Streamers have yet to figure out how to effectively tap into the massive sports audience. While some are bidding up the prices for the rights to live sports, like Apple for MLS and Amazon’s Prime Video for “Thursday Night Football,” to say nothing of the impending NBA rights negotiations, Netflix appears to be happy to focus on sports-adjacent content at the moment.
“We really think that we can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the company’s most recent earnings call.