For decades, the architecture of sports broadcasting was simple: leagues sold rights to broadcast and cable networks, networks sold advertising, and fans tuned in at the appointed hour. That model has not collapsed, but it is being rebuilt in real time. Streaming platforms — once treated as experimental add-ons in rights negotiations — now sit at the main table, writing some of the largest cheques in the industry and changing how hundreds of millions of people watch live sport.
The clearest signal came from American football. Amazon’s Prime Video took over Thursday Night Football as an exclusive package in 2022, in a long-term arrangement widely reported at roughly $1 billion per year. The early scepticism about whether fans would follow games to an app has largely evaporated. The 2025 season of Thursday Night Football averaged around 15 million viewers, a record for the package and a third consecutive year of double-digit growth, according to figures published by Amazon. A property that was once considered the NFL’s weakest broadcast window has become a proof of concept for streaming-first live sport.
The new heavyweights: Amazon, Netflix and Apple
Amazon has since extended its football ambitions into basketball. The NBA’s new media agreements, which began with the 2025-26 season, run for 11 years and have been reported at around $76 billion in total across the Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal and Amazon. Prime Video now carries a substantial regular-season package, games in the league’s in-season tournament, and a share of the playoffs, while NBC’s return to the NBA brought games back to broadcast television and to its Peacock streaming service. The deal ended a near four-decade association between the league and Turner Sports — a reminder that no incumbent is safe when streaming money enters the room. For more on where the league’s storylines are heading on the court, see our look at the NBA’s new season.
Netflix, long resistant to live sport, has changed course decisively. The company struck a deal reported at $150 million per year to stream NFL games on Christmas Day, and its first holiday doubleheader in 2024 averaged roughly 24 million viewers in the United States plus several million more internationally. Netflix also signed a 10-year agreement, reported at more than $5 billion, to make WWE’s flagship weekly show Raw a Netflix exclusive from January 2025. Wrestling is scripted entertainment rather than competitive sport, but for broadcasters the lesson is the same: appointment viewing still exists, and streamers will pay handsomely for it.
Apple took a different route. Rather than buying a slice of a league’s schedule, it bought the whole thing: a 10-year global agreement with Major League Soccer, announced in 2022 and reported at $2.5 billion, made Apple the league’s worldwide streaming home. The partnership has since been restructured — the two sides agreed in late 2025 to wind down the original arrangement early, with Apple folding MLS matches into its broader Apple TV subscription rather than selling a separate Season Pass. The episode shows both the promise and the difficulty of all-in streaming deals: global reach and clean presentation on one hand, discoverability and audience scale on the other. The league’s broader trajectory is covered in our piece on MLS and the growth of North American soccer.
Traditional broadcasters are becoming streamers too
The disruption is not only coming from technology companies. ESPN launched its full direct-to-consumer streaming service in August 2025, offering its entire network output without a cable subscription for $29.99 per month at launch. It quickly used that platform to land new rights, including a five-year agreement reported at $1.6 billion to carry WWE’s premium live events in the United States from 2026. NBCUniversal’s Peacock, meanwhile, demonstrated the subscriber-acquisition power of exclusive sport when its NFL playoff game in January 2024 averaged about 23 million viewers — at the time the largest live-streamed event in US history.
Even free platforms are now in the market. YouTube streamed an NFL regular-season game from São Paulo to a worldwide audience at no charge in September 2025, the first NFL game distributed exclusively and free on the platform. For the league, the calculation is as much about reach and new audiences as about immediate rights fees — a theme explored further in our analysis of the business behind Super Bowl media rights.
What it means for fans and for the industry
For viewers, the streaming era cuts both ways. Production quality on the major platforms has been strong, and streamers have invested in features traditional television rarely offered: alternate feeds, integrated statistics, and more flexible viewing. But fragmentation is real. A fan who wants to follow a single league across a season may now need several subscriptions, and the simplicity of one channel, one schedule has gone.
For leagues, streaming has expanded the pool of bidders and pushed total rights values upward. Industry analyses have estimated that the NFL’s current cycle of media agreements is worth in the region of $110 billion over its full term. Competition between traditional networks, their own streaming services, and the technology giants gives rights holders leverage they have never had before.
For broadcasters, the pressure is existential. Cable subscriptions continue to decline, and live sport — the last reliably mass audience in television — is the asset everyone is fighting to keep. The likely end state is not the death of traditional broadcasting but a hybrid: big events on free or broadcast platforms for reach, deep packages on streaming for revenue and data. How fans experience that world, second screen in hand, is changing too, as we explore in how social media changed the way fans follow live games.
The direction of travel is no longer in doubt. Streaming platforms are not testing the waters of sports broadcasting; they are setting its price, shaping its schedule and, increasingly, defining what a broadcast even is.
