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Sports/eSports

On the go or in the living room, sports and esports video viewers are some of the most demanding and passionate audiences out there, and streaming is enabling delivery of the biggest games and the smallest leagues alike.

Here you'll find Streaming Media's coverage of the technology and business behind the growing sports and esports streaming market.

Who’s Who in the Streaming Media Sports Supplier Directory

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Features

The 2025 Streaming Media All-Stars

After a 12-year hiatus, Streaming Media is bringing back the Streaming Media All-Stars for 2025 to pay tribute to a select group of key technology innovators who are driving and disrupting the streaming industry.

Streaming Year in Review 2025: Online Video Is Now an Advertising-Led Business

Old Hollywood got Wall Street's memo: "Do whatever it takes to do what Netflix is do­ing." And finally, the studios have begun making money from streaming. With the exception of NBCUniversal, the biggest leg­acy media companies all reported a profit from their direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses in Q3 2024. They got there by variously writing down or shedding ca­ble assets, slashing jobs, hiking prices, policing pass­word-sharing, improving bundled offerings, and put­ting the full focus of their business strategy into online.

The State of the Video Codec Market 2025

HEVC rode the 4K/HDR wave to success, but AV1, VVC, and LCEVC lack an equivalent killer app. With CDNs racing to the bottom on pricing and new royalty pools threatening to increase costs, codec adoption is no longer just about technical merit—it's about survival. These are the issues I'll explore in this article.

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.

Spotlights

Q&A: Christopher Levy, CEO, BuyDRM

With nearly a half-century of streaming industry observations, experience, and expertise between them BuyDRM CEO Christopher Levy and Help Me Stream Research Foundation Founder Timothy Fore-Siglin gathered at Streaming Media Connect 2025 for a richly detailed, insightful, and wide-ranging interview on the state of content protection technology and strategy. The discussion covered various aspects of digital rights management (DRM) and its role in combating streaming piracy.

Phone Takeover: Replacing Pro Cameras in Live Streaming

A mobile device with the right software is now a tool that can replace some of the traditional live production equipment such as low- and mid-tier cameras and encoders. This reduces both upfront capital expenses, like equipment purchases, and operational costs for live content creators.

View From the Top: Zixi | Navigating the Challenging Financial Landscape: The Strategic Importance of Total Cost of Ownership in Broadcasting and Streaming

The broadcast and streaming industry is currently navigating a challenging financial landscape, marked by economic uncertainties, intensified competition and shifting consumer behaviors. In this environment, understanding and optimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has become more critical than ever. TCO is not just a financial metric; it's a strategic tool that helps organizations manage resources efficiently, maintain competitiveness and contribute to sustainability in a rapidly evolving market.

View From the Top: EZDRM: Enabling New Business Through Security

As we look at the trajectory of our industry in 2024 and beyond, the EZDRM team is increasingly navigating the ever-changing world of streaming video through a focus on how our technologies, in both the security and integrity realms, in conjunction with strong partner collaborations, are helping new content-related business segments to emerge and thrive. Thus, we emphasize a profile far beyond a simplistic focus on piracy mitigation by focusing our attention on revenue protection and monetization of the already-existing, very valuable content.

Columns

The Blurring of Shared Experiences Via Streaming

The shared experience of enjoying a program that's happening at (or very near) the same time as reality is gone. YouTube, Facebook, et al. are typically 20 or more seconds behind when the event happened. Streaming services and apps can have their own pathways and delays. Add more viewers or more processing, and it can get longer.

Live Sports Streaming and the Edison Tone Test

There can be little doubt that live sports streaming has a lucrative and dazzling future. But first, it needs to get past the Tone Test stage.

Is 2024 the Year of WebRTC?

With large sports-streaming operators, WebRTC provides a real opportunity for ultra-low-latency streaming. But those same operators, which spend billions on licensing rights, can't afford to just swap the ability to stream content in real time for basic OTT functionality like SSAI and DRM.

Why the Upfronts Are So Yesterday

The internet fostered the ability to make changes on a continual basis, so how come national broadcast advertising is still being transacted in the upfronts (the same format that started in 1962), which require an annual dollar and audience-reach commitment in advance to buy and sell advertising?

Sports/eSports Companies and Suppliers