rights until next year. UFC will consider splitting packages among multiple carriers, sources briefed on the discussions said. Athletics.

Netflix also made a splash last month by acquiring the rights to broadcast the Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031. It should surprise no one if and when Netflix uses this as a step towards acquiring the Men’s World Cup which will be available soon. in 2030.

As the Paul-Tyson fight and, earlier this year, the live “roast” of Tom Brady showed, Netflix’s live programming team has no shortage of willingness to evaluate non-traditional ideas, of appetite to spread them and of the deepest reflection. pockets to acquire them.

And in another interesting twist, Netflix’s presence in the sports space has shown that the leagues need the streamer more than Netflix needs it. It’s 180 degrees different from traditional networks.

ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS would likely survive if they lost the NFL, but they would not be dominant forces in sports entertainment culture. Netflix may have been helped by the NFL games, but if it weren’t for those two Christmas games, it’s hard to believe its earnings report would have been drastically different, given its output regular shows like the second season of “Squid”. Game” and movies starring stars.

The same is true for Amazon. Its Prime Video service is the sports leader among digital players with its NFL and NBA deals. However, if Amazon decided tomorrow – it doesn’t, because they have long-term agreements – to abandon sports, would they sell one less box of paper towels?

We’re in the middle of a big shakeup in how we look at sports. The biggest long-term challengers to ESPN’s supremacy and the top spot among traditional networks are Amazon and Netflix. While leagues, like the NFL, really want digital players to be more invested in their games, a long-term problem arises: will Netflix orient its strategy more towards sports?

Whether Netflix gets UFC will be telling, and it’s hard to imagine the sport being anything other than a boon for Netflix’s relatively new advertising tier.

How this all plays out in the long term could impact not only how you watch your games, but also the financial makeup of the sport.

(Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty Images)

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