TV Sports Rights Veer Into Bubble Territory, What Happens When It Pops?
We appear to be on the backside of Peak TV, finally, maybe: HBO Max is pulling out of parts of Europe; Netflix is laying off hundreds; Disney and Comcast say they’re going to be prudent spenders; shows and production deals are being cancelled across Hollywood.
But there's one place where media company checkbooks are still getting a vigorous workout: buying rights to live sports, at least for now. Even amid the pullbacks and comedowns battering streaming since Netflix’s crummy April earnings report, just look at all the new sports rights deals:
Apple TV+ and Peacock carved out unique windows in Major League Baseball’s already full TV schedule, with exclusive games on Friday nights and Sunday mornings, respectively.
Disney spent $75 million to retain rights to Formula 1 races. Disney previously was paying just $5 million for those rights. Fan interest accelerated in recent years thanks to the docu-series Drive to Survive, on Netflix, which also bid for the circuit’s rights.
Disney’s Star India unit will spend $3 billion for Indian Premier League cricket matches over the next five years, but passed on the even more expensive streaming rights in what its executives called “disciplined bids.” Streaming rights went for slightly more to Viacom18, a consortium backed by local giant Reliance Industries that includes Paramount Global. All told, IPL media rights more than doubled from the deal expiring after this season.
Apple and Major League Soccer signed a deal to carry every MLS game for the next decade on a new streaming service available on the Apple TV app. Apple TV+ subscribers also will have free access to “a broad selection” of MLS and Leagues Cup games.
The Big 10 upended the TV rights landscape in college sports when it announced this month that USC and UCLA would join the Midwest-based conference by 2024. The two Los Angeles schools bring the No. 2 TV market to the already lucrative Big 10 TV deal, while defenestrating the Pac-12. Estimates of a renegotiated/new deal for the now continent-spanning conference have run as high as $100 million per year per school, compared to the $44 million Fox paid this year.
Still undecided is whether Apple or Amazon will win control of the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, taking over from fast-declining DirecTV. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC last weekend that “I clearly believe we will be moving to a streaming service.” That would seem to eliminate Disney/ABC/ESPN from what will still be a very expensive new deal, on top of the $105 billion in rights the league sold off a year ago. Puck’s Dylan Byers, reporting from the Allen & Co. billionaires confab in Sun Valley, Idaho, suggested that Apple is most likely to get the deal, at something more than $2 billion a year. Amazon, it’s worth noting, is already about to start an 11-year, $11 billion Thursday Night football package.
This, it would seem, is the very definition of a bubble.
But how much longer before it pops?
Can MLB, the NBA, other college conferences and other sports get a piece of the action before it does? What happens to the economic structures undergirding the leagues, their owners, players and others have built if that bubble goes boom?
The increased rights deals are fed by a stark reality: live sports remains one of the few remaining reasons anyone pays for cable. How long will that continue as cord-cutting accelerates, and sports viewing is no longer subsidized by the many cable and broadcast viewers who aren’t sports fans?
NFL games comprised 75 of the top 100 most watched shows on TV last year, suggesting how severe the reliance on sports already is. But even the NFL included provisions in its latest rights deals allowing broadcast/cable rights to shift to streaming if viewership falls too far.
The downside for fans of an increasing shift to streaming is that they’ll have to pay a lot more to watch games, because the services involved won’t be able to subsidize costs across, say, all the subscribers to a basic cable tier. And that complication only worsens when the costs of rights deals is jumping upward faster than an overeager scrub trying to make an impression in an NBA Summer League game.
For the legacy holders of increasingly pricey streaming rights, desperately clinging to one of their few remaining reliable audience generators, continuing to operate broadcast and cable outlets as ad revenues and retrans fees decline will be facing a difficult choice of their own. Do they keep spending money they may not have in a few years, or start cutting back on spending here too, possibly further accelerating their decline?
And while the boom in rights deals is leaving all the leagues, owners and athletes with more cash in their wallets than ever, they too will need to tread carefully going forward, because the bubble will pop at some point, affecting them too.
Just look at Disney’s “disciplined” decision not to buy IPL streaming rights, even though it likely will lose tens of millions of Star India customers when its current deal expires.
The streaming companies backed by traditional Hollywood media companies are already resetting seemingly everything but their sports spending.
But as market expectations shift, and audiences fragment, it’s worth asking if we’ve also hit the apex of Peak Sports TV, and what that means for everyone involved.