Linear TV might be on a long slide toward extinction, but based on this week’s upfront presentations, the industry seems to collectively recognize that its survival is closely entwined with the games people play — and more to the point, watch.
ESPN will soon double as the name of a streaming service, but the takeaway from the week is thanks to the dominance of sports, every existing network seemingly wants to be ESPN, at least a little.
“Sports is definitely having a moment in the industry and, God knows, you’ll hear the word ‘sports’ 10 thousand times this week,” Mark Marshall, chairman of NBCUniversal global advertising and partnerships, said at its upfront, kicking off the festivities. His company used the word dozens of times touting how the NBA would become the linchpin of its lineup.
Because sports remain among the few genres of programming that people prefer to consume live, they command disproportionate interest from the media buyers that networks and streaming services spent the week wooing. For networks trying to maintain their relevance, the logical strategy would then be to cede ground to streaming and other platforms grudgingly at best, mindful of the lifeline sports can provide, as streaming services ante up to add sports to their menus as well.
When Disney’s upfront turn came, its global advertising president Rita Ferro called this “a new era for sports.” In many ways, though, it’s really just an on-steroids continuation of the old era, with the disclaimer being sports have grown bigger in the overall TV picture as the networks that carry them shrink.
Much of this won’t come as news to those who have watched the industry evolve in this direction, with even the CW — once a haven for youth-oriented dramas and DC superheroes — receiving a complete makeover built around sports, including NASCAR and wrestling.
The tradeoff, of course, is sports franchises and leagues have been watching those trends too, and recognize the leverage they possess, with hopes of cashing in on the appetite for sports in ways that will surely cut into media companies’ profits while creating the risk of further saturating (and thus potentially diluting) the market.
The importance of sports could hardly be lost on anyone attending (or streaming) this week’s presentations. At Disney’s event, the former and current athletes on hand outnumbered executives, catching the attention of resident funny man Jimmy Kimmel, who observed after Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes made his second appearance, “I think there are more athletes here than there were at the game last night. So much sports.”
The nagging question for all concerned is the extent to which sports can be handed over to newer players hungry to get in on the action — Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and sister streamers like NBCUniversal’s Peacock among them — without cannibalizing TV’s traditional players.
That’s particularly true of something like ESPN’s upcoming streaming offering, priced at $29.99 a month. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro predicted the service would “redefine our business,” but that’s a notably neutral term, especially for other interested parties, like satellite and cable operators, which might understandably worry that such a “redefinition” could help euthanize their business.
Thus far, Comcast might lay claim to the most clearly additive example of combining linear TV and streaming with its abundant coverage of the 2024 Olympics, providing the most popular events on NBC and its cable channels while making a vast and deep assortment of options available via Peacock. Still, in many ways the Olympics remain a near-unique property, made more special by their biennial availability (and quadrennial, really, given the oscillating between Winter and Summer Games).
The expansion of sports hasn’t yielded diminishing returns yet ratings-wise, and if anything, sports’ dominance has been on the rise. As Variety reported, sporting events accounted for 75 of the 100 most-watched primetime telecasts in 2024, a marked increase over the previous year thanks in part to 19 nights of Olympics coverage that joined 45 NFL telecasts on the list.
Not to be ignored, part of the interest in sports is the fast rise in gambling on games. Americans wagered $148 billion on sports in 2024, a 23% rise from the previous year, and networks have leaned into those possibilities eyeing additional sources of revenue.
In fact, there have been plenty of encouraging signs, with considerable growth for women’s basketball, thanks to stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, while the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament finished with its biggest audience since 2019 for the championship game.
After a flurry of midseason trades, the NBA also rebounded during the second half of the season, with strong results for the early rounds of the playoffs, although it’s yet to be seen whether they’ll sustain that momentum with some of the league’s marquee players having been eliminated from contention.
The NFL is still a giant among Lilliputians both in terms of its audience and financial clout, which explains why streamers have sought to squeeze into that ecosystem, from Amazon’s NFL deal (in addition to its new NBA pact) to Netflix’s just-a-taste Christmas Day games.
Not surprisingly, the NFL’s 11-year, $111 billion haul from its TV partners dwarfs all others, and although those contracts run until 2033, the league’s opt-out clause in 2029 already has spurred speculation about what those rights will look like — and cost — four years from now.
The pace of change, and uncertainty related to it, can also be seen in the recent split between ESPN and Major League Baseball with three years left on their seven-year deal. The decision creates opportunities for other competitors to nab or expand their TV rights but also demonstrates how hard it is to see around corners when it comes to such multiyear, nine-figure commitments.
After all, billion-dollar investments here and there quickly start to add up. Yet however fierce the competition for TV rights becomes, companies seeking to maintain toeholds with viewers and advertisers will face tough choices about how badly they want to stay in the game.
Because while Kimmel was right when he said, “So much sports,” the one thing you probably don’t want to wind up having, in this current environment, is not enough.
