Sports are seen, by some, as a panacea for streaming’s costly content problem.
While fantasy and sci-fi have plainly been popular drivers for audience growth so far in the so-called streaming war, nothing beats sports for fanaticism and brand loyalty - as a quick glance at the Premier League proves.
Each of the season’s thirty-eight matchday rounds sees many comic-cons worth of bodies fill stadiums across the country, while millions more watch from their couches – either on legit subscription services or via illegal streams
An example of an illegal streaming site is Footybite.to, which provides links to Premier League games from broadcasters all over the world.
This has been the core of Sky’s entrenched and incumbent satellite TV subscription model, which charges a princely £34 per month for an incomplete viewing schedule (148 matches are broadcast by Sky each year) and fans have to pay BT another £29.99 per month for access to the other 52 televised matches in the UK.
Fans abroad, meanwhile, can watch streams of all fixtures, not just those ‘selected for TV’ under the UK broadcast rights deals, which were priced at £1.7bn a year in 2021.
It's very unclear precisely how and when the ‘streamers’ will properly attempt to tackle the massive sporting opportunity.
Amazon has dipped its toe farthest into the water, with mixed success.
In the UK, it has streamed a relatively small number of fixtures around the festive period, and, it recently opted to exit its tennis venture with the ATP.
In the United States, analytics on Amazon’s first season streaming the NFL’s Thursday Night Football were described as something of a curate's egg – with the platform beating TV in younger demographics, but ultimately showing an overall lower volume of viewership vs the traditional media channel.
Netflix, meanwhile, has proven transformational for the viewership and demographic appeal to such an extent that it has thoroughly reinvigorated Formula 1 – but, that’s for a reality-TV-esque docu-series not live sports broadcast which remains on traditional TV.
DAZN showed a great deal of promise in the UK, having seen success in select smaller international markets but even with the promotional weight of Eddie Hearn and Anthony Joshua it has yet to gain the sort of traction many thought it might.
And, in a curious and potentially retrograde step, it most recently announced plans to broadcast to a TV audience via a subscription channel on Sky.
Similarly, despite speculation in recent weeks that the English Football League rights may be bought up by a streamer the latest reports claim that EFL bosses have opted to stick with the Sky TV status quo.
The sporting appeal would seem pretty obvious, given the extensive fixed schedule of content provided by sports like football.
Though, frankly, it is also very much a numbers game with only a small number of sports (and, significantly, a smaller number of names within each of those sports) that draw the vast majority of attention and value.
The terms for sharing TV money were understood to be among the motivating factors driving the botched European Super League venture, but a new deal between WWE and UFC and also the number of premier league clubs up for sale suggests that this might be a case of an initiative postponed rather than scrapped.
Next: Manchester United and the new paradigm