Happy Sunday Wrap readers,

To cover the business of media, it's important that the editors and reporters here at TheWrap are also active consumers of media. That helps us help you, in this case, figure out what is sometimes the maddening deluge of streaming subscriptions. This past week reporters Kayla Cobb and Lucas Manfredi, as part of our "Game On" multipart series on the impact on sports in entertainment, took a dive into the world of sports streaming, both from the consumer and business angles.

It's the kind of all-encompassing analysis we pride ourselves on here at WrapPRO and what we feel differentiates us from our competitors.

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Tom Lowry
SVP/Editorial Strategy
tom.lowry@thewrap.com

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Streaming Sports Boom Means More Confusion, More Frustration and More Bills

A Wrap series: Thanks to streamers, sports rights have been sold for billions across different platforms just as average Americans have reached their spending limit

By Kayla Cobb and Lucas Manfredi

The struggle to figure out how to watch every NFL game this season is real. Let’s say you’re a Seattle Seahawks fan. 

Many of the games will air on local affiliates, in which case you would need either a digital antenna or a subscription to cable TV or a live-streaming service like YouTube TV ($83). To get around a traditional bundle, you could catch CBS games through Paramount+ ($13 a month), NBC games through Peacock ($11 a month), Fox games through the new Fox One ($20 a month) streaming service and ABC and ESPN games though ESPN+ ($12 a month). 

But that’s not all. You would also need an Amazon Prime subscription ($15 a month) to view two exclusive Thursday night games on Prime Video.

Things are even worse if you happen to be a Seahawks fan who’s not in the Seattle area — you would need NFL Sunday Ticket ($480 per season), which is an exclusive add-on to YouTube TV that lets viewers watch games that are not carried on local broadcasts in their area. 

And that’s just one sport. 

This convoluted jigsaw puzzle (which required two reporters and a confused editor who had to rely on ChatGPT to help piece together) is illustrative of how fragmented and expensive sports has become. Every week, there seems to be another story about a massive sports rights deal, with streaming media rights up 153% from where they were a decade ago. 

But as media giants pay more for sports, it’s unclear how long consumers will be willing to pay for these live events. Subscribers have consistently reported that they’re close to reaching their spending limits for TV. A Hub Research study of 1,600 respondents found the average person pays $83 a month on TV subscriptions, a number that’s fairly consistent with what respondents said they paid in 2022, 2023 and 2024. However, the maximum amount consumers said they were willing to pay averaged $86 a month, with those who subscribe to three or more services saying they've already surpassed their limits.

Those numbers aren’t even in the ballpark of what a major sports fan would need to spend. If you subscribed to the nine streaming services that have exclusive rights deals with major leagues like the NFL and NBA as well as smaller leagues like the WWE and Formula 1, having access to all of these sports would cost you $168.17 a month, or $2,018.04 a year. Each month, you would be paying more than $20 over the most expensive Spectrum cable plan, which includes ESPN, Paramount+

This number doesn’t account for bundling deals that could lower the overall cost. It also assumes you don’t have a cable package or a subscription to a live TV streamer like Hulu + Live TV ($81.99 a month), YouTube TV ($82.99 a month) or Fubo TV (anywhere from $54.99 a month to $84.99 a month).

For its part, the NFL has defended its platform diversification. "For us, it's about giving those choices and those opportunities, and once we do that, the fan can select the best way to engage in the best platforms for them," Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer for the NFL, said last Tuesday during a press conference with reporters. Ballew highlighted that most games are free-to-air over broadcast television for the competing teams' home markets. "We want to make sure the fans get access to our games and get access on the platforms and the devices that they choose. So as we've made changes over the years to find fans where they are, that's remained the cornerstone."

Part of why sports is so attractive is because of the passionate fanbase willing to follow any given team.

“It's an irrational attachment with an irrational commitment,” Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the TV and media data company Video Advertising Bureau, told TheWrap about sports fans. “The reason that's incredibly attractive is because, ultimately, brands are trying to build loyalty beyond reason.”

But loyalty has its limits, and based on what consumers are saying, even the most hardcore fans will have to make sacrifices. What fans pick and choose will be critical, as the media and tech giants have bet billions of dollars that these teams will help them retain subscribers, and not every wager will pay off. 

“There has to be losers and winners in this space,” Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of the sports sponsorship data company SponsorUnited, told TheWrap. “I don't think that it’s going to be positive for everybody in the long run.”

Sports as an acquisition driver

The surest bet in sports remains the NFL, where fans still seem to be paying these increasing costs. Last year, NFL games increased user acquisition by 28% on average and time spent on platforms by 57% for the three biggest sports streaming platforms, according to a report from Samsung Ads, a brand that accounts for more than a third of all TVs and Smart TVs used in the U.S.

That same study found that by March, those same apps saw a 33% drop in audience as well as a 59% decrease in time spent, indicating that many people only subscribed to watch the NFL. Across all sports fans, Samsung Ads found that 75% of sports fans cancel or pause subscriptions after the season ends. The turnover rate is another example of how the priorities around sports streaming rights have shifted. 

“Streaming audiences are highly rental audiences,” Justin Fromm, head of insights and thought leadership at Samsung Ads, told TheWrap. “But what we're finding is that sports streaming audiences are even more rental. They exacerbate that trend.”

Though Samsung Ads found that most fans were likely to have subscribed to a streaming service to watch live sports, there was a discrepancy between casual fans (about 57% of sports fans) and diehard fans (43%). Not only were diehard fans more likely to have five or more streaming services compared to casual fans’ three services on average, casual fans were also far more likely to cancel their cable or pay TV subscriptions.

“The platform diversification is challenging if you're a fan of a certain team. Not only is it hard to know which streaming app has the sport you're interested in but then which streaming app has your team?” Fromm said. “That’s on top of blackouts for local games. It's incredibly frustrating.”

Before companies used to pay for these rights so that they could monetize ads during games. Now, those sports rights are used to pull in audiences or keep them from migrating to another platform, according to Lynch. 

These aggressive moves come as more consumers warm up to the idea of viewing sports through streaming services. A reported 69% of sports fans listed SVODs like Netflix, Peacock and Paramount+ as one of the ways they watch live sports, according to a Hub Research report that surveyed 3,753 U.S.-based sports fans. That number marked a 7% increase and signaled for the first time that sports fans were more likely to  watch sports on SVOD platforms than on cable or broadcast. Samsung Ads also found that, during the NFL season, there’s an increase of what the division calls streaming samplers, people who only use an app two to three times a month. 

Overall, 66% of sports fans said they watched games on broadcast, down from 72% in 2024. Cable saw an even steeper year-over-year decline of 10% with 63% of respondents saying that’s how they watch live sports.

Tubi’s stream of the Super Bowl this February further proved this trend. The Fox-owned streamer secured a record-breaking 13.6 million average minute audience. That live stream also boosted overall platform viewership by 18%.

The risk of rising prices