Of course, it’s less than other broadcasters-Paramount (CBS), Fox, and Comcast (NBC)-are paying for their larger slates of Sunday games. The cost? Over $1bn per year in an 11-year deal. This year, Amazon will be the sole broadcaster of Thursday Night Football, becoming the first streaming service to exclusively broadcast a full package of games. For the past five years, Amazon has paid for limited streaming rights to Thursday Night Football, which it shared with NFL Network and Fox. Though Apple TV+ is growing while other streaming services are declining amid the ongoing cost of living crisis, the expansion of its sports offering is still in its infancy compared to fellow streaming competitor Amazon Prime Video.Īmazon was something of a first mover in aggressively going after sports media deals, beginning with the National Football League in 2017. The company’s MLB rights deal, when added to the estimated $2.5bn, 10-year deal to exclusively stream Major League Soccer across the US, shows how much Apple has been willing to invest into live sports just this year. Regardless, Apple appears to be planting flags. Discovery and Disney, sports leagues must walk a fine line between preparing for a future of streaming-first content (after all, streaming viewership just surpassed cable for the first time ever) and retaining the currently lucrative rights deals with key cable and broadcast outlets.Īs the MediaKind report reads: “for the premium sports and many of the sports properties analyzed, the traditional broadcast market continues to deliver substantial revenues-often their biggest revenue stream-and guaranteed for years in advance.” Similar to other large media companies such as Warner Bros. Fans want to watch their teams with the fewest possible inconveniences restricting options for viewership is more likely than not to sour league sentiment. The criticism is one leagues must balance against the legitimate interest of entering into streaming markets. When Apple entered into the world of sports this year, it paid an estimated $85m to stream the MLB’s new Friday Night Baseball offering, a once-a-week primetime baseball game.Īpple’s baseball coverage has received mixed reception from fans online, who have both praised the production quality while also maligning the fact that more games that would have been locally broadcast to them via cable are now locked behind a separate paywall. The inflated cost was thanks in part to Paramount’s reportedly entering into a bidding war with Amazon. Last week, Paramount was forced to spend $1.5bn-over two-and-a-half times what it spent previously-to retain the English-speaking US media rights to the UEFA Champions League. And they appear willing to pay more for major US deals than competitor streaming services like DAZN (one of the big spenders in Europe) or even Disney’s ESPN, which dropped out of the bidding for the Big Ten’s collegiate sports media rights. a small number of games per season) or exclusive broadcast rights. In part, the push is increasingly being led by two mega tech companies that are known less for their media offering than other aspects of the business.Īmazon and Apple-relative late-bloomers in the streaming space-have each invested heavily into inking deals with sports leagues, be they for relative scraps (i.e. But increasingly, rights-holders are selling off shares of content to streamers themselves. It described streaming as “a significant factor in the future of sports media distribution”, with most rights-holders already beginning to tap into streaming by distributing clips on third-party platforms such as YouTube or social media. MediaKind’s 2021 Sports DTC report analyzed how the increased demand for streaming was affecting the industry. Analysis Streaming services have made inroads into live sports, led by two mega companies that are known less for their media offerings than their other products.Įven as streaming services have competed with linear TV for quality content offerings and driven many households to cut the cord, broadcast and cable outlets have been able to rely on news and live sports to bolster seasonal viewership and, therefore, ad revenue.īut in recent years, streaming services have begun taking slices out of the pie, with estimates by Ampere Analysis predicting streaming would account for one-fifth of sports rights spend across European markets in 2022.
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