The State of Live Sports Streaming 2026
By 2030, the value of global sports rights will reach $78 billion, up 20% from 2025, predicts Ampere Analysis, as global streamers switch to making live sports a major strategic play. There’s a parallel pivot from rights owners that want to embrace digital and streaming channels to reach new and younger audiences. The deeper pockets of billionaire-backed streamers or those owned by tech giants do not go unnoticed by leagues and federations that are looking to bring yet more cash into their game.
In the U.S., spending on sports rights in 2025 totaled $30.5 billion (per Ampere figures), with almost two-thirds of that generated by longterm TV deals from major leagues. But the switch is gradually being flipped to carriage on global streaming platforms. S&P Global reports that increased competition from streamers helped double the value of America’s streaming sports media rights to nearly $30 billion between 2015 and 2024.
Netflix’s $5 billion, 10-year coverage of the WWE began in January 2025, with 300 hours of content streamed in the first half of the year. Ampere Analysis charted its impact, noting that episodes of WWE’s Raw generated 88.6 million total aggregated views, helping “reduce subscriber churn [and] grow its US subscriber base, despite what is often seen as a saturated market.”
It may be that in the next tranche of major league rights (from 2030 onward, although they might be negotiated sooner), distribution on linear TV falls away, almost entirely replaced by streaming services. But before we herald DAZN, Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney/ESPN as winners, there is market disruption on the horizon.
Creators Are Changing the Face of Sports
For the second year running, IMG’s Digital Trends report crowned YouTube the priority platform for the sports industry. The ability for YouTube (also Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook) to reach new audiences with new formats, drive revenue, and deliver audience analytics is the most significant trend in sports media coverage right now.
Just as broadcasters are distributing more and more of their shows on YouTube, so sports rightsholders are making larger deals with the platform to carry their games live and for free, hopeful that fans will be enticed back to the mother ship. No longer just about highlights and post-match reactions, YouTube is becoming a primary destination for live sports, especially on connected TVs.
In the U.S., YouTube streamed a Week 1 game of the 2025 NFL season live, exclusive, and free from Corinthians Arena in São Paulo, Brazil. The Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Los Angeles Chargers contest was seen by 17.3 million fans worldwide, opening the sport up to “an interactive viewing experience” with “creators right at the center of the experience,” according to YouTube chief business officer, Mary Ellen Coe.
YouTube streamed a Week 1 game of the 2025 NFL season live from São Paolo to 17.3 million fans worldwide.
In Brazil, where soccer clubs rather than leagues own the broadcast rights to top-flight matches, broadcasting has already shifted to social media. In 2022, CazéTV, a production company owned by media and marketing agency LiveMode and Brazilian streamer Casimiro, streamed live matches from Rio de Janeiro’s state league and select matches from the FIFA World Cup in Qatar on YouTube and Twitch. In 2025, the FIFA Club World Cup was streamed to CazéTV’s YouTube channels and Samsung TV+. Now, CazéTV has gone one better and secured 2026 FIFA World Cup streaming rights for all 104 matches—for free—along with the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in partnership with the IOC.
Brazil’s CazéTV will stream all 104 FIFA World Cup matches in 2026.
CazéTV promises interactive programming that targets younger fans. Similar moves are being replicated, if not yet to the same scale, in other territories as legacy media is reformed with social media and YouTube at its heart.
In the 2025 season, U.K. soccer fans were able to watch German Bundesliga matches on YouTube channels (Mark Goldbridge’s “watchalong” channel That’s Football, which has nearly 1.5 million subscribers, and former pro soccer player Gary Neville’s The Overlap, which has nearly 1.6 million subscribers and was recently acquired by European radio giant Global) as well as on Bundesliga’s official YouTube channel, which has 5.5 million subscribers. In addition, France’s Pro D2 rugby league has sold its broadcast rights in the U.K. and Ireland to YouTuber Tim Cocker.
While IMG warns against “mistaking virality for value,” it advises sports organizations to “balance formats, using short clips to attract attention but guiding fans toward podcasts, live streams, and storytelling that sustain engagement and emotional connection.” Sports brands “must publish high-quality, high-volume material across every platform all the time,” it emphasizes.
Younger audiences want digital, interactive, multiscreen, and authentic experiences. “They want more from the way that they consume content,” said Caretta Research business development manager Rebecca Jackson in a presentation at FutureSPORT in November 2025. “They want to have multiple things onscreen at the same time; they want to have stats coming up; they want to be able to engage with content more actively. [T]hat’s going to be super important in terms of maintaining competitive edge.”
Production Splits Sports into Streaming Parts
In turn, this means sports producers need to think like creators and adopt toolsets accordingly. In its analysis of CazéTV, U.K.-based sports production agency WSC Sports highlights a three-point plan:
- Build interactivity into broadcasts, such as chat, polls, and watch parties “that make viewers feel part of the experience rather than spectators.”
- Generate clips, stories, and formats for every match moment to extend content beyond live.
- Use AI to scale.
In its 2026 Digital Trends report, IMG also advised live producers to use AI to streamline workflows. It added, “The brands that scale up production without sacrificing purpose or originality will dominate attention and engagement.”
We are witnessing the final breakup of the legacy broadcast model: one signal, one production, sent to everyone. When the means of transmission (streaming) is in the hands of rightsholders, they can disintermediate broadcasters and go straight to fans. IP means that they can also split that signal into many streams (ISO feeds, AI-voiced local-language commentary, graphics and data, 9:16 video for mobile) to create new, monetizable products or new ways to engage with an audience that wants to interact.
Paul Calleja, CEO at IP transport platform provider GlobalM, dubs this “intelligent orchestration.” He says, “You need to be able to ingest a feed once, then version, format, and distribute it in real time to multiple endpoints across the globe. That might mean a high-bitrate SRT stream to multiple broadcasters, an RTMP output for a digital only streaming app, or an HLS stream optimised for mobile users. At the same time, you might be sending a recorded version to an archive server, pushing metadata into a CMS, and distributing highlights to social media platforms with different overlays or branding.”
Josh Harrington, commercial strategist in the streaming, FAST, and CTV space, declared in a LinkedIn post, “[T]he streaming industry is entering a new era: the age of controlled devices, locked-down delivery, and premium-rights protection. And it could be a preview of what’s coming next—especially in live sports.”
Fragmentation Continues, But Is This Really a Negative?
The splintering of live sports rights and the splitting of the universal signal into its constituent piec-es can be seen as part of the same continuum. It depends on where you stand on whether this outcome is negative or positive for consumers.
The carve-up of UEFA soccer rights in Europe is generally seen as a negative. Fans wanting to watch the full suite of matches in the UEFA Champions League (UCL) and other UEFA tournaments in the U.K. will have to subscribe to Amazon and DAZN as well as Sky Sports, “which will only push users to watch streams illegally,” reckons analyst Paolo Pescatore.
Caretta Research found that the pace of deals moving from traditional broadcast and pay TV to streaming and D2C is accelerating. “Platforms like YouTube now hold more sports rights than any other single outlet in many territories, largely because of their dominance in Tier 2 and Tier 3 sports,” notes Calleja. “If this trajectory holds, the fragmentation and redistribution of rights will not just be a strategic choice, it will become the default model.”
BBC Sport, which retains highlights to UCL matches until 2030–2031, also took the consumer’s side: “Every time a new broadcaster enters the TV rights market it usually means one thing: supporters paying more to watch live football.”
“[W]hat consumers really want does not exist in the market and never will,” says streaming media guru Dan Rayburn. “They want one service to go and get every piece of sports content they could possibly ever get. That is not going to happen.”
There is an opposing view arguing that fragmentation is an opportunity. Fragmentation “is one of the most commercially exciting things happening in our industry right now,” claims Calleja. “It allows federations to sell more, deliver more, and engage new types of buyers. It brings new value to each part of the production, not just the match itself.”
GlobalM has a vested interest in making this case, but Calleja’s argument is persuasive. “Federations and leagues are recognizing that every version of a feed, every angle, graphic overlay, and audio track can be sold to someone. This is about allowing a much wider marketplace to participate in rights buying that is no longer limited to broadcast on its own.”
For example, in-car camera feeds in motorsports will be sold separately from the main coverage, and additional analytics streams will be offered to betting platforms. “The orchestration layer has become just as important as the production layer,” Calleja argues. “It’s no longer enough to produce the feed, you need to be able to manage it across multiple pathways, each with its own commercial rules and technical requirements.”
GlobalM’s Paul Calleja says the next wave in sports streaming fragmentation will see every angle or feed sold separately, including popular motorsports driver cams.
Fubo/Hulu, ESPN Unlimited, and Fox One Launch
Early in January 2025, Disney announced it would merge sports-centric streamer Fubo with Hulu + Live TV, a move that effectively killed off Venu Sports. To recap: Venu was a proposed sports-only streamer that planned to offer major league and college sports in a joint venture from Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, scheduled to launch by fall 2024. That was until Fubo, headed by CEO David Gandler, took on the giants with a lawsuit that claimed Venu would be anti-competitive and would restrict consumer choice. In August 2024, a court decided in favor of Fubo, granting a preliminary injunction to halt the launch of Venu. While Disney could have pursued the case, it decided instead to negotiate and fold Fubo into its own business. It paid $220 million to Fubo on top of a $145 million loan to take 70% of the combined Fubo and Hulu + Live TV entity.
In September 2025, the transaction was rubber-stamped by Fubo shareholders—an unsurprising choice, since the upside seems obvious: Its execs remain in charge of operations, it grew its subscriptions overnight to 6.2 million, and it gained the financial protection of a corporate behemoth.
For Disney too, the opportunity to acquire Fubo “was likely a no-brainer,” according to Forbes. “Facing challenges from well-capitalized streaming competitors like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, the move to combine Fubo and Hulu + Live TV gives Disney a robust, sports-focused distribution vehicle that complements its existing portfolio of ESPN+, Hulu, and Disney+.”
That’s notwithstanding the August 2025 rollout of ESPN Unlimited, a standalone ESPN streaming flagship. ESPN Unlimited is a DTC that combines access to all ESPN linear networks and was bolstered, at launch, with games from the NFL Network (in exchange for which the NFL acquired a 10% stake in ESPN). The new service, which costs nearly $30 a month, will also bundle WWE events in a 5-year exclusive U.S. deal from 2026.
The ESPN Unlimited standalone service launched in August 2025.
Fox made a similar move, debuting its DTC service Fox One in August 2025. It offers access to all Fox channels plus live sports, including college football’s Big Ten Championship and the NFL, for nearly $20 a month. Both ESPN Unlimited and Fox One showed moderate gains after 3 months: Data from cable channels, if the company is acquired by Netflix, Netflix would likely gain control of TNT International, including TNT Sports in the U.K. and Ireland and, therefore, rights to Premier League and UCL matches (for the rest of the 2025–2026 season only). Netflix will likely use its increased scale to take a bigger stake in live sports, which is one of the premium content areas where it doesn’t currently have a huge presence. Data from research firm Antenna estimates 3 million signups for ESPN Unlimited and 2.3 million for Fox One as of October 2025.
Paramount+ Makes Waves in Europe
The tectonic plates of U.S. studios made a seismic shift on the U.K. sports landscape when Paramount+, hitherto unknown to fans that side of the pond as a place to watch live sports, landed exclusive rights to UCL matches from 2027 to 2031, for which it reportedly paid $1.5 billion. That follows the $7.7 billion paid last summer for exclusive U.S. rights to the UFC for 7 years, beginning 2026. Aside from further fragmenting the market for consumers, the strike could land a knockout blow to TNT Sports, which had held rights to the UCL since 2015–2016 under its previous incarnation, BT Sport.
“Losing these rights is significant for TNT Sports, as its UEFA club competition rights spend makes up 39% of its total UK sports rights outlay and the competitions are a key subscription driver, alongside its package of one game a week in the English Premier League,” notes Ampere Analysis’ Danni Moore.
“No dressing this up, a disastrous outcome as [TNT Sports] will lose the Crown Jewels in its sports portfolio,” adds Pescatore. “While it saves much-needed cash, it could lead to its demise.” Suggesting that Paramount+ had “clearly overpaid” to secure the UCL, “as part of a strategy to build a base quickly” he says, “TNT Sports … will lose subscribers as sports are a big draw and drive subscriptions. For users, this is terrible, forcing them to sign up to another relatively unknown provider who relies solely on streaming (as things stand).”
That’s an important caveat since Paramount could broadcast UCL matches on U.K. linear Channel 5, which it owns. (It does this on CBS with the UCL rights it already owns in the U.S.)
While Warner Bros. Discovery retains TNT Sports in the U.S. as part of its Global Networks division of
Apple Roars Into F1
F1: The Movie was a big box office hit in 2025, generating more than $630 million in global receipts while serving as invaluable promotion for motorsports in growing reach in the U.S. and for Apple (hardware and streamer), which produced the film in partnership with motorsports’ governing body FIA.
Box office hit F1: The Movie helped turbocharge F1 racing and Apple’s investment in it.
It seems likely that greenlighting the movie’s production ran in parallel to discussions at Apple about targeting live rights for F1, which it did by locking out incumbent ESPN and everyone else from the U.S. market for 5 years. That begins in 2026 when Cadillac joins the grid. The $750 million Apple will pay F1 owner Liberty Media in that time will see all Grands Prix available as part of an Apple TV subscription (although it may air some races for free to help the platform and motorsports extend their reach).
The deal adds to Apple’s existing U.S. sports rights for MLB and MLS. According to Ampere Analysis data, fewer than half of F1 followers in the U.S. are also fans of MLB, and only 18% are also fans of MLS. Since more than two-thirds of U.S. F1 followers (approximately 2.8 million) are not already with Apple TV, there’s a pool of F1 fans ready to be lapped up.
DAZN Cements Relationship with Saudi Arabia and FIFA
DAZN accounted for one-third (about $4.1 billion) of all spend by streaming services for sports in 2025. With the London-headquartered company minority-owned since February 2025 by SURJ Sports Investment, the sports investment unit of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and majority-owned by billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, the self-proclaimed “Netflix of Sports” shows no sign of running out of cash.
The streamer’s most high-profile carriage was the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, for which it paid $1 billion. Hosted in 11 U.S. cities between June and July and won by British club Chelsea, the 63 matches of the inaugural tournament were viewed by an estimated 2.7 billion fans across all forms of media, according to Nielsen Sports. As the exclusive global broadcaster, DAZN also sublicensed broadcast rights to more than 100 partners worldwide. While the linear figures “show impressive results” according to FIFA (in Brazil, for example, more than 131 million viewers, or 62% of the population, watched the tournament on TV Globo), the soccer body was coy about figures for streaming.
FIFA states that DAZN’s social channels received more than 10 billion impressions, but ratings for streaming coverage in Europe are undisclosed, perhaps limited because of the time difference, which saw matches played in the early morning in Europe. This will not dampen a likely rerun in 2029, not least because of the relationship between FIFA, Saudi Arabia, and DAZN. The $1 billion investment by SURJ is aimed to make DAZN the official platform to showcase Saudi sport and Saudi-based events to the world. The stake represents about 5% of DAZN value, even though the company has yet to turn a profit and lost nearly $1 billion in the last financial year.
Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in sports and games (including the $55 billion buyout of EA Sports) to help diversify its economy, soften its image, and attract tourists. Saudi Arabia will also host the 2034 FIFA World Cup.
For Netflix, Sports Are Lifestyle Programming
Although at one time it was only developing sports-adjacent docuseries like The Last Dance and Full Swing, Netflix now considers live events in general and live sports in particular as essential to its content strategy. Yet, it still does so with a left-of-center approach that looks to fuse entertainment and sports into new formats to entice new audiences. The clear examples are its one-off boxing extravaganzas featuring YouTuber Jake Paul. His bout with aging Mike Tyson in November 2024 drew 108 million viewers, according to Netflix. By comparison, Paul’s December 2025 knockout by Anthony Joshua was seen by 33 million. Arguably a more significant boxing event for Netflix was September 2025’s fight between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford in Las Vegas, watched by 41.5 million viewers, which “signalled a shift from ‘celebrity boxing’ to the crown jewels of the sport,” reckons The Telegraph.
September’s Alvarez–Crawford fight represented a departure for Netflix from celebrity boxing-themed entertainment to real fights with legit contenders, according to The Telegraph.
Just as significant, The Telegraph notes, was the inclusion of these fights at no additional cost within Netflix’s standard-with-ads subscription, effectively breaking “the paywall that has stifled boxing’s growth for decades.” This holds true for NFL games like the Dallas Cowboys vs. the Washington Commanders and the Detroit Lions vs. the Minnesota Vikings on Christmas Day. Netflix’s goal is not to be a boxing promoter (like DAZN) “but a global stadium,” writes The Telegraph. “[T]hey want you to stay for the NFL and WWE, but use boxing spectacles to stop viewers from hitting the cancel button.”
However, even Netflix couldn’t present a seamless streaming experience for all of its fans. After reports of buffering during the Paul vs. Tyson bout, some viewers of Paul vs. Joshua vented their frustration at audio sync issues. One commented online, “Sorry Netflix but leave live stuff to the professionals, can’t even get the audio and mouth movement the same… #netflix.”
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