By René Alles, CEO, Scoopa.

For decades, ‘live’ has been the holy grail of sports broadcasting. Live rights drove value, dominated negotiations and justified billion-euro deals. Yet, as we leave 2025 behind, one truth has become unavoidable: the real growth in sports media is no longer happening during the live match – it’s everything that happens around it.

The new currency: Attention beyond the broadcast

Today’s sports audience no longer gathers around a single live feed. They consume content where they are – on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, WhatsApp, or the club’s app. They expect highlights, reaction clips, behind-the-scenes moments, and athlete-generated snippets delivered in the same tone and format as their everyday content diet.

This is the era of additional content – the ecosystem of short-form, platform-tailored and often AI-assisted media that extends the story of a sporting event beyond the live broadcast. It’s what keeps fans engaged long after the whistle and attracts entirely new audiences who might never have watched a full match.

In 2025, this shift crystallised. Rights holders who invested in post-live storytelling – distributing fast, contextual and shareable clips to partners, broadcasters, teams and athletes — saw measurable growth in engagement and brand reach.

From ‘broadcaster-centric’ to ‘ecosystem-centric’

Traditional broadcasting models were built around a linear hierarchy: the rights holder produced content, the broadcaster distributed it, and the fan consumed it. But in recent years, that chain fractured into a network.

Today, athletes, clubs and even sponsors are distribution nodes in their own right. They have direct access to millions of followers and increasingly act as media publishers. Rights holders that enable these partners with fast, platform-ready video content don’t lose control — they multiply reach.

The emerging mindset is clear: Don’t just broadcast to audiences — broadcast through them.

In this environment, control over how content flows is less important than ensuring it flows fast, relevantly and natively. The new value lies in enabling agility, not enforcing exclusivity.

AI as the accelerator, not the threat

If 2024 was the year AI entered the sports production suite, 2025 was the year it became invisible — embedded into everyday workflows. From automated highlight detection to context-based editing and metadata tagging, AI now fuels the velocity of content creation.

But the true power of AI is not in replacing human editors, it’s in scaling creativity. An AI can instantly produce 20 localised highlight versions for 20 markets or cut player-centric reels for each athlete in a tournament. This turns what used to be a single broadcast asset into a cascade of audience-specific media.

The result? More relevance, more frequency, and ultimately, more value from the same footage.

The opportunity for rights holders

For rights holders, this transformation presents a strategic crossroads. Do they continue to think in terms of one-time ‘distribution’, or do they evolve into continuous ‘content ecosystems’?

Those who succeed will:

• Treat every piece of content as an asset with multiple lifecycles. A single match can generate days of digital storytelling.
• Integrate automation and metadata to accelerate turnaround times without sacrificing quality.
• Empower their partners — from federations to local clubs and athletes — to tell their version of the story using brand-safe, rights-cleared assets.
• Rethink measurement: Engagement and reach across distributed ecosystems are the new performance metrics, not just broadcast viewership.
• In short, rights holders must evolve from content owners to content enablers.

The risk of standing still

Many organisations still believe their biggest challenge is piracy or fragmentation. In reality, the bigger threat is irrelevance — the failure to meet audiences where they already are.

Every day, user-generated content fills the void that official channels leave behind. If rights holders don’t move fast enough to populate those spaces with authentic, shareable media, someone else will — often with less accuracy, less context and no commercial return.

The irony is that the infrastructure to deliver additional content already exists in most workflows. The missing link is cultural, not technical: shifting the mindset from protection to participation.

2026: The year of the amplified rights holder

Looking ahead, 2026 will reward those who view additional content not as a byproduct, but as a core product line. The boundaries between production, distribution and consumption will blur even further.

We will see:

• Micro-rights strategies: Selling or licensing short-form packages to non-traditional platforms or regional outlets.
• Collaborative storytelling: Athletes and clubs co-creating content within official frameworks, turning them into amplifiers rather than competitors.
• Integrated AI pipelines: Connecting production, editing and distribution tools via automated handshakes — from camera to feed to post to platform.

Ultimately, the next evolution of sports broadcasting is not about more cameras or higher resolution. It’s about more moments — intelligently captured, instantly delivered and endlessly reinterpreted.

Live is the spark, not the fire

‘Live’ will always remain the emotional anchor of sport — the moment of truth, the unrepeatable spectacle. But in the attention economy of 2026, live is only the spark. The fire that sustains fan engagement, sponsor value and cultural relevance is lit by everything that follows.

Rights holders who understand this — and who embrace the chaos of a multichannel, multiformat, AI-driven content universe — won’t just adapt to the future. They will define it.