How the streaming dream turned sports on TV into a costly maze

There was a moment, perhaps a decade ago, when it felt as if sports broadcasting nirvana was near. A world where ordinary fans could access any game on any device, any time, anywhere.

Or near enough, as cord-cutting devastated traditional cable subscription models and viewers who had long been locked into expensive and restrictive TV packages now had choices. Streaming nurtured a diverse and bespoke landscape.

At some point, though, the age of abundance became the era of excess. Too many services offering too many subscriptions for too much money with too many commercials. What once seemed like a clear and fair proposal for fans – only pay for what you really want to watch, and cancel when you like – mutated into complexity, cost and confusion.

This is especially evident in Major League Baseball. It was the bedrock of regional sports networks on old-school cable TV, valued for the predictable rhythm of its 162-game regular season: with rare exceptions, the same team on the same local channel with the same commentators, day-in, day-out.

This season, seven providers – traditional broadcasters as well as Apple TV – carry games nationally depending on the day, and the picture is blurry for fans in some local markets who are subject to old-fashioned blackouts and have endured channel churn as failing regional sports networks restructure and rebrand at a dizzying rate.

In the New York area most Yankees games stream on the Gotham Sports App, which reduced its prices in February amid criticism of its buggy performance. It costs $119.99 for a Yankees Season Pass for fans who don’t have games covered via a TV subscription to the regional YES network. But Amazon’s Prime Video (prices vary, but it’s $14.99 a month or $139 a year for a full Prime membership) has exclusive local rights to 21 Yankees games, mostly on Wednesdays. Netflix, meanwhile ($19.99 a month for a standard subscription with no adverts), exclusively broadcast the season-opening Yankees v San Francisco Giants game last month. An all-in Yankees devotee could pay about $800 to access every one of their team’s games this season across 10 networks, according to a calculation by The Athletic.

Even Apple TV’s boss admits there’s a problem. “We’ve gone backwards,” Eddy Cue said at a Motorsport Network event last October. “You used to buy one subscription, your cable subscription, and you got pretty much everything they had. Now, there’s so many different subscriptions, so I think that needs to be fixed.”

Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, wants to centralise local rights and control all 30 teams’ broadcasts by 2028. As regional sports networks have gone bankrupt the league has gobbled up the rights and now controls local broadcasts for about half its teams. But it’s far from certain that the future will be less splintered: clubs and leagues will follow the money. Netflix, Amazon and Apple are rich and eager to expand their sports coverage amid a complex battle with legacy networks who see live sports as valuable properties as they fight a rearguard action against declining customer numbers while promoting their own streaming services. Traditional over-the-air broadcasters are sounding the alarm over “a world where Big Tech acquires more and more broadcast sports rights” and asking government regulators to step in.

The NBA’s new 11-year, $76bn media deal with Disney/ESPN, Amazon and NBC shows the staggering sums on offer if a league can successfully strike an accord that blends old and new media. However, it’s hard to for broadcasters and leagues alike to gauge the value of exclusivity, tradition and consistency versus splashy intermittent exposure across multiple novel platforms.

Sunday Night Baseball was a prestigious cornerstone of ESPN’s schedule for 35 years but last year the network opted out of its deal with MLB. The league then forged a new arrangement with ESPN, NBC and Netflix. ESPN was reportedly irked that it paid $550m annually yet in 2024 MLB struck a deal with Roku that saw the streamer charged only $10m a year for Sunday afternoon games. Perhaps MLB was reaching a new audience on Roku, but it had devalued its rights and inadvertently sent ESPN a signal that it was overpaying.

Netflix is reportedly spending $50m a season for three years to show an Opening Night game, the Home Run Derby and the “Field of Dreams” game. “Netflix has now given leagues a model for peeling off individual games and selling them for eight figures,” says Jon Lewis, founder of the website Sports Media Watch.

The richest, most popular and most influential league is the NFL, which believes that more is merrier. “The biggest thing going in sports is the NFL and they have chosen to fragment. It’s a strategy for them,” Lewis says. “Because they know they can make extra money, significantly more money, outside of their main media rights deals by selling additional game packages to streamers.”

The NFL shows games on CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN/ABC, Prime Video, the NFL Network, YouTube and Netflix. The league is willing to create boutique batches to cater to streamers such as Netflix who want games tied to special occasions, such as Thanksgiving, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Confusing, costly, and requiring sign-ups to multiple services: watching sports on TV today is hardly the frictionless entertainment experience that the digital age seemed to herald. It’s also getting tougher on the eyeballs as viewers are bombarded by an intrusive and distracting array of in-game advertisements in addition to the familiar barrage of commercial breaks and animated sideline boards. MLB overlays brand names on the pitcher’s mound; NHL ice is festooned with rotating digital logos.

Major international tournaments such as the Olympics exert more restraint than the hyper-commercialised North American leagues but it is not hard to predict what will happen on screen during the World Cup this summer now that Fifa has mandated three-minute “hydration breaks” in each half of every match, regardless of the temperature, and greenlit broadcasters to show adverts.

The promise of uninterrupted, commercial-free shows was one of the main attractions of the early streaming era. Now streamers hike their subscription costs but offer ad-free premium tiers, placing viewers in a similar position to airline passengers shelling out extra for services such as baggage and window seats.

It’s not only greed; there is also a degree of desperation. Generally, rights are increasingly expensive and most streaming services are unprofitable, raising the question of whether there will be a reckoning at some point: a time when networks decide that major leagues aren’t worth the cost. NBC’s Peacock revealed a fourth-quarter 2025 increase in paying subscribers to an impressive 44m. Yet Peacock also announced a bigger loss compared with the same period a year earlier – an astonishing $552m – not least because it’s paying a fortune to show the NBA and NFL. Dazn, a major international player which streams a wide variety of sports, has reportedly racked up billions of dollars in operating losses since its launch.

While conjuring up ever-more creative and aggressive ways to stuff the screen with ads – even when the content is paused – may provide a short-term boost to balance sheets, degrading the viewing experience is freighted with risk. Sports are not as essential as industry insiders would like to believe, Lewis argues. “A lot of people turn on sports as background noise,” he says. “If you irritate people and turn them off, or make it hard for them to watch, they might fall out of the habit.”

Or not develop the habit in the first place. That is a particular risk as attention spans shrink and young people primarily consume media in clips. Those born since the late 1990s “won’t be watching football as much as other generations,” says Anthony Palomba, an assistant professor of business administration and audience analysis expert at the University of Virginia. “The prospect of watching a three- or four- hour game versus knowing that I’m going to get good stuff on TikTok is difficult … The more you use TikTok the better it is because it’s learning about your habits.”

Despite privacy concerns, personal data collection holds great appeal for rights-holders and advertisers as they deploy AI to understand and target their audience with the goal of going beyond ratings, subscription fees and ordinary commercials to more effectively monetise those multibillion dollar sports contracts.

The Super Bowl is the defining American sports TV event but despite its ongoing popularity the collective experience of passively watching broad and ultra-expensive 30-second spots is an anachronism. It’s not truly productive for an insurance company, or a viewer, if someone who doesn’t own a car is blitzed by offers for auto insurance, for example.

The future is in cheaper, personalised, AI-directed digital ads – known as programmatic advertising – and sports delivers a core of loyal fans who are engaged and inclined towards interactivity (such as gambling) and impulse buying. That’s ideal for so-called shoppable streaming, which treats content as a retail opportunity. Just watched Steph Curry sink a game-winning three-pointer? A great deal on a Curry jersey might flash up on your screen, all yours with one click.

Palomba follows the Florida Gators, who won the men’s March Madness basketball title in 2025. “You can bet that I bought a T-shirt, like, 15 minutes after the confetti came down,” he says. QR codes and mobile phone notifications make spending easy and can be linked to the action in ways that are more integrated and relevant than if you were watching, say, historical dramas such as Bridgerton and Young Sherlock.

Once you’ve committed to Prime Video to watch the game, Amazon wants you to spend more time and money in its ecosystem. It’s no coincidence that Amazon streamed 15 hours of live sports, including golf, the NBA and an NFL game, on Black Friday last year. The company offers, Palomba says, “The ability to connect the entire consumer journey. You watch something, did you buy something, what did you buy? All of that has been disparate, in different aisles … Amazon houses all of that.”

It’s also, like rivals including YouTube TV, offering sports bundles by selling content from third-party providers such as ESPN. One-stop-shops are a possible means of mitigating the enshittification of the sports broadcasting landscape – to use a phrase coined in 2022 by the writer Cory Doctorow to describe a decline in the quality of online services as platforms prioritise profits above customer satisfaction. But Lewis cautions against too much nostalgia.

“The old days, I wouldn’t necessarily romanticise them. I think the old days were complicated in their own ways and I think it’s really important to keep in mind, it’s only a relatively recent invention that we need to watch every single game, right?” he says.

“When Michael Jordan was winning NBA games in the 90s and NBC was getting massive audiences on the weekends for those games, well, Michael was then playing during the week on TNT and TBS. It’s always been the case that there have been games on platforms that people have been unable to watch … I’m sure if you went back to 1988 you could find someone saying, oh, man, I gotta sign up for ESPN now?”