Live Sports & Monetization: A New Live Sports Paradigm For Public Service Broadcasters
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Amid significant regional differences in live sports trends, some common opportunities for public service broadcasters have emerged. These include the rapid rise in viewing of various women’s sports and the cementing of Public Service Broadcasters as viewing backstops for iconic and big ticket events.
Premium live sports coverage has become a white-knuckle ride for many Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) around the world, as they seek to extract as much value as possible from this golden goose over which they exert diminishing control.
But amid regional variations one common denominator providing some comfort for PSBs is their trusted and often unique status as guardians of universal FTA (Free To Air) access to marquee events of national or cultural importance.
Some premium live sports events fall under this category, spawning numerous agreements between regulators, PSBs, and, increasingly, streaming providers with deep pockets who have gained control over rights.
We have already sketched the changing technological and commercial background of live sports earlier in this series, while later on we will dive deeper into the content side with a focus on opportunities in niche or emerging sports. In this article we discuss regional differences around a common theme of PSBs building around an anchor as providers of FTA coverage for iconic sporting events. This activity is taking them into niche or new areas, especially women’s sport as the fastest growing sector in the whole field, as they seek to live with the reality of being marginalized over major rights.
Mix And Match
It is worth noting that it is not just PSBs shying away from some of the most expensive premium sports rights but even some of the richest streaming companies, aware that even they must spend limited budgets wisely. This is leading some of them away from the most expensive rights, such as English Premier League (EPL) matches for coverage in the UK itself. Amazon Prime Video notably withdrew after the 2024/25 season and has no EPL rights under the current round, with rights shared between Sky Sports as the dominant rights holder, and TNT Sports. Over time it looks likely the most valuable rights, such as the EPL in the UK, may be subsumed by the leagues themselves in any case.
Amazon previously held a package of mid-week EPL matches in the UK to test the water, before concluding that its live sports budget would be better spent elsewhere. This includes UK rights to German Bundesliga matches, which attracts a far smaller audience but for a much lower cost, and is deemed to represent better value for money as part of a wider strategy involving aggregation of rather more niche live sports content. Notably, Amazon offers these Bundesliga on a PPV (Pay Per View) basis with no ongoing commitment required, aiming to build audience and revenue share with that drip feed approach.
It is important to recognize regional differences though, with EPL rights for the UK specifically standing out for being shunned by the major online providers. This includes sports streamer DAZN, despite being London based, whose only UK big ticket rights package is for boxing, which the company has decided to major on globally.
The company now has a multi-year, global media rights deal with UK-based Queensberry Promotions founded by boxing mogul Frank Warren and owner of rights for many of the leading events in the sport. This started in April 2025, making DAZN the exclusive home of those events.
The rest of Europe is rather different in that rights to top football league matches are rather more affordable and, at least partly as a result, sought after by the streamers. Certainly, DAZN has made a major play for mono-territory rights, or country-specific rights, for the major football leagues. This includes the EPL in some countries, including Belgium, with Spain and Portugal added for the seasons 2025-26 to 2027-28.
The aim is to become the go-to platform for all-round sports fans seeking a single subscription that gives them most of what they want. At the same time, DAZN wants to cater for as many dedicated fans of particular clubs as possible.
DAZN has accounted for about one third of total spending by streamers on sports in 2025, having been elevated by its $1 billion outlay for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, the first serious version of that contest. DAZN’s share of the global sports rights market will be even higher in 2026 as that will be the first full year it will have Foxtel in Australia on board, after completion of the $3.4 billion purchase from News Corp in April 2025.
An Opportunity For Growth
Despite the reticence to bid for EPL rights in the UK, competition more widely is intensifying among streamers, and this is starting to exert renewed upward pressure on rights values, acting to shut PSBs out of direct contention for premium sports. This is being driven by growing saturation of entertainment, which had for well over a decade been the mainstay of growth for online video streamers. This was nowhere truer than at Netflix, which long maintained a line of shunning both advertising and live TV, the idea of it entering the specialist sports arena looking unthinkable.
However, as streaming subscription nears saturation point in mature markets, general entertainment platforms are increasingly turning to sports. Amazon is now the second biggest spender among streamers, with its share boosted from 18% to 23% by its acquisition of US NBA (National Basketball Association) rights starting with the 2025-26 season.
YouTube TV is in third place, elevated by its rights to the NFL (National Football League) Sunday Ticket until 2030, at a cost of $2 billion per year. Here YouTube parent Alphabet was playing a long game but has run into various problems associated with channel licensing battles, especially with Disney.
YouTube TV also failed to cater for the dedicated fans making up most of the potential viewership, who are chiefly interested in following their own team rather than matches involving others, and were therefore unwilling to pay for the package. The deal has lost Alphabet millions of dollars so far.
Netflix has been more successful with its more gradual ramp into live sports, offering events at no extra cost to existing subscribers with the objective of keeping its existing packages sticky. This includes a three-year agreement to show two Christmas Day NFL games from 2025, which collectively have become very popular, attracting an audience of over 26 million viewers in the US and over 30 million viewers globally. In this case there is a substantial number of general viewers tuning in, in addition to fans of the teams involved.
Netflix also has a new deal with WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) worth $500 million a year. Already these moves have catapulted Netflix into fourth place in the global league of sports streaming investors with a carefully calibrated strategy to expand slowly, with no plans to step out into PPV. Mind you, that was once true of advertising and live TV.
What About PSBs?
The role for PSBs increasingly lies as trusted guardians of the FTA space, which in turn is cherished by many of the other participants in the chain. Rights holders and buyers, as well as the leagues and sports themselves, see the value of selective FTA coverage for building or sustaining the brand and audiences, as well as their fan bases.
That is particularly the case for sports just below the very top tiers. There are naturally regional variations on this count, with cricket slipping down audience ratings in the UK after Sky took complete control of rights for test and one day matches around 2005 and kept them behind a pay wall, while in India it remains the runaway number one sport.
Governments have also stepped in to maintain FTA access to events considered of national cultural importance, or to provide selective access to primary sports. An example of the former is the Wimbledon tennis championships in the UK, which remain available on BBC FTA services. There are plenty of other examples of the latter, such as the Spanish 2022 law requiring FTA rights to be sold for one LaLiga football game every matchday.
There is a parallel debate in some countries over whether FTA equates to digital terrestrial given that not all viewers have high speed broadband connections, but that is another question. In practice it looks likely that with growing availability and ubiquity of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite services from the likes of Starlink and Amazon, the issue of universal access to broadband will fade away. Many PSBs are already betting on that happening with migration strategies towards all internet distribution in future.
Meanwhile, there have been striking recent regional developments on the sports broadcast landscape which reflect the pace of change in the field combined with national factors. One recent big story in the USA was the launch in November 2025 by Comcast’s NBCUniversal of a rebranded NBC Sports Network (NBCSN), repackaged as a 24/7 linear service featuring a wide range of major sporting events for which it has rights.
This is a complex exercise with various commercial and political factors, but the upshot is that all the content will now be available through various participating pay TV distributors, as well as Comcast’s own Xfinity platform and YouTube TV. To a certain extent it plays into the demand for widespread access to premium sports content.
Women’s Sports & Regional Variations
There is also a more universal theme that Comcast is exploiting – the rapid rise in popularity of leading women’s sports. This is being driven by a newly created brand called USA Sports, which also includes programming from USA Network, Golf Channel, and business channel CNBC.
It is being positioned as a focal point for women’s sports, following an 11-year rights deal with the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association). This is part of a wider trend as streamers and PSBs alike aim to capitalize on this as the fastest growing overall sector of live sports broadcasting, which is something we will discuss in more detail in a future article.
We will also delve further into sports content diversification, which is another thread linking almost all markets. In India, where cricket has dominated the sports airwaves at least as much as football in some European countries, there is increasing promotion and viewership of sports which also have some pedigree in the country, such as hockey, badminton, and the contact sport of kabaddi.
In China, table tennis is the national sport, but here too more popular second tier sports are being promoted increasingly strongly, especially by Migu, the streaming platform of the country’s dominant wireless operator China Mobile. With Basketball having crept up as one of the most viewed sports in the country, Migu struck a four-year deal for rights in China with the International Basketball Federation (Fiba).
Migu has come to dominate Chinese sports broadcasting, having ousted state broadcaster CCTV (China Central Television) from major sports rights including, most recently, table tennis. However, China Mobile is itself state owned, and Migu’s dominance has increased rather than diminished access to premium sports FTA. CCTV still shows major events through sub licensing deals, as do some other video distributors. Then Migu itself has FAST (Free Ad Supported TV) options for its various services, so there is no real universal access issue there.
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