Anxious Sports TV Execs Portend Rights Bubble Trouble

Televised live sports couldn’t seem any stronger right now, coming off Netflix’s boxing debut over the weekend, which streamed to 60 million households worldwide.

And yet a new survey suggests there’s considerable anxiety among execs about the state of that business. When global strategy consulting firm Altman Solon asked 220 senior sports TV brass worldwide if live sports was losing relevance, 65% agreed, and 17% said the issue needed to be addressed urgently. While 35% disagreed, 43% said there was still time to address the problem.

That 65% of respondents would express anxiety about live sports might seem strange considering they are thought to be the healthiest part of the media ecosystem at a time when just about everything seems to be languishing. The post-strike soft spots in film and TV production in 2024 have been amply documented.

But another data point in the survey makes clear why execs are concerned about live sports: The younger the consumers, the more inclined they are to enjoy consuming their sports in short-form clips versus entire games. Blame it on dwindling attention spans or whatever other theory you might have about the younger demos, but the widening gap across the generations is pretty unmistakable.

Except here's the thing: This is far from a new trend. Sports rights have been soaring to the stratosphere for years even as consumer survey after consumer survey going back at least five years has made abundantly clear that younger fans do not have the same appetite for full games as preceding generations of fans.

Just last month, at ESPN’s latest media day, chairman Jimmy Pitaro noted the very sentiment this survey gets at. “If you ask my direct reports what it is that’s keeping them up at night, if you ask me, it’s that,” he said. “If you look at my kids: Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, Fortnite. They’re incredibly distracted."

It's hard to see how most sports are going to evade ratings gravity in the long term as rights holders — particularly the tech firms — pay through the nose to pry the best packages away from the linear platforms where these games have resided for decades.

Maybe their pockets are deep enough to absorb the costs; maybe in a TV universe where everything else is in decline too, sports can afford to see some downturns in its own audience levels.

But coming off the recent Disney-Warner Bros. Discovery settlement for NBA games, you would think it's business as usual as far as sports rights go. Media companies throw bottomless troves of cash at these deals as if there’s no limit to their value when there’s mounting evidence that younger viewers don’t value them the way the older folk from the generation of viewers making these deals do.

Millennials and Gen Z have been making their feelings known for quite some time now. Finally, along comes a survey where the executives catering to them are recognizing that, too.