Streaming
The $14 billion migration: live sports completes its move to streaming
For decades the sports-rights business had one address: the pay-TV bundle. In 2026 it has seven. SportsPro reports streamers alone will spend an estimated $14.2 billion on sports rights in 2026 — Amazon, Peacock, Netflix, Apple, YouTube and DAZN now sit at the same table as ESPN and the broadcast networks.
The NBA's new media agreements are the cleanest picture of the new order: an 11-year package worth roughly $76 billion, split across Disney (ESPN/ABC), NBCUniversal (NBC and Peacock), and Amazon's Prime Video — ending the league's decades-long TNT era. Every national game now has a streaming home, and some have only a streaming home.
The fragmentation runs league by league: MLB's 2026–28 national rights spread across NBC/Peacock, Netflix, ESPN, Fox, TBS and Apple TV+; Netflix owns WWE Raw in the US; Formula 1 went exclusively to Apple. Trade coverage has settled on a consensus: 2025 was the year linear TV's reign over marquee live sports ended — not with one deal, but with all of them at once.
For the ad business, sports completing its streaming migration matters more than any other genre shift. Live sports is the last reliably un-skippable, watch-it-now audience at scale — the inventory that anchored linear's pricing for generations. As it moves, it pulls the premium end of the TV ad market into CTV with it, and it hands the streamers something they've historically lacked: appointment viewing worth a premium CPM.