In the aftermath of a game that featured plenty of cutaways to Taylor Swift in the friends and family box—before going into a tie-breaking overtime for just the second time in league history—it was reported that Super Bowl LVIII coverage on CBS and Paramount+ reached a total of 210 million viewers in the US, plus an international audience of 62.5 million in more than 130 markets. In fact, it was the most-watched TV event of all time, and the most-streamed Super Bowl ever, according to Nielsen.

With these kinds of audience numbers at stake—and the unique ability of live sports to bring whole families together to watch big games and events—it’s no wonder that most SVOD platforms have zeroed in on the genre as a major weapon when it comes to combating churn and winning the streaming wars. But where do things currently stand with those rights?

Disney+, which reportedly counts half of all US families with young children as subscribers, announced earlier this year that it would be rolling ESPN content—including live sports—into its domestic offering. (The Walt Disney Company has an 80% ownership stake in ESPN.)

Netflix recently scored a touchdown with the announcement that it will be the global home of two National Football League games on December 25—one featuring the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs versus the Pittsburgh Steelers. Plus, the platform will stream at least one Christmas Day game in each of the following two seasons.

The NFL has also made deals with multiple digital services, including Amazon Prime Video, which is paying a reported US$1 billion per year to be the exclusive broadcaster of Thursday Night Football (starting last season).

For its part, the NBA recently signed an 11-year global media rights agreement with Prime, which will present exclusive global coverage of 66 regular-season NBA games beginning in 2025, including an opening week doubleheader, a new Black Friday NBA game and all games from the knockout rounds of the Emirates NBA Cup.

Prime also scooped up the rights to soccer leagues and competitions in Brazil, the UK and Europe, in addition to French Open tennis. And Amazon has partnered with rights holder Rogers Communications to exclusively bring Monday night National Hockey League games to Canadian fans for the next two seasons—the NHL’s first such agreement with a digital-only service.

The drive to stream sports is so strong that it has even turned opponents into teammates. In February, ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox announced a joint US service slated to launch this fall featuring content from all major professional and college leagues.

In league together

The truth is, streamers and sports leagues need each other right now. Live sports is a key area where linear broadcasters have historically had streamers beat, but streamers want sports because they want families.

“Sports offer advertisers a reliable audience watching brandsafe content, regardless of what platform games air on,” writes business reporter Jacob Feldman on the Sportico website. “And tech companies are increasingly in the ad business.” Prime and Netflix have both introduced ad-supported tiers (with Apple’s said to be in the works), and each platform is reportedly using sports properties to court advertisers.

To continually enlist young fans and ensure long-term growth, the leagues need to go where kids are—and that’s not on broadcast TV channels anymore.

Last year, Nielsen reported that two- to 11-year-olds spent 62% of their screen time over summer break streaming and 30% on “other” platforms, primarily gaming. For 12- to 17-year-olds, the breakdown was 43% and 46%. By comparison, broadcast viewing accounted for just 20.8% of total TV time—a new low. Cable usage inched up 0.4% thanks to feature films (up 10%) and news (up 6.6%), but lost 0.6 share points due to the increase in total
TV usage.

Streamers catering to kids

The symbiotic relationship between streamers and sports leagues extends much further than game rights—with most streamers now investing in unscripted sports programming, too.

Netflix has established a strong relationship with the NFL, starting with 2023 docuseries Quarterback (which generated 21 million hours of watch time), and followed by Receiver (pictured), which premiered in July and was the streamer’s most-watched program for a time. (According to sponsorship insights group SponsorPulse, 69% of engaged NFL fans have kids in their households.)

And these football-oriented shows came on the heels of 2023’s Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf)—which racked up 53 million hours of watch time in its first four months.

But car racing is the sport that really propelled Netflix down this path. The streamer’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which has chronicled F1 drivers and races for six seasons, is a special case. It inspired a 2.3% viewership bump for live races in 2022, according to Nielsen, and logged 90 million watch-time hours in the first half of 2023.

Disney+ series The Crossover

Disney+ already has a robust catalogue of scripted sports fare, including basketball-themed series The Crossover and feature film Chang Can Dunk. The platform also offers docuseries including Save Our Squad with David Beckham and Matildas: The World at Our Feet, which follows the Australian women’s national soccer team.

And more players are getting into the game. For example, Sony Pictures Television is tapping into sports through a new partnership with City Football Group (CFG), the owner of the Manchester City soccer team, to co-develop and produce original kids TV projects. The companies teamed up in late July with the goal of creating animated projects and children’s series that have soccer, or CFG’s clubs and players, as the focus.

Sony and CFG will jointly generate concepts and fund the development of projects that could also include documentaries, as well as unscripted and scripted series. It’s too early for the companies to share specific details, but when it comes to animation, the focus is on content aimed at preschoolers and the six-and-up demo.

Manchester City appeared in Amazon’s documentary series All or Nothing in 2018, and CFG’s City Studios banner produced the Netflix docuseries Together: Treble Winners, which premiered in April.

Get in the game

The major leagues are also looking beyond television, seeking brand engagement with potential younger fans through video games and eSports. The NBA co-runs the NBA 2K League, for example, which live-streams its eSports games on Twitch and YouTube. And the NHL, MLB and NFL are also involved in eSports championships series.

Then there are the social media platforms—led by YouTube, TikTok and Instagram—where US teens spend 4.8 hours per day on average, according to Statista.

When it comes to tailoring social and web content to this demographic, it’s the NBA that’s got the most game. For its 2022/2023 season, the NBA reported 18 billion views across its social platforms—the most of all sports leagues—with 50% of its audience in the 25-and-under bracket. And most of its social media growth has been international, since 70% of its followers live outside the US.

For example, when Suga, a member of South Korean boy band BTS, was named an NBA Ambassador, the announcement generated the league’s second most-liked Instagram post of all time. And the league is also thinking of younger children, offering a Jr. NBA website with downloadable activities.

When it comes to streamers and sports, it’s obvious that it’s very much game on. But with so much at stake for platforms, rights holders and leagues, the only question remaining is: What’s the winning combo?

This article by Mark Dillon originally appeared in Kidscreen’s Q3 2024 magazine issue, which you can read here.