The broadcast rights for live sports were once the sole domain of the big networks, CBS, ABC and NBC for multiple decades. They were then forced to contend with the introduction of upstart cable networks who were also willing to pay to secure the rights for different leagues and teams. A balance existed amongst these identifiable players who would bid for sports rights as they became available. However, the newest entrants—streaming TV companies—are upending the whole field. With their consumer usage and financial firepower, the question is can anyone really stop the streaming companies from controlling the $123 billion+ live sports environment?
The Value Exchange
For traditional linear TV broadcasts, there is a simple, long established value exchange that is understood by consumers. Viewers watch shows in exchange for seeing commercial blocks sold to advertisers throughout that telecast. This balance is the primary revenue driver for old school broadcasters and cable networks. Sports broadcasts work precisely this way and are of the greatest value to advertisers as games are viewed live by a vast majority of highly attentive consumers. This means there is the highest opportunity for a brand to reach its target audience, which is focused and lacks the capability to forward through the brand’s ad.
In order to broadcast these games, networks purchase the rights from respective leagues and teams. They then produce their own telecasts and build more content around it, such as pregame and postgame shows. For this ecosystem to exist, there are three primary components:
- Consumer adoption
- Network financial wherewithal
- Advertiser opportunity and interest
Consumers lead the way. For the two traditional players, there was mass consumer adoption and reach with antennas and later cable boxes. With the audience in place, buying sports rights was merely a math exercise of costs and revenue. This all started with a Columbia University vs. Princeton baseball game broadcast in 1939. The competition changed in 1972, when the start-up cable network, HBO, broadcast the NY Rangers beating the Vancouver Canucks 5-2. They paid a reported $9,000 for those rights.
Fast forward 50+ years to see the sheer magnitude of change. The most recent major sports league deal had the NBA sell all its U.S. TV rights for $77 billion. Using the Consumer Price Index since 1972 as a barometer, inflation rose 641%. If we extrapolate the 1972 HBO rights to that entire 78 game NHL season for every team in the league, the growth in TV sports rights increased by 783,476%. And that says nothing of the higher degree of popularity of the NBA over the NHL. The bottom line is that consumers love their broadcast sports, so who wants to pay up to provide them?
Enter CTV
In the past decade, consumers widely adopted consuming content through a new delivery system, the internet, at a rapid pace. Streaming or Connected TV (CTV) had a massive growth spurt during the pandemic and has continued that trajectory. According to Nielsen, 46% of a TV viewer’s time watching their 65” living room TV (and elsewhere) is now spent with CTV networks. Or to put it another way, CTV is on the verge of being the dominant form of TV consumption.
The CTV networks—also now referred to as publishers—have quickly become household names. These include streaming-only CTV networks such as Netflix, Prime Video, AppleTV+, and Roku amongst many others. Not to mention their unusual cousin YouTube, which is now primarily watched on TV screens over mobile phones. Then add in traditional broadcasters’ streaming outlets such as Disney+ and Hulu (ABC/Disney), Peacock (NBC) and Paramount+ (CBS). While the new streaming-only group may have slightly different financial models and process objectives than their broadcast predecessors, every platform shares the collective goal of gaining more viewers of their content. And sports is an ideal path to capture more viewers.
2016 saw Twitch (now an Amazon division) first air NFL games. Then, in 2022 Amazon took the next step and became the first CTV company to exclusively air an NFL broadcast with “Thursday Night Football”. It was a bold and significant test to see if fans would accept this only-streaming format. In their first year, Amazon averaged 9.6 million viewers.
However, it may have been Peacock that truly broke the seal and got its nose bloodied in the process for a larger good. In January 2024, Peacock aired the first only-streaming NFL playoff game. Sports fans watched the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins 26-7, all for a cost of $110 million to Peacock. Despite much consumer complaint about having to sign up for a new service to watch, Peacock still gained an estimated 2.8 million new subscribers from this single game. This now cemented a new short-term focus and math for the streamers. Sports broadcasts = new subscribers. These subscribers paid monthly fees or viewed advertising or both.
It is now becoming clearer that sports fans do not have an issue watching sports on streamers—and may actually prefer it. According to the March 2025 Hub Entertainment Research report, “What’s the Score?”, 63% of sports fans believe that the streaming providers are the best equipped to show live games and highlights. Further, 60% of viewers who had technical difficulties watching live sports streams remain excited for more content to find its way to these platforms. So, the previous argument that technological glitches will be a hindrance to CTV sports growth are firmly behind us.
Now a growing number of powerful companies are testing the waters, and they are doing so quickly. The longest recognized name in CTV is Netflix, and it began its foray into live sports in late 2024. On November 15th, it aired the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul boxing match and garnered 1.43 million new subscribers over just three days. The result—60 million households tuning in for the fight, the scale proved to Netflix that viewers would flip to them for sporting events. Netflix followed this up with two 2024 Christmas NFL games. The streamer also owns the rights to stream WWE Raw wrestling weekly and more NFL Christmas games in 2025 and beyond. Due to its dominant consumer position, Netflix is a viable and dangerous competitor in this field.
To the chagrin of the traditional broadcasters, not only are there more competitors nowadays vying for sports rights, but these new competitors also have enormous bank accounts and value.
Financial Power
On face value, the streaming-only CTV networks vs. the traditional broadcasters is not a fair fight. Using market capitalization and cash on hand as gauges of bidding power, see the comparison below as of June 30, 2025:
Streaming-Only CTV Companies
| Company | Market Cap | Cash/Cash Equivalents | CTV Network | Streaming Sports Rights |
| Apple | $3.08 Trillion | $57 Billion | AppleTV+ | Major League Baseball (MLB) |
| Amazon | $1.87 Trillion | $72 Billion | Prime Video | NFL/Thursday Night Football, NASCAR, NBA, WNBA, Yankees |
| Google (Alphabet) | $2.23 Trillion | $133 Billion | YouTube TV | NFL Sunday Ticket |
| Netflix | $270 Billion | $8 Billion | Netflix | NFL, WWE, Boxing |
Traditional TV Companies
| Company | Market Cap | Cash/Cash Equivalents | Key Broadcast, Cable, and CTV Networks | TV Sports Rights |
| Disney | $195 Billion | $10.5 Billion | ABC, ESPN, Disney+ (CTV), ESPN+ (CTV),NFL Network (CTV) | ESPN, NBA, NFL, WWE |
| Comcast | $165 Billion | $8.3 Billion | NBC, Peacock (CTV) | Olympics, Premier League |
| Paramount | $26 Billion | $3.1 Billion | CBS, Paramount+ (CTV) | NFL, NCAA |
| Fox | $17.5 Billion | $2.2 Billion | Fox, Tubi (CTV) | NFL, MLB, NASCAR |
| WBD | $42 Billion | $4.2 Billion | TNT, TBS, HBO Max (CTV) | NBA, MLB, NHL |
While the streaming-only companies come out of the tech world and have other business endeavors, their sheer buying power dwarfs the traditional networks. This has driven the price tags on sports rights up considerably and created new opportunities for leagues and teams to portion out their broadcasts. The new NBA deal taking effect in 2025 is $77 billion over 11 years. The overall broadcast rights were split between three companies: Amazon, Disney and Comcast. While Disney and Comcast will have linear broadcast rights, streaming is at the core of the overall deal, with all three companies having sizable CTV platforms. If this deal was strictly cash focused, Amazon had an absurd 6.8x buying capacity over Disney. In other words, Amazon could have done whatever it determined was best and left the older juggernauts to have its scraps.
The Advertisers
The buying of ads is the financial fuel in the sports rights’ equation. Enter the powerful group: advertisers. In 2024, eMarketer reported that brands spent over $389 billion on overall advertising, with $87.8 billion being spent on all TV avenues. Advertisers understand the impact of advertising in live sports. According to the VAB’s “Fast Break” report, 46% of sports fans will make a purchase based on a commercial they saw during a sports broadcast.
Brands are hungry for the largest possible scale to drive that purchase rate, and sports delivers that part as well. Of the 100 most watched traditional TV broadcasts in 2024, 80 were sports broadcasts (NFL games being 72 of those) per Nielsen. Impact plus scale provides a basis for advertisers to pay heavily to air their ads, with the most expensive being the Superbowl. For the upcoming 2026 Superbowl, a 30-second spot will cost advertisers $8 million. This past year, Fox delivered 127.7 million viewers, with 13.6 million of those viewing on Fox’s streaming service, Tubi.
Altogether, there are virtually uncountable advertising opportunities stretching across sports leagues. This enables brands to further reach consumers at scale while also targeting specific audiences. CTV is technologically advanced to deliver on both of these objectives.
First, let’s examine in-broadcast opportunities. Similar to traditional broadcasts, CTV enables brands to place their ads in commercial breaks during the game. And just like TV broadcasts, there are in-game opportunities, such as virtual brand placements on the game floor, field or surroundings. But as traditional TV approaches its limits here, this is where CTV creativity and new thinking can begin. For example, postgame shows on streaming platforms can run for as long as the platform wants. There is no limitation by local news, promoted shows or any structure.
Additionally, where traditional sports are shown on one channel, Amazon Prime Video’s “Thursday Night Football” airs multiple “shows”. On any given Thursday this could include the traditional broadcast, a full-Spanish broadcast, a version from social influencer Dude Perfect, and one with next level AI-powered statistics surrounding the video. This multi-stream approach can attract different types of viewers and expand overall audience sizes. More viewers and more content time equals more advertising impressions available.
Next, as CTV is a truly digital ecosystem, advertisers can leverage consumer data to buy only the audiences they want. This could be as simple as an automotive brand precision targeting just the suburbs of New York City instead of those in Chicago between innings of a baseball game; or a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) company using behavioral data to reach only heads of household during a NASCAR race. Breaking down the U.S. consumer market effectively enables brands to be significantly more efficient with their ad spending.
Since consumers often need to be reached three or more times to act, brands can further re-target these consumers throughout the week and not just during the live event itself. So that NASCAR-Mom could see the same ad (or the next in a sequence of ads) while watching a reality show on CTV two days later. Plus, a cohesive brand strategy could also re-target her on her mobile phone or computer, gaining her attention on any screen.
Sports on CTV is a new canvas for advertisers to smartly engage their consumers and create new opportunities entirely to reach their audiences. Since it is a completely digital environment, measuring viewership and downstream impact are naturally engrained.
As advertising agencies are pushed by their brand clients to further loosen their legacy thinking, the potential advertising options for CTV are endless. Now the questions are just how much of their overall $87.8 billion TV budget will shift here and can CTV begin drawing even more from separate digital advertising budgets which are $309 billion on their own.
It has been true for years now, the chasm is growing, and there is no bigger game in TV than sports right. This past TV upfront season saw this firmly as the number one priority of many major brands and they do not care which platform they reach consumers on. Legacy walls will be forced to further crumble as brand dollars ultimately dictate strategies. The status quo is nowhere in sight yet, but as the financial stakes keep getting raised, so will the enormity of the broadcasts and viewing experiences for fans.
