The Vergecast: A Brief Overview of the Future of Sports Streaming and Some New Year’s Resolutions for Electronic and Mobile Devices
On this episode of The Vergecast, after a brief update on the state of the TikTok ban, we explore the brief life and quiet death of the supposed future of sports streaming. Sportico’s Jacob Feldman joins the show to explain Venu’s origin, how its parent companies thought it was a good idea, and why Fubo immediately picked a fight over its existence. We talk about the future of sports streaming now that Venu is gone, and if someone else should be the next worldwide leader.
After that, The Verge’s Kevin Nguyen joins the show for the first in our two-part New Year’s Resolution series. If you’re hoping to read more books this year, or just want to replace some of your aimless scrolling with more focused reading, Kevin has some tips on how to make it work on all your devices, at all times of day. Sometimes you have a good book and other times you have a long line at the coffee shop. They are both great reading times if you do it right.
We answer questions on the Hotline about why your phone wouldn’t let you play multiple audio sources at the same time. We have some ideas about how it works — and an easy way for Apple and Google to fix it.
Streaming Sports: How Sports Networks Grow During the 21st Century, and why Sports Live Radio will continue to (sadly) Decline
“Our expectation is it’s going to decline,” says Rose Oberman, media and entertainment director at S&P Global Ratings, though she noted that decline would happen over years, not months, and likened TV’s slide to what’s happened to radio over the past couple of decades. There is no sudden collapse of broadcast TV as audiences move to streaming and pay for it.
That’s what’s so crucial about broadcast TV. While it does require a television and a digital tuner to watch, there’s no monthly fee for internet or service, and unlike YouTube or Instagram, no company is collecting enormous amounts of data on you to sell to advertisers. It’s a completely passive experience. The stations air sports and news and entertainment, and you can tune in or not. People are not tuning in.
Take sports as an example. Events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl were once reliable audience drivers, but in 2024 the Super Bowl streamed on Paramount Plus. The experience was buggy and stuttering, but Paramount Plus still garnered 3.4 million more subscribers than it had before the game. The Olympics, which were simulcast on Peacock, experienced even more online success. People liked that they could just watch the events they wanted on demand and skip anything they didn’t.
Then, at Christmas, sports streaming experienced its biggest event to date when Netflix successfully streamed two NFL games (and a flashy Beyoncé-starring half-time show). A stuttering complaint in sight. The games were streamed the most in NFL history.
Streaming will not wipe out broadcast TV broadcasts of live sports, because contracts exist to keep games on the air. As those contracts are about to expire, leagues could choose to play their games in another area, particularly as broadcast becomes less profitable and viewers prefer streaming. Right now the networks spend billions to air NFL games, but companies like Netflix and Amazon have deeper pockets, and they’ve shown they have no problem paying big money to snatch rights out from under legacy media networks. Amazon agreed to pay $1 billion a year to secure the rights to NFL Thursday Night Football back in 2021. Fox was paying about $660 million a year for those games.