The frantic blitz to figure out sports streaming
Executives at the National Football League were in Las Vegas on Tuesday preparing for this weekend’s Super Bowl when they got word from news reports that their business—and the sports media industry writ large—was about to change in a fundamental way. Disney’s ESPN and Fox, two of the league’s biggest media partners, announced that alongside Warner Bros. Discovery they would create a new streaming service to offer all their live-sports programming.
The NFL, a titan that’s used to having a seat at the table in any discussion affecting its future and content, was out of the loop. Executives including Commissioner Roger Goodell and media chief Brian Rolapp were caught off guard by the news. That the media behemoths were willing to risk the ire of the NFL shows the sense of urgency—even desperation—they feel about solving what is arguably the biggest riddle in their industry: finding a business model that can work in the streaming economy.
To do that, they made a profound shift without consulting powerful partners like the NFL, revealing it days before the biggest sporting and television event of the year. They’re taking the chance that, by joining forces with big rivals, they won’t draw antitrust scrutiny. And they’re doing it with a product that consumers might not even want—in part because the new service won’t deliver anything close to the entire landscape of sports programming.
Sports have been the linchpin of the hugely profitable cable-TV industry for decades. But as consumers cut the cord in droves, pushing that business to the brink, making the transition to streaming has been rocky. It’s been hard enough to port entertainment programming to streaming, with services such as Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ struggling
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