Tag: sports media rights

College football's push toward a 24-team playoff could create 12 additional games, giving ESPN and the conferences more media-rights, advertising and streaming inventory to monetize. The economics favor expansion, but each added game risks weakening the scarcity, tradition and regular-season…

The NBA’s media-rights reset redirected advertiser spending toward streaming, with Guideline estimating a record $2.1 billion in 2025-26 NBA ad spending and streaming capturing 41% of the total. Amazon, NBCUniversal and Disney can now monetize those rights across advertising, subscriptions,…

Fanatics is set to become an official NFL sportsbook after DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars let their deals expire, giving the league a new partner willing to absorb the rising cost of Genius Sports data required for NFL sponsorship access. The…

Rights owners are increasingly preserving IP, distribution, customer relationships and future monetization while selling buyers only the access or control they actually need. Netflix, Disney, Sony and the NFL show how narrower rights deals can create value without transferring the…

MLS named Larry Berg commissioner effective January 1, 2027, putting him in charge of leading the league into its next media rights negotiations as the Apple deal approaches its 2029 expiration. Berg's biggest challenge is proving MLS can keep the…

Fox’s 2026 FIFA World Cup coverage drove a 108% increase in television advertising revenue and boosted Fox One subscriber growth. The quarter validated Fox’s multiplatform sports strategy and strengthened its position ahead of future NFL rights negotiations.

Amazon is preparing to take full control of Thursday Night Football production after the 2026 NFL season, ending the NBC Sports partnership that helped de-risk its launch into exclusive national NFL streaming. Amazon’s expanded sports portfolio, production infrastructure and advertising…

Basics Of Streaming explains how anti-piracy systems have become a critical part of live sports streaming infrastructure as platforms work to protect high-value content in real time. The piece outlines how DRM, watermarking, AI monitoring, and network-level enforcement help reduce…

From the Archives revisits how Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV launched in 2002 as an early direct-to-consumer streaming model that bypassed traditional distribution and solved out-of-market access. It paired centralized rights control with in-house infrastructure while preserving regional broadcast economics through…

Main Street Sports Group’s shutdown leaves 20 NBA and NHL teams without local broadcast partners, marking the effective collapse of the RSN model after failed payments and an unsuccessful sale attempt. The NBA’s using this disruption to consolidate local rights…