Winning the battle: Amagi on why live sports control the future of streaming
By Kalaivani Sivasankaran, senior director of product marketing at Amagi.
In the past year, the growth in live sports on streaming platforms has emerged as a key to unlocking subscriber growth and retention. Exclusive sports rights deals are no longer a luxury — they are necessary in the battle for dominance in the streaming wars.
Here’s why.
Live sports surge
Gone are the days when we sat in front of the TV to watch our favourite show at a particular time. The emergence of multiple streaming models has significantly changed the way we consume content. While traditional TV continues to lose ground, live sports remain the heartbeat of appointment-based viewing. This enduring appeal reshapes how audiences consume content, and streaming platforms are racing to seize the opportunity.
Live sports remain dominant in the traditional broadcast and cable TV landscape. Remarkably, a 2023 survey by Sportico states that 97 out of the 100 most-watched US TV broadcasts were sports-related.
However, viewership for live sports on traditional TV has steadily declined as audiences increasingly transition from linear TV to streaming platforms. As a result, sports content providers are rethinking their distribution strategies to better meet evolving viewer preferences, accelerating the migration of live sports programming to streaming services.
The rise of live sports in streaming has driven bold moves by major players. One of the biggest dominoes to fall happened in 2022, when Amazon Prime Video started streaming the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, marking the league’s first exclusive streaming partnership in a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deal. In 2024, the company agreed to a $76 million, 11-year contract to stream NBA games starting next season (with ESPN/ABC and NBCU).
Those examples, along with previous deals like the Apple TV+ Major League Soccer deal and YouTube TV’s agreement to stream NFL Sunday Ticket, showcase the growing shift of marquee sports to digital platforms. Streaming platforms such as Peacock and YouTube TV also reported record-breaking viewership during events like the FIFA World Cup, as audiences increasingly chose streaming over traditional cable.
Breaking broadcast
Traditional TV has declined slowly for over a decade. According to a 2023 report from Statista, traditional cable and satellite TV subscriptions in the US have dropped by more than 40% since 2015, with younger audiences driving this change. The rise of subscription-based, on-demand streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video has fundamentally changed viewing habits, allowing viewers to watch what they want, when they want.
Live sports are an exception. While scripted shows lose viewers, events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, and FIFA World Cup dominate primetime, often surpassing streaming platform audiences combined. Their appeal lies in their urgency and communal experience — something on-demand content cannot replicate. For fans, live TV is the next best thing to being in-person, making sports a key focus for broadcasters and streamers seeking to stay relevant in a fragmented market.
Single live events and VOD are the future of streaming
The future is hybrid! As audiences fragment across countless platforms, streaming will revolve around two main pillars — single live events and VOD.
1. Single live events: These include sporting events, awards shows, and cultural phenomena like concert live streams or significant political debates. Events that demand real-time participation will remain popular under appointment viewing. While largely favouring on-demand content, younger audiences are still likely to tune in for live sports or viral, once-in-a-lifetime moments.
2. VOD: On-demand content reigns supreme for everything else — binge-worthy series, films, and documentaries. Streaming services have perfected the art of serving content tailored to individual tastes, creating a personalised, anytime-anywhere experience.
This double-edged model caters to evolving viewing habits while preserving the unique value of live events. It also creates opportunities for advertisers to target audiences in two distinct ways: real time engagement during live events and personalised ads during on-demand streams.
What’s next?
While the shift to live streaming offers exciting opportunities, challenges remain, and innovation will be crucial to move forward.
1. Cost management: With increasing costs of acquiring sports rights (see the latest NBA, NFL deals), justifying these costs requires innovative monetisation strategies, such as dynamic ad insertion and tiered subscription models.
2. Infrastructure scaling: Live streaming has unique technical challenges, including real-time latency, seamless global delivery, and handling massive concurrent audiences. Netflix’s tech glitches during November’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight exposed the difficulty of scaling live infrastructure – even for streaming giants.
3. Ad tech evolution: Advertisers are still catching up with the demands of real-time ad delivery for live events. Innovations like programmatic ad placement, contextual targeting, and cloud-based workflows will be critical to maximise revenue potential.
4. Viewer expectations: Audiences expect flawless streaming experiences with minimal latency, crystal-clear resolution, and zero interruptions. Meeting these expectations requires platforms to continuously innovate in cloud workflows, AI-driven optimisations, and CDN orchestration.
The future of entertainment is running on two tracks – single live events and VOD. What does this mean for advertisers, audiences, and the sports industry?
- Advertisers: Live events drive real-time engagement, while VOD delivers precise, targeted messaging for diverse audiences.
2. Audiences: A seamless mix of timeless VOD and the excitement of communal live events creates the ultimate viewing experience.
3. Sports industry: Streaming expands global reach, boosts interactivity, and unlocks new monetisation opportunities for sports leagues.
As streaming platforms evolve, the gap between the urgency of live events and the timeless appeal of on-demand content grows sharper. This shift raises a compelling question: What happens to storytelling when everything outside live events becomes timeless? In this emerging dual framework, the balance between the immediacy of live events, with live sports leading the charge, and the flexibility of on-demand content will redefine how we watch, engage with, and experience the stories that shape our world.