The State of Live Sports Streaming 2025

The sports media sector continues to undergo rapid change, with streaming aggregators attempting to reconsolidate for greater ef­ficiency but still falling short of traditional broadcast models in reach and revenue.

The widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV needs to be put to rest. In fact, sports viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV, as global communal experiences like the Olympics and national tentpoles like the Super Bowl demon­strated in 2024.

How NBCUniversal’s Olympics streaming broadcasts stack up against original streaming programming, according to The Hollywood Reporter

As Enders Analysis points out in the report “Defying the Decline,” it’s not just the big-ticket items on net­work TV that were ratings hits this year. In the U.K., young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports through Comcast-owned Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a pay­wall,” the report says. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TNT Sports also saw its audience share rise in Europe despite subscription price hikes.

“Fears that young people are no longer interest­ed in sport are overblown,” the report states, point­ing out that sports are now a growing proportion of all live TV set viewing with those younger than age 35: 17% in 2023, up from 7% in 2015. In addition, the report notes that “in a world of personalized al­gorithms and subcultures, sport is one of few glues that bind fans together.” It helps too that sports have to be watched live. But Enders Analysis also credits broadcasters and leagues “for maintaining sport’s appeal in a changing media landscape.”

In addition, Altman Solon’s 2024 Global Sports Sur­vey states that interest in live sports remains high across all generations, with approximately 60% of sports fans from all geographies saying they tune in to televised sports at least monthly (go2sm.com/dellea).

DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT

However, there is a distinct generational divide. Samba TV’s “Live Sports on Streaming Platforms” report reveals that across sports such as MLS, the NHL, and the UEFA Champions League, younger, higher-income audiences prefer streaming, while older, lower-income viewers favor broadcast TV. “For example, MLS on Apple TV+, the NHL on Hulu and ESPN+, and UEFA on Paramount+ are all attracting Millennials with money to spend—one of the most coveted demos for advertisers. Older and lower-income households stick to traditional TV. This trend gives advertisers a clear roadmap: use streaming platforms to engage affluent, younger audiences, while leveraging broadcast TV to reach older or less tech-savvy viewers,” notes Jan Ozer in his analysis of the report.

Audience sizes for streaming-only sports events vary widely. At the top end are events like the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, which drew 29 million U.S. household viewers on Netflix. The NFL also per­formed well, with 14.2 million U.S. viewers watching the Eagles beat the Packers 34–29 on Peacock in Sep­tember. Ozer says, “By comparison, smaller events like MLS games on Apple TV+ struggled to reach sim­ilar numbers, with some matchups, such as Charlotte vs. Miami, attracting just 69,000 viewers, while the NHL’s New York Rangers vs. the Detroit Red Wings drew only 87,000 viewers. These numbers suggest that even well-established leagues like the NHL face chal­lenges in drawing large audiences for streaming-only events, especially when they’re not available on na­tional linear channels.

“For sports leagues,” Ozer continues, “the implica­tions are more complex. Should leagues align their distribution strategies with their existing audiences—focusing on streaming to retain younger, affluent fans—or diversify by maintaining a presence on both broadcast and streaming platforms to expand their reach? Balancing these priorities could be key to fu­ture growth.”

Altman Solon’s survey points out that rightshold­ers risk undermining their future value with high fees and paywalls. Younger fans might be keen on sports but are unwilling or unable to pay for the live event. Short-form highlights are their preferred en­try point. The survey also found that only two-thirds of sports fans watch live matches, due to difficulty accessing content and a lack of willingness to pay. A related survey says that 65% of global sports execu­tives are concerned over the continued relevance of live broadcasts for sports fans.

Calling it a “serious problem,” Altman Solon’s David Dellea states that “short-form content cannot possibly replace the unique commercial value of live sports. We’ve reached the tipping point where content orig­inally created to generate interest in the games has become as sought after as the games themselves. The critical question for rights holders is: how can we nav­igate challenges of discovery and access to funnel younger audiences to a live product that they want to watch?”

In its “Digital Trends 2025” report, IMG notes that fans are increasingly drawn toward community-fo­cused platforms like YouTube and Reddit while also highlighting the emergence of the “sports influencer” as a key factor in driving attention to a live event. “2024 has seen a clear advancement in direct-to-consumer strategy and a widespread industry shift towards com­munity-focused platforms,” comments Lewis Wiltshire, IMG’s SVP and managing director of digital.

According to data from Ampere Analysis, 63% of 18–24-year-olds globally watch influencer videos ev­ery day, and 89% watch YouTube on at least a monthly basis. YouTuber Jake Paul has nearly 21 million sub­scribers, which gives events featuring him a ready-made younger-profiled audience.
However, while sports dominate the big screen, our phones command our attention. IMG predicts that “2025 will see sports abandon the notion of ‘first screen’ and ‘second screen’ to put more emphasis into winning the battle for both screens—at the same time.”

OLYMPIC VIEWING GOLD

No event underlined the power of live both for TV and streaming than the 2024 Paris Olympics. “Audi­ences are following and interacting with the Olym­pic Games like never before. These were an Olympic Games of a new era,” championed IOC president Thomas Bach.

Five billion viewers, or 84% of the possible global audience, watched some of the 460,000-plus hours of coverage from Paris across broadcast and digital plat­forms, claims the IOC. In France, 95% of the potential audience watched an average of 24 hours of coverage. Engagement on social media went through the roof, with a 290% increase over the COVID-impacted 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

NBC’s 2024 Paris Olympics creator partners

The IOC and rightsholder broadcasters used influ­encers to attract a younger audience via social. NBC­Universal partnered with content creators on Meta, Overtime, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube to promote the Games to their followers. The broadcaster also gave Snoop Dogg an official commentary role and saw peaks of 30.6 million viewers a day, up 82% on Tokyo. Led by Peacock, NBCUniversal streamed 23.5 billion minutes from Paris, more than 40% the amount streamed from all previous Games combined.

In Europe, Warner Bros. Discovery saw record en­gagement across all platforms, with a cumulative reach of 215 million and more than 7 billion minutes streamed—a boost of 23% from Tokyo. This helped to deliver a record number of paid sign-ups on Discov­ery+ and Max during the Olympics.

Increased U.S. ratings pushed NBC’s ad revenue past the previous record of $1.25 billion it took in during the Tokyo Olympics. The final number for Paris will be the largest ad revenue take for any U.S. TV event in history, according to an NBC representative. (Super Bowls usu­ally generate around $1 billion for the network that’s broadcasting the game.)

NBC’s Olympics president Gary Zenkel tells SportsPro that the growth had come as a “huge re­lief” after the network saw a sig­nificant slump in viewing for To­kyo and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. It has paid $7.65 billion for successive Games in the U.S. through 2032.

Other broadcasters also posted strong ratings. BBC Sport saw its coverage streamed a record 218 million times online, more than double the 104 million from Tokyo.

The trick for both Warner Bros. Discovery and NBC­Universal will be to convert users who subscribed to view online during the summer into longer term subs, ideally until 2028 when there’s a home bonanza as the Games land in Los Angeles.

The IOC’s in-house broadcaster used AI to pump out 95,000-plus highlights in what is just the start of AI’s impact on sports production. NBCUniversal also credited its Paris success to new tools such as Pea­cock Discovery Multiview, which allowed viewers to watch multiple simultaneous events, and Your Daily Olympic Recap, which let users personalize their own highlights, compiled using generative AI with AI-
created commentary in the voice of sportscaster Al Michaels.

THE NETFLIX OF SPORTS IS NETFLIX

With Netflix’s 2024 broadcast of two NFL games on Christmas Day, the dam has burst on its pretense to be just a movie and TV show platform. As Ampere Analysis puts it, “The company has desig­nated live sports a key component of its continued growth strategy.”

According to Nielsen, the two Christmas Day games each had an average of 24.2 million viewers, peaking at 27 million during Be­yoncé’s halftime performance at the Baltimore Ravens vs. Houston Texans game. Although that’s 5 mil­lion fewer than CBS and Fox drew for Christmas Day games in 2023, it’s still a record for a streaming-exclusive NFL game. But it’s good news for Netflix, which has report­edly paid $150 million for rights to Christmas Day games until 2026.

In 2023, Netflix hosted a Formula 1-golf mashup and a concocted a “Netflix Slam” tennis event held in March 2024. Then in November 2024, it presented the Paul vs. Tyson bout at Texas’ AT&T Stadium. Net­flix claimed a global viewership of 108 million people, comprising around 60 million households. In January 2025, it began airing WWE programming, the start of a 10-year, $5 billion deal. The NFL is arguably the only true sports property here (sorry, WWE fans)—the others being sports/entertainment crossovers that fit the Netflix brand.

The Paul vs. Tyson fight was beset with buffering, pixelation, and stuttering issues, which Sandvine re­ports were caused by problems within Netflix’s app, instead of ISP network performance. This suggests that Netflix was at fault for the 40% drop in QoE. Jer­emy Bowman at The Motley Fool judges it “a good problem to have as it shows that the fight [was] in such high demand that it was stressing Netflix’s technical infrastructure.”

While Netflix may not gain many new subscribers from its NFL deal (because most viewers are likely to already be Netflix subscribers), Ampere Analysis predicts that the package may help reduce subscrib­er churn rates domestically.

The bigger picture is the synergy between Netflix’s global reach and sports leagues’ international ambi­tions. While more than 80% of viewers for the Christ­mas NFL games came from the U.S., the deal made the games available to Netflix subscribers worldwide, in a synergy that fits both parties’ ambitions. The NFL has been sending teams to play regular season games in London for nearly 20 years, recently expanding to Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. European soc­cer leagues, such as the U.K’s Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, and Italy’s Serie A, have also expressed a desire move some competitive games abroad.

“Leagues like … the English Pre­mier League in soccer have a glo­bal audience, and no platform is better equipped to connect view­ers with those games and relat­ed content than Netflix,” says The Motley Fool’s Bowman. “The NFL, NBA, and MLB are all eager to reach audiences outside of North America. That’s why they’ve start­ed hosting games in far-flung loca­tions like London and Brazil. But teaming up with Netflix seems like a better strategy as it would give millions of subscribers a chance to watch those games and introduce them to potential fans who aren’t familiar with them. No other streaming platform can offer that kind of value or worldwide exposure to sports leagues.”

In December 2024, Netflix announced that it had se­cured exclusive domestic rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031, marking the first time the tournament will appear on a streaming service.

Ampere Analysis cites Formula 1 as another sport that could work very well for the platform, which has primed its audience with the documentary series For­mula 1: Drive to Survive.

PIRACY REMAINS ENDEMIC

Piracy of sports streaming is rampant—so much so that ESPN reporter Adam Schefter was accused of watching an illegal streaming site when he shared a highlight on social media relating to the NFL’s Octo­ber New York Jets vs. Houston Texans game. The high­light featured a watermark of an illegal streaming site.

Meanwhile, having paid $400 million per season for rights to cover Ligue 1, the top soccer division in France, DAZN set a target of 1.5 million subscribers within 6 months only to find that in the first week of its broadcasts, around 200,000 people were illicitly streaming its coverage.
Sports streaming piracy remains endemic, accord­ing to Synamedia, which suggests the global sports in­dustry is missing out on $28 billion a year as a result. In addition, “There is more live streaming piracy than in the past because live is the most valuable content to try and monetise with a pirate business model,” Werner Strydom, head of advanced technology and innovation at Irdeto, told IBC365.

Dealing with live piracy requires responding to an illegal stream within minutes of an event having started, and this is a major area where AI can help in triggering and accelerating workflows. “If an algo­rithm detects a watermark or a fingerprint of content that’s distributed illegally, the model is also smart enough to be able to react and deal with it,” says Tim Pearson, Nagravision’s VP of global solution and part­ner marketing. “You can scan for a lot more patterns and do a lot more pattern matching with AI than you can do conventionally.”

Meanwhile, in Italy, anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield (managed by the nation’s media regulator to protect rights on behalf of Prime Video, DAZN, and Sky) mistakenly blocked access to legitimate provid­ers along with illegal ones.

Reducing the cost of subscriptions is a counter mea­sure that’s as useful as tightening security. Nearly two-thirds of French football fans believed the high cost of a subscription encouraged more illegal streaming of Ligue 1, according to an Odoxa report from August 2024. When DAZN slashed its prices, it saw subscrip­tion numbers rise.

Netflix took a different route by making the Paul vs. Tyson fight free to all of its subscribers. While this maximized reach, it likely also had a piracy-deterrence effect. According to Ampere Analysis’ Sam Nursall, “[T]hose who tend to access fights by illegal means [were] presented with a much smaller monetary incentive compared to the typical [pay-per-view] model,” noting that 70% of global boxing/MMA fans have pirated live sports.

STREAMERS’ SELECTIVE SPORTS RIGHTS STRATEGIES

Whereas Netflix (with the WWE) and Apple (with MLS) acquired long-term rights to sports properties, Amazon and Disney+ are pursuing different strat­egies. April 2024 saw Amazon, Rogers Communica­tions, and the NHL secure a sublicensing deal mak­ing Prime Video the home of Monday Night Hockey games in Canada from 2024 to 2026. In the U.K., Am­azon acquired one UEFA Champions League match per week from 2024 to 2027, which is in line with its other Champions League deals in Germany and Italy.

Sports or scripted entertainment, Netflix’s Jan. 6 WWE event was number one on the streamer’s top 10 programs list for U.S. viewers for the first week of 2025.

According to Ampere Analysis’ Danni Moore, “This indicates that while customer acquisition around busy retail periods was Amazon’s initial aim in ac­quiring sports rights, it has subsequently switched its focus to retaining customers’ interest across lon­ger periods of time.” Another example of this is Am­azon’s Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL, for which Ampere Analysis estimates Amazon is paying $1.1 billion per season.

Disney+, meanwhile, acquired exclusive rights to broadcast the UEFA Europa League and Europa Con­ference League in Sweden and Denmark for the next three seasons. Ampere Analysis notes that these in­vestments can be seen in the context of streamers start­ing to experience a slowdown in subscriber growth, to­gether with market saturation in some of their bigger territories, and that introducing sports content is one way to tap a new potential audience.

Disney’s major move in 2025 will be the launch of a standalone SVOD service, informally called ESPN Flagship. The new DTC platform, with no publicly an­nounced price, could land in the fall. The company is laying the groundwork to lasso new viewers by offer­ing ESPN content as part of a larger Disney enter­tainment bundle.

Nonetheless, Ampere Analysis thinks it’s unlikely that there will be a scramble for rights. “[M]aking these investments profitable has proven challenging to date, given the limitations around monetising the rights in the same way that traditional broadcasters have been able to through higher-cost subscriptions and premium channel carriage fees,” writes Ampere Analysis’ Dan Harraghy. “With many streamers in the early stages of broadcasting sport and still developing an understanding of its strategic merits, the race for sports rights is likely to be a marathon, not a sprint.”

Meanwhile, heralded by Wall Street as positive for Big Media, negative for their rivals, and defensive versus Big Tech, the prospective August 2024 launch of a $42.99 per month super sports app was quickly mired in the courts. Due to be called Venu Sports, the blockbuster streamer from Warner Bros. Discov­ery, Fox, and Disney would combine the trio’s respec­tive sports offerings into one OTT service that would include major properties such as the NFL, MLB, the NBA, the WNBA, the NHL, MLS, and NASCAR, plus the PGA Tour and the FIFA World Cup.

Venu Sports’ prospects were diminished in July 2024 when Warner Bros. Discovery lost its bumper package of NBA games to Amazon and Comcast/Peacock (which joined with Disney to pay the league $77 billion through the 2035–2036 season). The deal collapsed entirely in January 2025 after Disney set­tled an antitrust lawsuit with Fubo by purchasing the company and merging Fubo and Hulu + Live TV. Four days later, the three companies announced that Venu Sports was ceasing operations.

In other news, Warner Bros. Discovery sued the NBA for failing to allow it to use its matching rights for TNT Sports’ licensing package before agreeing to an 11-year deal with the league that does not include rights to live games in the U.S., but does include interna­tional and digital rights for NBA content. It will be allowed to promote NBA content on TNT Sports and its sports digital brands Bleacher Report and House of Highlights.

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