Live Sports and Netflix's Faustian Bargain

As sports docuseries airball (and Apple pulls back), I look at the fight for rights between streamers and linear and what is (and isn't) worth it

STAREDOWN If you think Mike Tyson and Jake Paul are going to have a knockdown, drag-out brawl in November, wait for the fight between sports leagues and streamers. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images for Netflix)

Here’s a hot take for you:

I don’t think social media helped boost Paris Olympics viewership in 2024.

Naturally, the tech triumphalists want to tout TikTok, Instagram and X driving users to the TV. But the actual answer is almost certainly not that the Olympics went viral, as if social media hasn’t existed for two decades and somehow none of the previous Olympiads since 2004 went viral.

Rather, multiple factors likely drove the viewership increase for the Olympics: Paris is in a much better time zone to watch live events in the United States and NBCUniversal decided to air many more events live — and then counted that late afternoon viewership in their totals. The fact that more people work from home likely boosted this too.

And NBCU put a lot of the Olympics’ best events live on Peacock and counted those viewers in its totals.

The numbers were undeniably huge, and streaming played its biggest part yet. While there are still some who wonder whether sports will work on streaming, that framing is all wrong. The data from the Olympics reveals two things: Sports are big on living room TVs, period. And the majority of sports viewership still hasn’t migrated to streamers. Yet.

For streaming to truly dethrone cable TV, more sports viewership will need to take place on these services. There’s just one big problem with that: Sports are expensive, and it’s not clear if the streamers can afford it.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How live sports on streaming compares with the biggest hits in the history of streaming

• Why the Olympics were a great bargain for NBCUniversal

• How related sports programming fares compared with live sports

• Why Netflix’s strategy of one-off sports events is misguided

• The Faustian bargain facing Netflix as it has to choose between live sports, original programming and free cash flow

• How legacy studios could exploit that challenge

• Why the Big Tech players in Amazon, Apple and Google are best positioned

• What that means for the live sports rights bubble

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